Science
Talent: Past Preservers
Are you looking for talent? Someone with a passion for history and archaeology? Past Preservers was founded by archaeologist Nigel J. Hetherington to provide historical and archaeological consultancy and professional support to the media industry, and their website has a (small) number of showreels of potential hosts partaking in derring-do. Rich Blundell from Past Preservers [...]
Martian Summer
Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mission by Andrew Kessler is his offbeat, warts-and-all account of the summer he spent inside NASA as they prepared for a mission to Mars, after he secured unprecedented access to 130 of the world’s best scientists. The book is published on 15 [...]
Stress ‘Rewires’ Cells
A team of scientists in the United States, South Korea, and Switzerland has uncovered a vast, complex network of 160,000 genetic interactions within yeast cells that changes dramatically when the cells are subjected to stress. The “rewiring” of this genetic network is much more extensive than scientists previously thought. About 70 percent of the genetic [...]
Hand Held Eye
Munivo is an ergonomic sensor, designed to fit in a blind-person’s palm, that can help alert them to obstacles by the use of small balls that move on two axes to tell them which way to walk. Read more on Behance.
Fantastic Factology for the London 2012 Olympics
Fantastic Factology has been gathering facts from the public about “surprising things in life” – the best will be engraved onto plaques sited on benches around the 2012 London Olympic site, which will (hopefully) be visited by “generations of future visitors”. You can see some of the facts on the Fantastic Factology website. It seems [...]
Head Cam Horror
Artist Wafaa Bilal is undertaking a year-long project which involves taking a photograph every minute. That may sound like it requires an extreme amount of commitment, but he’s taken it a step further by having a camera inserted into the back of his head (in a body piercing studio). Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, his body [...]
How to Win a Scratchcard Lottery
Wired tells the story of Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto who worked out how to spot which lottery scratch cards were winning cards. But when he reported his findings to lottery organizers he found it difficult to get them to take him seriously – until he sent them a batch of unscratched [...]
Google Body
Move over Grey’s Anatomy – Google Body has arrived. Those clever Google people have created an online anatomical model (cleverly only available in certain browsers, including surprise, surprise, Google Chrome) that you can interact with to peel back the layers of skin and flesh to reveal and explore bones, muscles and nerves. Try it here. [...]
Need Surgery? Invent Your Own Implant
Tal Golesworthy decided that he didn’t want to undergo surgery for a serious heart defect that would mean taking blood-thinning drugs for the rest of his life. Instead he drew on his engineering experience to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer-aided design (CAD) to come up with a new type of implant that would [...]
Bomb Detecting Plants
Professor June Medford, a biologist at Colorado State University is engineering plants to detect and react to traces of explosives in the environment – such as an airport or security sensitive building - by turning white. She’s in discussions with U.S. Homeland Security about using her genetically modified plants which can be grown from seeds; [...]
