Nato is poised to bring down Muammar Gaddafi with Apache helicopters. Helicopters, did you say? How passé, at least compared with the dwarf drones, video monocles, and quantum dots on the Pentagon’s latest wishlist.
California-based bamboo supplier and renewable material promoter CaliBamboo offers free materials to the best project, and last month NMD alumnus Chris Bagley bagged the prize for his bamboo ski capstone.
Feb 032011
Volkswagon has unveiled a plug-in hybrid that gets 260 miles to the gallon and can go 20 miles on electricity alone. At 24 grams of CO2 per kilometer, the XL1 emits less than a third of the emissions of a 2010 Prius.
You’ve spent your winter break tricking out your Arduino board and now you’re planning to bring it back to school on the plane. Whoops! You forgot that your custom art installation looks just like a homemade bomb to the airport scanner.
Here’s a handy guide to getting your gizmos through security without ending up on the terror suspect watch list.
(via Bruce Sterling)
http://teachmetomake.wordpress.com/traveling-with-diy-electronics/
Move over, silicon—E. coli’s gunning for your job. Researchers prove that bacteria can store data and solve sodoku. Oh, it can repair highways too.
That’s all well and good, but what if you catch a cold, er, an app, from your PC? “Sorry I couldn’t come earlier, but my gut was up all night rendering a big animated movie…”
“A research team out of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found a way to do data encryption and storage with bacteria. The project is called ‘Bioencryption,’ and their presentation (as a PDF file) is here.”
“Problem Solving Bacteria Crack Sudoku”
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/11/17/2229223/Problem-Solving-Bacteria-Crack-Sudoku
“A strain of Escherichia coli bacteria can now solve the logic puzzles – with some help from a group of students at the University of Tokyo, Japan, reports New Scientist. The team begin with 16 types of E. coli, each colony assigned a distinct genetic identity depending on which square it occupied within a four-by-four sudoku grid.The bacteria can also express one of four colours to represent the numerical value of their square. As with any sudoku puzzle, a small number of the grid squares are given a value from the beginning by encouraging the bacteria in these squares to differentiate and take on one of the four colours.The Tokyo team’s sudoku-solving bacteria competed in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week.”
“Bacteria Used To Fix Cracked Concrete”
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/11/17/182244/Bacteria-Used-To-Fix-Cracked-Concrete “Researchers at the U.K’s University of Newcastle have created a new type of bacteria that generates glue to hold together cracks in concrete structures – that means everything from concrete sidewalks to buildings that have been damaged by earthquakes. When the cells have been germinated, they burrow deep into the concrete until they reach the bottom. At this point, the concrete repair process is activated, and the cells split into three types that produce calcium carbonate crystals, act as reinforcing fibers, and produce glue which acts as a binding agent to fill concrete gaps.”
UMaine New Media graduate Chris Bagley stepped outside of the box in 2009 when he switched from a Web-based capstone to start a local business premised on building environmentally responsible skis. The do-it-yourselfer built his own ski press in his garage and began turning out prototypes–and turning heads on the slopes. As the Bangor Daily News reports, this will be the first season his skis will be available to the general public, custom-built for both East Coast skiing conditions and to customer specifications.
Turns out the placebo effect isn’t just for drugs. It apparently works for elevators, thermostats, and walk buttons at intersections–most of which don’t work and aren’t even intended to! Oh, and turns out in addition to his other firsts, John Cage may have created the first placebo music.
And it’ll blow your wallet too, to judge from the pricetag. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want one of these crazy electronic saxiPhones that look like something out of the cantina scene from Star Wars.
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/LRvEH3tTULg/
It’s nerdier than a theramin and even harder to play. Meet the Eigenharp Pico….
A plastic breath pipe with a reed curves from the top of the Pico. Two columns of nine keys each run parallel down its body, flanked by a touch-sensitive “ribbon” controller used primarily for pitch-bending and for bowing a software-modeled cello.
Each LED-decked, pressure-sensitive key of the Eigenharp is actually three keys in one: The concave center triggers a standard note, while the upper edge triggers a sharp and the lower edge a flat. Octaves can be raised or lowered by tapping on two smaller, circular buttons below the keyboard.
Two identical buttons above the keyboard serve different purposes. One turns the drum loop on and off, and the other — when held down — turns the keyboard into “main mode”: cycle through instruments, change scales, record and edit loops, add or subtract to the percussive beat, and manipulate a slew of other parameters.
Sep 192010
Animation is all about time, right? Well, these animations demonstrate that time can be a box you can break out of, thanks to stop-action applied to simple 3d CAD files.
It’s a pen! It’s a voice recorder! It’s both–and Livescribe’s advocates claim it will revolutionize note-taking in class.
The Apertus is an open-source high-definition movie camera. New media programs (not to mention governments like Brazil and the state of California) have been looking to save cash by using open-source software like Open Office or Ubuntu. So why aren’t schools buying up open-source hardware as well?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/08/30/1639248/Apertus-the-Open-Source-HD-Movie-Camera?from=rss via Byline osliving writes “This article takes a tour of the hardware and software behind the innovative Apertus, a real world open source project. Led by Oscar Spierenburg and a team of international developers, the project aims to produce ‘an affordable community driven free software and open hardware cinematic HD camera for a professional production environment’.”
While the Apertus may not have the most professional-quality lenses and sensor yet, its users may benefit from the lack of an implicit video format license, namely the h.264 codec. From a Slashdot commenter:
MPEG-LA [the organization that controls h.264] basically claims certain financial rights over your project in exchange for the right to use the h.264 codec. This means that if you shoot a scene in h.264, but switch to something else to release on the web, they still have rights over you. If a contractor shoots in h.264 but sends you the video in a different format, they still claim rights over you. As far as I know, pretty much all HD cameras shoot in h.264.Some of this is definitely winnable in court, some isn’t. But if you’re an independent filmmaker, you don’t have the money to go against one of the biggest legal groups in filmmaking.
So yes, this particular situation is a bit Orwellian.
Blogs, wikis, videoconferencing? “No thanks,” say most professors; “PeopleSoft and PowerPoint will do.”
Aug 222010
Looking to reduce your water and grocery bills simultaneously? Follow these three steps to thinking outside the box–er, pool. Via Bruce Sterling and William Emory.
Have you ever wished you could use Jedi mind powers to speed up your boring professor’s PowerPoint presentation? Or force the words “Happy Birthday Jennifer!” suddenly to appear on his screen? Now you can, thanks to Dutch researcher Niels Teusink, who combined an Arduino board and Metasploit software to demonstrate how to hack a presenter’s computer by hijacking his remote.
Aug 012010
Looking for ideas to inspire a new media capstone? How about turning a problem into a solution? The software keyboard has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to using mobile devices such as the iPad for real work rather than just media consumption. But that may soon change. Thanks to soft keyboards like BlindType, the words smart and keyboard may start to be used in the same sentence.
Several NMD courses at U-Me this fall will be using iPads–though I don’t believe it’s so much to read textbooks as reinvent them.
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/DSyc9zuJNsw/
The iPad is about to have its academic chops put to the test this fall in a number of programs around the country. Colleges and universities are looking to adopt the iPad as a collaborative tool, a standardized mobile device to integrate into curriculums, and, in some cases, even a cost-saving device.
Several NMD courses at U-Me this fall will be using iPads–though I don’t believe it’s so much to read textbooks as reinvent them.
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/DSyc9zuJNsw/
The iPad is about to have its academic chops put to the test this fall in a number of programs around the country. Colleges and universities are looking to adopt the iPad as a collaborative tool, a standardized mobile device to integrate into curriculums, and, in some cases, even a cost-saving device.
Charlie Stross argues that Steve Jobs’ recent fascistic turn — such as his refusal to run Flash on the iPhone — is a side effect of Jobs’ planning for the coming decline in personal computer sales.
According to Stross, the market will be all about mobility. Apple will turn from selling hardware that runs its software to selling hardware that runs its cloud.