Man Invents Steampunk Mechanical Tiger

An artist from Brugge, Belgium has invented the world’s first Steampunk-style mechanical tiger.

An awesome, custom-built mechanical tiger created by a local artist and taken out for its first ride.

Mincemeat and the Imaginary Man

Early in the morning on the 1st of May 1943, a fisherman on a beach in Spain discovered a waterlogged corpse which had washed ashore during the night. The dead man was clothed in British military attire and a life preserver, and he had a briefcase chained to his lifeless body. Apparently a casualty of an airplane accident at sea, the body was transported to the local port, where its discovery was reported to the Nazi officials stationed in the city of Huelva.
From his personal effects, the man was identified as Major William Martin, a temporary captain and acting major in the British Royal Marines. Rather than allowing possible military intelligence to go unintercepted, the local agents for the Abwehr– the German intelligence organization– coaxed the briefcase open to examine its contents. Inside, along with the man's personal effects, the Nazis discovered a personal correspondence between Lt. Gen. Sir Archibald Nye, vice chief of the Imperial General Staff, and General Sir Harold Alexander, the British commander in North Africa. This letter described key details of the Allies' plans to invade Nazi-held territory. It seemed that luck was favoring Germany; but the discovery ultimately resulted in disaster for the Nazis.

Grand Canyon Skyway

When standing at the rail of the observation deck of the Sears Tower– one of the tallest buildings in the world– many visitors experience some degree of vertigo at the brink of the sheer, 1,353 foot drop-off. This is a natural response as the body's self-defense system reminds its owner of the dangers of gravity. If you're not fond of heights, a new construction project underway in Arizona will probably cause that self-defense mechanism to chew its way out of your body and flee for safety. It's called the Grand Canyon Skyway, and it dabbles in altitudes which dwarf that of the Sears Tower.
The horseshoe-shaped walkway, scheduled to open later this year, will jut out seventy feet off the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, suspending its occupants about 4,000 feet above the ground (about thrice the height of the Sears Tower) as they stand on a glass floor, looking down. The walkway's walls will be comprised of the same four-inch-thick glass as the floor, which will leave the spectacular view relatively unobstructed, even for those people who opt to remain on all fours.

Birth of FM Radio

Armstrong's regenerative receiver prototype (1912)In 1934, much of the world was in the grip of the Great Depression. Unemployment was an epidemic, and many businesses struggled desperately to survive. One notable exception to these economic troubles, however, was the radio industry. Broadcasters in the US were making upwards of two billion dollars a year, and they owed much of their success to the innovations of a brilliant man named Edwin Armstrong. Twenty years earlier he had significantly improved the sensitivity and quality of radio receivers with his invention of the regenerative circuit in his junior year of college, and he went on to further improve them with his Super Regenerative circuit and Super Heterodyne receiver. These laid the foundation for the success of radio broadcasting– in fact, almost any radio you buy today will still incorporate these innovations. But in 1933, Armstrong brought about an even more revolutionary change in the broadcasting business: FM radio.
In spite of these brilliant technical achievements, Armstrong saw little financial benefit from his inventions. Many of his ideas were plundered by unscrupulous people, a trend which ultimately led to Armstrong's tragic and premature death.

Why Not a Wind-up Car ?

Many hybrid cars use an interesting system called "regenerative braking" to recapture some of the energy which is wasted with conventional braking systems. On a typical car, each wheel has a rotor disk, and braking is accomplished by causing the brake pads to squeeze the rotor and create friction which slows the car, converting the forward momentum into waste heat. But a hybrid doesn't use the brake pads at all unless you hit the brakes hard… Instead, the car's momentum is used to crank its electric motors, which slows the car while recharging the onboard batteries.
This brilliantly simple system is part of why hybrid cars are so fuel efficient in stop-and-go traffic. But hybrids have their downsides… For one, a modern hybrid's batteries only last 8-10 years on average, and they are extremely expensive to replace, on the order of $3000-7000. Battery disposal is also a sticky problem, since Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries contain hazardous chemicals. In addition, although hybrids save some weight by including a smaller gas engine, they add it all back by including the heavy electrical components: two electric motors and the batteries. Could there be a way of usefully recapturing a car's kinetic energy on deceleration without adding so much weight, and without the expense and environmental impact of batteries? What about a wind-up automobile?

The Alcatraz Redemption

Alcatraz Island (pdphoto.org)Officially, there were never any successful escape attempts from California's notorious Alcatraz Prison. Nicknamed 'The Rock', Alcatraz is located on the tiny island of the same name in San Francisco Bay. It is about one and a quarter miles from the mainland, outside reasonable swimming distance and surrounded by strong ocean currents. This location afforded it formidable defenses against escape. Between 1934 and 1963, when the prison was operating, only fourteen attempts were made; most of the escapees involved were shot by guards or recaptured.
One exception, however, came in 1962. Prisoners Frank Lee Morris, Clarence Anglin, and John Anglin had spent months developing an elaborate plan to get out of the imposing structure, as well as a way to cross San Francisco Bay to the mainland with a makeshift raft. After lights-out on the night of 11 June 1962, the trio decided that the time was right and set their plan in motion. After that, however, they were never seen again.

Cellphones to smell in the future ?

Motorola has recently received a patent for a handset which is capable of releasing scents by heating a gel packet, operating on the same principle as that of a plug-in air freshener. The handset comes with a power amplifier that can activate this feature without having the cellphone suffer from dramatic design changes. This is essential since Motorola has long moved on from unwieldy cellphones to their current slick and slim handsets which are the company’s main source of revenue.

I don’t know about you, but to release a smell that is universally appealing can be a pretty challenging task. You wouldn’t want your handbag to be filled with the same smell that is released from your cellphone all the time, would you? After all, that scenario would mean having everything else in your handbag smell the same as well. Smells are much more invasive than looks, and as it stands, not everybody digs the same handset design, making smells a much harder proposition to put forward to ever finicky consumers.
What happens when a customer is sick of a particular smell - does he/she have to trade in the cellphone, or is there a replacement refill to switch smells? Would the smell replacements be fairly priced? Chances are if a handset utilizing this technology is released, most people will probably ditch the gel packet first and carry on talking like normal, which pretty much defeats the purpose in the first place. I don’t know about you, but having a cellphone that eliminates odors would probably fare better in the long run.

The Gravity Express

About four hundred years ago– sometime in the latter half of the 17th century– Isaac Newton received a letter from the brilliant British scientist and inventor Robert Hooke. In this letter, Hooke outlined the mathematics governing how objects might fall if dropped through hypothetical tunnels drilled through the Earth at varying angles. Though it seems that Hooke was mostly interested in the physics of the thought experiment, an improbable yet intriguing idea fell out of the data: a dizzyingly fast transportation system.
Hooke's calculations showed that if the technology could be developed to bore such holes through the Earth, a vehicle with sufficiently reduced friction could use such a tunnel to travel to another point anywhere on the on Earth within three quarters of an hour, regardless of distance. Even more amazingly, the vehicle would require negligible fuel. The concept is known as the Gravity Train, and though it seems inconceivably difficult to construct, it has received some serious scientific attention and research in the intervening centuries.

You Can Pick Your Doctor, and You Can Pick Your Nose…

There is an Austrian doctor who has gained notoriety by advocating the picking of one's nose and the consumption of the resulting bounty, particularly in children. Dr. Friedrich Bischinger, a lung specialist working in Innsbruck, would have us believe that people who pick their noses with their fingers are healthier, happier, and more in tune with their bodies. His argument stems from the notion that exposing the body to the dried germ corpses helps to reinforce the immune system. The good doctor feels that society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking, and encourage children to take up the habit.

The Seventh Sense

From childhood, we are taught that the human body has five senses. I'm sure we can all recite them: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. This list has remained unchanged since the time of Aristotle. To most people, a "sixth sense" refers either to one outside the realm of the scientific, or one that simply does not exist in most humans.
However, ask a neurologist how many senses the human body has, and you might get a surprising answer. Many identify nine or more senses- some listing as many as twenty-one. The first category of senses is the "special" senses, including the familiar sight, hearing, taste, and smell. The second category is made up of the somatic senses, which we usually lump under "touch"- including our perception of pressure, heat, and pain. The third category, however, is not nearly as well-known. These are the interoceptive senses- those that deal with data originating in the body itself.
It is fairly obvious what happens to a person when a sense fails. Many members of society are missing one or more senses. It is common knowledge that blindness is the absence of sight. Deafness, of hearing. Everyone knows what it's like to lose taste and smell as well; this loss accompanies every head cold. But what happens when the body loses knowledge of itself is a far stranger occurrence.

Lie Detectors Alongside Metal Detectors

Someday in the future, when you're moving through airport security, you may be required to speak to the GK-1 machine before being allowed to pass. As you don a headset, the machine will ask you questions about your criminal intentions, and wait for you to utter your responses into a microphone. Software inside the machine will record your responses, scrutinize them for tell-tale signs of dishonesty, and flag you for further probing if thinks you're a liar.
The GK-1 was developed by Nemesysco, a security outfit in Israel. It uses software to listen for involuntary tremors which arise in the voice of a liar, or so its makers claim. If you have too many tremors in your voice when the machine asks you whether you're a drug smuggler, a terrorist, or some other type of disagreeable person, you'll be "taken aside."

The Truth About Truth Serum

Popular culture makes gratuitous use of powerful lie-repelling agents known as Truth Serums. They are usually depicted as injected drugs which strongly inhibit a subject's ability to lie, causing him or her to mechanically recite the truth to an interviewer upon questioning.
Such drugs have been utilized by some of the three-letter government agencies in the not-so-distant past (CIA, FBI, DOD, KGB, etc.), particularly during the rampant paranoia of the Cold War. And in the aftermath of 9/11, there was some discussion on the idea of bringing them back into use for interrogation. But are these truth serums effective? Do they produce any useful results?

Tiny Fish, Big Catch

Scientists have discovered the world’s smallest fish in the threatened swampland of Indonesia. It’s called Paedocypris Progenetica, a distant member of the carp family, and when fully grown it’s the size of a large mosquito.
Skinny, translucent and very elusive, the fish lives in the swamps of the Indonesian island of Sumatra and on Malaysian Borneo. The water the fish lives in is extremely acidic with a pH value of 3. These areas are now being endangered by encroaching forestry and agriculture.
The smallest adult specimen was a female that came to 7.9 millimeters just beating out the previous smallest fish, the dwarf goby, Trimmatom Nanus, at 8 .0 millimeters.
The Paedocypris Progenetica is also the world’s smallest vertebrate.
Evolutionary pressures may have caused the fish to develop highly modified fins to survive in its environment. The head is unprotected by a skeleton. Males also have a tough pad on the front of the pelvic girdle that may be used to help them clutch onto females during mating.

The Most Powerful Bomb Ever Constructed

On October 30, 1961, the most powerful weapon ever constructed by mankind was exploded over the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Sea. The device was code-named "Ivan," and it was a multi-stage hydrogen bomb which was built in only fifteen weeks by engineers in the USSR, using off-the-shelf nuclear weapon components.

It was intended as a display of Soviet superiority during a period of grave tension between the USSR and the United States. The Russians had erected the Berlin wall only two months earlier, and they had just ended a shaky, three-year moratorium on atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Before Ivan, the largest explosion the world had seen was an incredible 15 megatons, an event which caused a mushroom cloud five kilometers across. Ivan's explosion was over three times more powerful, despite the fact that the device was deliberately prevented from operating to its full potential.

Monster Rogue Waves

For centuries sailors have been telling stories of encountering monstrous ocean waves which tower over one hundred feet in the air and toss ships about like corks. Historically oceanographers have discounted these reports as tall tales– the embellished stories of mariners with too much time at sea. But in the last eleven years scientists have discovered strong evidence indicating that such massive rogue waves do exist. The phenomenon has become the subject of recent scientific study, but their origin remains a mystery of the deep.

About one ship is lost every week in the world's oceans, mostly due to poor seamanship or severe weather. But it now seems likely that at least a small percentage of sea disappearances are due to encounters with these destructive waves. Over the years experienced captains have made very credible reports of meeting behemoth waves which appear spontaneously, cause extensive damage to their ships, and shrug back into the sea just as mysteriously as they had appeared. One account describes the appearance of a giant wave trough which onlookers likened to a "hole in the sea", followed by a twelve-story-tall "wall of water." To further compound the mystery, some such waves have been said to appear mid-ocean, and often in calm weather.

Clever Hans the Math Horse

In the late 1800s, a German high school mathematics instructor named Wilhelm Von Osten was pushing a few scientific envelopes from his home in Berlin. Among other things, he was a student of phrenology, the now discredited theory that one's intelligence, character, and personality traits can be derived based of the shape of one's head. But it was his keen interest in animal intelligence that would ultimately win him fame.
Von Osten firmly believed that humanity had greatly underestimated the reasoning skills and intelligence of animals. To test his hypothesis, he took it upon himself to tutor a cat, a horse, and a bear in the ways of mathematics. The cat was indifferent to his efforts, and the bear seemed outright hostile, but the arab stallion named Hans showed some real promise. With further tutelage, Hans the horse learned to use his hoof to tap out numbers written on a blackboard. Much to Von Osten's delight, jotting a "3" on the blackboard would prompt a tap-tap-tap from his pupil, a feat which Hans could repeat for any number under ten.
Encouraged by this success, Von Osten pressed his student further. The scientist drew out some basic arithmetic problems on his chalkboard, and attempted to train the horse in the symbols' meanings. Hans had no problem keeping up with the curriculum, and soon he was providing the correct responses to a variety of math problems including basic square roots and fractions. Hans was proving to be a clever horse indeed.

The Deepest Hole

This is a classic Damn Interesting article which originally appeared on 20 June 2006.

Over forty years ago, researchers in the Soviet Union began an ambitious drilling project whose goal was to penetrate the Earth's upper crust and sample the warm, mysterious area where the crust and mantle intermingle– the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or "Moho." So deep is this area that the Russian scientists had to invent new ways of drilling, and some of their new methods proved quite inventive. But despite the valiant effort which spanned several decades, the Russians never reached their goal, and many of the Earth's secrets were left undiscovered. The work done by the Soviets did, however, provide a plethora of information about what lies just beneath the surface, and it continues to be scientifically useful today. The project is known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole.