Can You Believe This is a Wall Painting?
See more amazing realistic wall paintings over at Moillusions (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
MIT Grad Student Comes Up With Webcam System That Can See If Your Heart Is Healthy
“Here’s a scary development for webcams, a MIT grad student has figured out how to determine if your heart is healthy just by looking at you via a webcam. The system uses an open-source face-tracking program and will study someone’s face, measuring the slight variations in brightness produced by the flow of blood through blood vessels in the face. So once the developer was able to determine how to account for variations in lighting and image quality, he was easily able to measure a pulse, and it worked well enough that it matched up with the results of FDA-approved devices. The hardware used is simple and cheap enough that it could be installed almost anywhere from a mirror in your home, or even using your own cell phone camera. The system could be improved in the future to even double up as a lie detector, figuring out if you’re nervous about stealing the cookies from the cookie jar every night.”
Via Ubergizmo (Thanks Christopher C)
Deaf ‘rewire brain’ to see better
People deaf from birth may be able to reassign the area of their brain used for hearing to boost their sight, suggests a study. Improved peripheral vision, often reported by deaf people, could be generated by the brain area which would normally deal with peripheral hearing. The Canadian research, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, tested the theory using congenitally deaf cats.
The researcher involved said the brain did not let unused space “go to waste”. Both deaf and blind people frequently say their other senses are sharper by way of compensation. However, it has not been obvious how the brain might achieve this. The researchers from the University of Western Ontario used their cat studies to test which parts of the brain were responsible. Their cats were given tests in which lights flashed at the very periphery of their normal vision. When only the auditory cortex – the part of the brain which normally processes sound information – was deactivated temporarily, their enhanced peripheral vision appeared to be switched off as well.
Narrowing the search, the team found that the part of the auditory cortex responsible was the part which would ordinarily detect peripheral sounds. Dr Stephen Lomber, who led the research, said: “The brain is very efficient, and doesn’t let unused space go to waste. “The brain wants to compensate for the lost sense with enhancements that are beneficial. “For example, if you’re deaf, you would benefit by seeing a car coming far off in your peripheral vision, because you can’t hear that car approaching from the side – the same with being to more accurately detect how fast something is moving.” He said that understanding what happens within the auditory cortex in the absence of sound information coming in could help doctors work out what is happening when someone with hearing loss is given a cochlear implant. “If the brain has rewired itself to compensate for the loss of hearing, what happens when hearing is restored?”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks @DiBroon)
UK Animators Use Cellphone and Microscope To Film Smallest Stop-Motion Animation Ever
“Using a Nokia N8 smartphone and a CellScope, the team behind the Wallace & Gromit series has made the world’s smallest stop-motion animation film.
Follow 0.35-inch-tall Dot as she runs through an obstacle course made of British currency, rides a bumblebee and stitches her way out of trouble. The music is catchy too.
Animators at the UK studio Aardman used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too small to manipulate or bend like they would other stop-motion animation characters. The figurine’s tiny features stretched the limit of the printer — any smaller and it would be hard to make distinct limbs. Each one was hand-painted by artists looking through a microscope.
Directors Ed Patterson and Will Studd attached a CellScope (winner of a PopSci Best of What’s New award in 2008) to a Nokia N8 12-megapixel camera to film Dot’s struggle in her microscopic world. They said Nokia commissioned them to make the film in celebration of CellScope’s potential to improve medicine in the developing world.
CellScope is the brainchild of Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineer at the University of California-Berkeley, who combined a cellphone camera with a 50x magnification microscope.”
Read more at PopSci (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Evidence of water in megacanyon on Mars
“Melas Chasma, a huge canyon forming part of the 4000 km Valles Marineris rift valley on Mars, plunges 9 km below the surrounding plains in this image, which was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, making it one of the deepest depressions on the planet.
Released today by the German Aerospace Centre, the image also shows evidence that water once flowed and lakes once stood on the Martian surface. White lines are channels cut by water and lighter-coloured regions indicate deposits of sulphate components. Rock formations display evidence of flow textures, indicating that they were once deposited by liquid water, water ice or mud.”
Read more at New Scientist (Thanks UKgnome)
Dinosaur origins pushed further back in time
“The first dinosaur-like creatures emerged up to nine million years earlier than previously thought. That is the conclusion of a study on footprints found in 250 million-year-old rocks from Poland. Writing in a Royal Society journal, a team has named the creature that made them Prorotodactylus. The prints are small – measuring a few centimetres in length – which suggests the earliest dinosaur-like animals were about the size of domestic cats. They would have weighed at most a kilogram or two, they walked on four legs and they were very rare animals. Their footprints comprised only two or three per cent of the total footprints on this site. The footprints date to just two million years after the end-Permian mass extinction – the worst mass extinction in the history of the planet.”
According to Stephen Brusatte, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who led the research: “In geological terms this is just the blink of an eye.” He told BBC News: “We can basically say that the dinosaur lineage originated in the immediate aftermath of this extinction which is a completely new idea and a very radical re-interpretation of the early history of dinosaurs”. In the end-Permian extinction event, more than 90% of all life on Earth was wiped out due to massive volcanic eruptions, sudden global warming and the stagnation of the oceans. Up until recently, scientists had thought that dinosaurs emerged 15 to 20 million years after the mass extinction, when the planet had become more habitable. But the new footprints suggest that the rise of dinosaurs was intimately related to the devastating extinction event.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
200 New Species of Frogs, Spiders, Mammals and More Discovered
“In just two months of searching through a remote, mountainous rainforest in Papua New Guinea, scientists discovered 200 new species of animals and plants, including spiders, frogs, insects and mammals.
The surveys were done in 2009 in the Nakanai Mountains on the island of New Britain, which the country has nominated for World Heritage status. The new species could offer a boost to that effort.
“While very encouraging, these discoveries do not mean that our global biodiversity is out of the woods,” Leeanne Alonso of Conservation International said in a press release Oct. 5. “On the contrary, they should serve as a cautionary message about how much we still don’t know about Earth’s still hidden secrets.”
Some of the newly discovered species are truly spectacular, such as the pink-eyed beauty above, one of 20 leaf katydids found in the surveys.
Within the relatively small sample of 42 individuals of the leaf katydids in the Muller Range mountains, scientists Piotr Naskrecki and David Rentz found at least 20 new species.
We’ve got some of the most beautiful, strange and interesting of the new species in this gallery, along with a few very rare ones that hadn’t been seen in the area before.”
See them over at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Contest Seeks Next Crazy Invention
“Wacky products like fart-absorbing pads, inflatable bra inserts, and disposable underwear just go to show you that there really is a market out there for anything.
No one knows that better than Kim Olenicoff, founder of Solutions That Stick Inc., a Southern California-based company that has carved out a niche selling weird, offbeat products that solve common problems.
Olenicoff is the proud creator of best-selling gems like Subtle Butt – a small strip of activated carbon fabric with an antimicrobial layer that absorbs the stench of farts when placed inside underwear – and Yoobies, inflatable inserts for bras that give the girls a quick lift. Now, she is lending a helping hand to fellow innovators who want consumers to get wind of their own zany products.
Olenicoff and her crew at Solutions That Stick have just launched the I Should Have Invented That! Contest, urging aspiring inventors to submit their ideas before midnight PST on Nov. 12 at solutionsthatstick.com.
A panel of judges including retail experts will choose seven to 10 finalists and post them on Facebook.com/SolutionsThatStick for the public to vote on beginning Nov. 17.
Whichever inventor gets the most votes by Dec. 2 will win the contest and get the guidance to finally turn their idea or product into a reality — before someone else thinks of it.
Olenicoff told AOL News she’ll personally help steer the winning inventor in the right direction, from helping with the design of the product to manufacturing and marketing it.”
Read more at AOL News (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Should psychoanalysis be in the Science Museum?
“The Science Museum has never set itself up as a gatekeeper, deciding what is science and what is not. As a museum, we have a wide-ranging interest in many forms of scientific culture. Our great collections represent diverse technologies and practices as well as research. This has been the basis of our approach to medicine since we accepted responsibility for the care of the Wellcome Collections on the History of Medicine in the 1970s.
So where does psychoanalysis fit in? With 1 in 4 people in the UK formally diagnosed with a mental illness during their lifetime, the subject of mental and emotional well-being has never been more relevant. We have therefore taken a number of major initiatives in this area.
We have a long-standing relationship with the British Psychological Society, which sponsors our curator of psychology. Our recently reopened biomedical gallery “Who Am I?” deals with neuroscience, among other things. The psychoanalysis exhibition, sponsored by the Institute of Psychoanalysis, is part of a diverse, balanced approach to the study of the mind.
Psychoanalysis has moved well beyond the work of its founder, Sigmund Freud. The exhibition takes place at a time when there are fruitful discussions between neuroscientists and psychoanalysts about the relationship between the concept of the non-conscious, as explored by the former, and the unconscious, as described by the latter.
Interest in the effectiveness of a range of treatments based on psychoanalytic concepts and methods is also very active. Psychiatrist Jonathan Shedler of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver recently reviewed a wide range of published meta-analyses of therapeutic outcomes (American Psychologist, vol 65, p 98). He concluded that empirical evidence supports the efficacy of these treatments. Psychoanalysis is also the subject of serious academic discussions within well-known departments such as the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London.
Our new exhibition aims to introduce the subject to a non-specialist audience. The focus will be on the unconscious, treated in both its therapeutic and cultural context. We aim to engage visitors through a blend of historical and modern objects, visual and audio displays and artworks by artists including Grayson Perry and Noble and Webster.
The exhibition will be a powerful experience that will prompt thought and inform discussion. We anticipate this debate will be the first of many.
Psychoanalysis: The unconscious in everyday life opens on 13 October and runs until April 2011. The museum’s Dana Centre will hold an associated discussion series. For more information visit sciencemuseum.org.uk”
Read more at New Scientist (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Yavin IV reaches the edge of space
“A group of self-confessed ‘nerds’ have achieved something very cool – launching their own balloon to the very edge of our atmosphere.
Using an iPhone, Flip camera and an ice cooler, the Yavin IV project scored some very impressive results.”
Via Sunday Mercury (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
