Best Beer Invention Ever!

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2013-04/anywhere-beer?utm_source=feedly

Bond and Science - Enough Time Has Passed to avoid spoilers...

In the new James Bond movie Skyfall, the Aston Martin DB5--a rare but staple race car in the spy fiction series since 1964--explodes into smithereens. We'll spare you the cinematic details, but take heart, auto aficionados. The real DB5 is safe.

A Bavarian 3-D printing company called voxeljet made three meticulously accurate 1:3 scale models of the classic vehicle, layer-by-layer. Each fake car (below) is made of 18 transparent plastic parts printed out of PMMA by voxeljet’s high-end VX4000 printer, a machine that can make objects as large as 13 feet by 6.5 feet by 3 feet.

From there a British prop-making company called Propshop Modelmakers assembled the models and applied realistic finishing like paint, chrome polish, and even bullet holes to match different car chase scenes in Skyfall.

Only 1,021 real Aston Martin DB5s were manufactured between 1963 and 1965, and the cameo car in the James Bond movie Goldfinger was recently valued at $2.6 million.

The models themselves aren’t cheap, either. Although one of the models met a fiery end, another sold for $99,041 at a Christie’s auction.

Source

Stretchy...

This is pretty cool, I love engineering and stuff...

At some point soon, we'll have wireless everything--wireless charging, wireless syncing, wireless video, wireless audio. We've already got a lot of that stuff, in fact. But today, we still need wires and cables, and a new creation from researchers at North Carolina State University could make them much more usable--by making them stretchy.

The basic construction of the new super-stretchy wires is an elastic tube filled with a highly conductive liquid metal alloy. Other attempts at stretchy wires, say the researchers, have relied on embedding conductivity into elastic, as opposed to separating them. The wires can be stretched up to eight times their original length, which is pretty amazing--an order of magnitude more stretchy than existing stretchy wires.

Source

 

Bread Mold - BeGone!

Nuked bread can last up to 60 days, according to the company, MicroZap, which spun off from Texas Tech University. Among wasted foods, bread is a major culprit, meeting its end in the garbage can once it becomes festooned with greenish growths of mold. This usually happens within 10 days of the bread being baked. MicroZap’s method kills the mold spores, keeping bread mold-free for two months and helping Americans reduce some of their food waste.

The equipment, which looks like a CT scanner for food, was originally developed to kill organisms like multi-resistant staph bacteria and salmonella. But its developers realized it also kills bread mold in about a 10-second zap. It works much like a home microwave, but the waves are produced in various frequencies, which allows for uniform heating, according to MicroZap CEO Don Stull.

Source

Inflatable Subway Plug

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City a few weeks ago, seven of the 14 under-river subway tunnels flooded as a result of the storm surge, halting operation of some subway lines for more than a week. One possible future safeguard for this kind of disaster: huge, inflatable tunnel plugs. At the University of West Virginia, researchers working with the Department of Homeland Security are testing a massive balloon made of high strength material that could potentially be used to plug subway tunnels during future calamities--be they weather- or terrorism-related--keeping water out and important infrastructure functional. Catch a video of this technology inflating over at the NYT.

Timely post since we just watched the benefit concert last night on AMC.

Source

Want to Play Catch?

My brother used to work for Disney Animatronics, so I knew they worked on things like this.  And if you have ever been to a Disney theme park, then you know that they are a leader and innovator in this area.

Having said that, this is cool to share.  Disney researchers invented a humanoid animatron that plays a lifelike game of catch.

They used an external camera system to track the balls and an algorithm to predict where and when the ball would fall. When the robot misses a catch, it looks back or down at where the ball fell, shrugs, or shakes its head. This guy was designed for theme parks, but one day it will be playing catch with our children and fetch with our dogs. Next they should program it to make dad jokes.

Source

Green City

A tiny pocket city built from scratch next to a crowded urban center could alleviate some of China’s crowding and pollution problems. A Chicago-based architectural firm designed a master plan for the city, which will be built within eight years and host 30,000 families, or roughly 80,000 people.

Great City will cover just 1.3 square kilometers, or 0.5 square miles. This is about 245 football fields of space. That is not a ton of space for 80,000 people. And that’s the idea--everything is supposed to be so close that you can walk anywhere within 15 minutes.

Here’s a breakdown of land use:

•Total site: 800 acres

•Urbanized area: 320 acres

•Buffer zone with natural landscape: 480 acres

Within the urbanized area:

•15 percent of land reserved for parks

•60 percent for construction of buildings

•25 percent for infrastructure, roads and pedestrian streets

Bye Bye Space Junk?

This picture always amazes me, and I am very pleased to hear that there is an effort to try and address this issue.  Kudos Boeing!

To clear space junk without creating more in the process, Boeing wants to slow pieces of orbiting degree by intercepting them with a cloud of dense gas.

Aerospace giant Boeing has developed a novel means of clearing space junk from low Earth orbit: A cloud of ballistic gas. Most space junk-clearing schemes involve launching something up there to physically de-orbit debris, but this means launching rocket stages into orbit that then become more orbital debris. Boeing’s solution: Launch a rocket full of cryogenic inert gas right to the very edge of space, then forcibly eject tons of vaporized gas further upward into an orbiting debris cluster. The initial density of the cloud will create enough drag to slow the debris just enough to de-orbit it, and the launch rocket would remain low enough to fall harmlessly back to Earth.

Source

Historic Egyptian Prosthetic

Researchers have suspected two Egyptian artificial toes are the world's oldest known prosthetic body parts. A new study suggests that is the case: Volunteers without a big toe showed the prosthetics would have made walking around in ancient Egyptian sandals much easier, suggesting they were not just used in burial or in some other non-practical way.

One of the artifacts in question is the Greville Chester toe, now in the British Museum. It dates back before 600 B.C. and is made of cartonnage, an ancient type of papier maché made with a mixture of linen, animal glue and tinted plaster. The other is the wood and leather Cairo toe at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which was found on a female mummy near Luxor and is thought to date back to between 950 and 710 B.C.

If the parts were indeed used to help ancient Egyptians missing a big toe walk normally, they would be the earliest known practical prostheses — older than the bronze and wooden Roman Capua leg, which dates back to 300 B.C.

Source

Back to the Future?

This is pretty cool, just saying :o)

Source

Beginning of the End

This boxy guy is called Kuratas, otherwise known as Vaudeville, and he stands 12 feet 5 inches tall. He weighs about 4.5 tons and is diesel-powered. Do not smile at him. He will shoot that grin right off your face.

Kuratas is a real-life mech from Japan, and it's an art project designed by Suidobashi Heavy Industry. Iron worker/artist Kogoro Kurata, at right in the photo above, built his namesake robot and debuted it at something called Wonder Fest 2012.

It has a ride-in cockpit, a master-slave joystick and a touchscreen interface, and its arms can be controlled via Kinect, so it could be trained as a boxer. Its twin BB Gatling guns can fire up to 6,000 BBs per minute. And it fires when a small camera inside the robot detects when you smile. This is just for fun, however — Kurata says he would never want his creation to harm anyone. But it could be used for robot competitions, he said.

Source

You could pretend-order one of your own, via a slick website Kurata and his colleagues at Suidobashi designed. The mecha come in various color schemes and customizable weapons. But the base model starts at $1,353,500, so better start saving.