Scientists Are Turning Dead Spiders Into ‘Necrobots’ And We Are So Creeped Out
It turns out that puppeteering dead spiders is a more effective gripping tool for small lightweight objects than the majority of the purely mechanical solutions we have tried so far.
Functional Wave Power has been figured out in Australia, at readily commercialisable rates of energy extraction and low maintenance. Most previous attempts to generate electricity from waves have relied on big paddles that are physically moved by the water, and they’ve had high maintenance requirements and barely broken even. This design mimics natural blowholes and has no moving parts below the surface and has proven it can withstand multiple Southern Ocean storms without breaking, with an 40%+ energy conversion. In theory, you can use them anywhere the water is rough enough close to shore while still letting you build.
Given the design, I think these may also be able to do double duty as an artificial word-for-coral, for environmental restoration and/or proving a surf break. Which is a nice bonus.
[Sorry about the word-for-coral, but there’s seems to be some weird censorship bug]
It’s a great design, but I find it slightly ironic that it’s basically converting wind-energised wave energy back into wind energy. I suppose the wave condenses a large swath of low-velocity wind into a more usable, high-density form though
This one falls under plain weird. Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” had the power to crash laptops in the Windows XP era. When the music video was played, some (but not all) laptops would crash, across multiple manufacturers, so it clearly wasn’t a manufacturer-specific firmware issue. This was stumping the people investigating, until they noticed that playing it on one laptop could crash nearby laptops.
Turns out that music video had a lot of tones that hit the resonant frequencies of the boot drive the laptops were using.
How Eyeless Centipedes Detect Sunlight
These are interesting, because the ‘usual’ solution to an animal needing to detect light after a period of evolutionary blindness is “reinvent basic photoreceptors”; it’s low enough level code that the required chemicals have generally been repurposed into something. Here, the centipede has instead opted for extremely sensitive temperature sensors, exploiting the fact that sunlight contains a lot of energy and is hot.
Admittedly, I’m also linking for the excellent description of the research subjects:
Venomous Chinese red-headed centipedes have long, black segmented bodies, yellow legs and a large, eyeless head with long antennae and a mouth capable of biting and injecting venom into prey, predators and humans that happen to step on them.
Runaway Black Hole With a Trail of Stars
NASA has found a supermassive black hole that seems to have been flung out of its host galaxy, likely after interacting with another pair of black holes in the aftermath of a galaxy collision. As it travels it is drawing in and compressing gas from the void, prompting fresh star formation behind it.
“Ah Yes, the Arm of Darkness.”
Launch Pad Water Deluge System Test at NASA Kennedy Space Center
Fun video showing a test of the water system used to protect the launch pad. There are no pumps; the pads are surrounded by water towers and the system is gravity-fed, under the logic that the fewer moving parts you have to go wrong, the less likely you’ll set everything on fire. I didn’t realise the sheer volume of water they use, because every other time I’ve seen it there is a large plume of rocket exhaust in the way.
Taxidermy Birds Are Being Turned Into Drones
This is an interesting approach to 1) experimenting with new drone aerodynamics, in case they’re more efficient, 2) experimenting with unusual materials, in case they lend themselves to new applications (in which case we may want to research bones more to come up with better manufacturing methods), and 3) seeing if wild birds are less alarmed by an uncanny valley ‘bird’ than a traditional drone.
It is also going to throw fuel on the “birds aren’t real” conspiracy theories, which I have learnt some people genuinely believe and don’t treat as a joke.
The first headline I saw with this was “Researchers have recently suggested that black hole event horizons collapse quantum superpositions like that of an observer”.
So I guess if you’re one of the adherents to the full-Copenhagenist, consciousness-centric interpretation of QM, it’s time to increment your posterior on “Black holes lairs of eldritch cosmic abominations”.
On another note, it seems research is progressing towards the kind of high-resolution NMRI machines the first upload clinics in the 'verse used to accurately capture the connectome.
Brain Images Just Got 64 Million Times Sharper | Duke Today
Future’s coming, folks!
(At least for mice.)
Ningaloo whale sharks found to stop swimming to have parasites plucked by researchers
Ethics Committee: We need to make sure this research isn’t causing significant distress to these endangered animals. We are concerned it might be causing more harm than good.
Whale Sharks: We have decided these misshapen slow water critters aren’t threats. They’re actually giant cleaner fish! Look, if you present your head to them they’ll remove parasites from the places that the remora can’t get to, this is excellent!
Ethics Committee: We didn’t mean you had to set up a barter service, but, uh… thank you for not causing significant distress to the subjects?
This new AI-powered computer model can predict dangerous solar storms
We might have an open-source solar storm warning system, soon. I know at least one person wanted a solar weather report, so this may assist with that?
One-hour training is all you need to control a third robotic arm
Study suggests that adult humans can learn to use additional limbs significantly faster than we thought.
The 2023 Ig Nobel prizes have been announced! These are awarded for science that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think". While they have no formal connection to the actual Nobels, many scientists love them, and Nobel laureates are the ones handing out the awards at the ceremony.1 So far only one person has won both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel.2
This year’s winning research is:
2 Andre Geim won the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, for magnetic levitation of a frog. (China is using this as a basis for their lunar gravity research. Funny science can still be useful.) In 2010 Geim won the Nobel Prize in Physics, for his research on graphene.
3 "Licking rocks makes it easier to identify them in the field because mineral particles in rocks adhere better to a moist surface than to a dry one.”
5 The pattern of creases around your anus.
6 While potentially being an IoT security nightmare.
7 Yes. Roughly 121 each, but they want to repeat with a broader variety of people.
8 Bored teachers result in bored students, and dreading a boring lecture can make it worse.
9 The more people in your ‘seed’ crowd, the more strangers you can get to pause and look themselves. Remember everyone, if you write it down and publish a paper it becomes science, not pranking.
That one is still too early. I think they’d need a deployable device (a prototype is fine) that has been proven to work for in at least a narrow area, and then publish a paper on it or similarly have it “in the wild”. If they couldn’t figure out the AI portion but their bowel noise simulator was useful enough that other researchers were purchasing it for their studies, I believe that would qualify too. (I know that the Economics Ig Nobel was won in 2005 by an alarm clock that runs away and hides when you hit the snooze button so you’re forced to get out of bed and chase it; that was a purchasable product.)