Stephanie Vetter captured this photograph of an aurora over Jökulsárlón, a glacial lake in Iceland. It won an international competition for landscape astrophotography.

Link via Gizmodo

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The End is Nigh, and It Is Beautiful

Ninety six minutes. Eleven shocks by defibrillator. Two dozen rescuers pounding his chest in shifts to bring vital oxygen to his limp body. A helicopter, even. That’s what it took to revive 54-year old Howard Snitzer this month. Oh, and a little celebrated thing called a capnography machine that let everyone know that he was still capable of being brought back from the brink of death. More

Go ahead and drive your SUV to the plastic factory: The French have discovered the first habitable planet in another solar system. It’s called Gliese 581d, and it’s a mere 20 light years away. More

In the run-up to the releases of the Volt and the Leaf, there was some talk making the rounds that the designers were having some trouble deciding what noise these new cars should make. After all, they’re naturally almost silent, and this presents a serious risk not just to unwary pedestrians but to also to blind people, wildlife, and of course other cars.

The question is whether you make EVs sound like other cars by simulating engine noise, or do you take this chance to give them an entirely new and perhaps more practical and customizable noise?

Some cars, of course, have a distinctive noise that results naturally from the mechanics of the engine and exhaust. Car designers can make their own noise now, even make your Leaf sound like an old Mustang — but should this noise be regulated, and if so, on what level?

Manufacturers and designers are testing out different sounds, from a UFO noise to the sound of a baseball card flapping against bike spokes, attempting to suss out which exactly produces the most awareness without becoming grating. The BBC has a nice video here with some of the noises being looked at by UK researchers.

They’re even simulating intersections with dozens of such vehicles and seeing how certain sounds would interact. Hey, you don’t roll something out to ten thousand vehicles without doing a little checking around, right?

I’m torn on the subject. Obviously there’s a line that needs to be walked between good taste and safety, but there are lots of unanswered questions as well. What about special sounds for certain types of vehicles, or user-selectable sounds? I want mine to sound like a Transformer transforming, all the time.

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Car Makers Ponder What To Make Electric Vehicles Sound Like

It’s been 150 years since Scottish Physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed off the world’s first color photograph at a Royal Institution lecture in London. His discovery is incredible but, technically, it shouldn’t have worked. More

Watermelons are delicious, especially during the summer. I search far and wide for the biggest, juiciest, perfectest watermelon around. But sometimes they can get too big, like this field of watermelons that’ve exploded like landmines. More

This, dear reader, is the iDVM Digital Multimeter — the world’s very first iDevice-enabled voltmeter, from Redfish Instruments. Designed with auto technicians, electricians and engineers in mind, the iDVM uses an ad hoc wireless network to connect to any iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, allowing users to record voltage, resistance and current directly from their palms. Once you’ve purchased the multimeter and downloaded the accompanying iDVM app, you’ll be able to gather electrical measurements from up to 30 yards away from your target, log data over extended periods of time and export your findings in spreadsheet or graph displays. The rechargeable battery-powered device can also read your measurements back to you, which should make you feel slightly less lonely while digging around your car’s engine at 3 am. We’re still not sure why anyone would want to juggle their iPhone while chasing down a shorted wire, but if you do, the iDVM starts shipping on June 1st, for $220 — which could buy you about 40 less complicated multimeters from Harbor Freight. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading iDVM Digital Multimeter collects voltage readings on your iDevice, shares them with whoever cares

iDVM Digital Multimeter collects voltage readings on your iDevice, shares them with whoever cares originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 May 2011 21:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Call me a hypocrite, but while I’m disdainful of Design for the Sake of Design, I’m all for Mechanical Engineering for the Sake of Mechanical Engineering. Dave Johnson’s self-built Magnet Machine sends Buckyballs on a little journey with no purpose, but does demonstrate some cool bits of electromagnetic science:

This machine manipulates small spherical rare earth magnets, slicing one at a time from the end of a long chain, moving it around a bit, then dropping it back to re-connect at the tail end of the chain.

It also demonstrates a little snippet of science called eddy currents. Watch how slowly the magnet falls through the aluminum tube compared to falling through air: the falling magnet generates an electrical current in the tube, and that current in turn generates a magnetic field that opposes the movement of the magnet, slowing it down dramatically.

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Dave Johnson’s Buckyball-Moving Magnet Machine

There seems to be no lack of options for cloud music players on Android these days, but what about your neglected iPhone? If you have a Dropbox account and use it to store music and podcasts, BoxyTunes makes it easy to grab those audio files on the go. More

Back in March, we saw a project using a head-mounted Kinect to sense and alert the user to obstacles in their path. Researchers at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden are working on a similar system, but building it into a wheelchair.

It was tested this week by a grad student hopeful who is himself visually impaired, and he pronounced it solid. The system looks quite bulky, however, and is limited to detecting objects within a narrow plane, so it wouldn’t pick up, say, a curb or overhang.

Still, it’s interesting research, and could be the start of a new kind of intelligent wheelchair that could let blind and partially sighted people get around their homes a bit easier.

[via Gizmag]

Link:
Swedish University Testing Wheelchair That Maps Its Surroundings