A few weeks ago, drips of lost footage filled with cut takes from Return of the Jedi began appearing online. Now you can see all 30 minutes of the recovered footage, compiled into a single video. Read more…
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Watch all 30 minutes of recovered Return of the Jedi footage
If you haven’t been able to convince publishers your life would make for an awesome comic book, and can’t draw more than a crude stick figure facsimile of yourself, you can thank the imaging researchers at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology in Japan. They’ve created a fun system that can automatically generate manga-style comics starring anyone striking a pose in front of its camera. Read more…
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You No Longer Need To Be an Artist To Appear In Your Own Comic Book
Synthetic biology researchers at MIT are creating simple analog computers in living cells, complete with fluorescent “displays.” Rahul Sarpeshkar and Timothy K. Lu engineered genetic circuits in E. coli so that the bacteria glows with a brightness determined by the amount of certain chemicals surrounding it. From Science News: By making bacteria glow more or less brightly depending on the number of different chemicals around, the new circuit can compute answers to math problems, Lu’s team reports May 15 in Nature. To add 1 plus 1, for example, the circuit would detect two chemicals and crank up the bacteria’s glow to “2.” ” Analog circuits boost power in living computers ” (Science News) ” Cell-Based Computing Goes Analog ” (The Scientist) ” Synthetic analog computation in living cells ” (Nature)
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E. coli engineered into an analog computer
Make Games! published a huge list of indie titles , many of them free or trivially inexpensive, made using the wildly popular game-making software Unity —I know what I’ll be doing next weekend! If you’re feeling inspired, Make Games!’ getting started page, links to essential article and Unity alternatives for developers of any skill level.
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Indie games made with Unity
Over at Fast Company, our pal Chris Arkenberg wrote about how advances in synthetic biology and biomimicry could someday transform how we build our built environments: Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions. Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers. Tools like Project Cyborg make possible a deeper exploration of biomimicry through the precise manipulation of matter. David Benjamin and his Columbia Living Architecture Lab explore ways to integrate biology into architecture. Their recent work investigates bacterial manufacturing–the genetic modification of bacteria to create durable materials. Envisioning a future where bacterial colonies are designed to print novel materials at scale, they see buildings wrapped in seamless, responsive, bio-electronic envelopes. ” Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers ”
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Buildings built by bacteria
Haiti has been battling a massive cholera outbreak since, roughly, around the time international aid groups arrived in the country following the 2010 earthquake. Now, genetic evidence links the strain of cholera in Haiti to a rare strain native to Nepal — further proof that it was Nepalese UN Peacekeepers who brought cholera to Haiti . This news comes two months after the UN claimed immunity from any financial liability relating to the outbreak, writes Stacey Singer at the Palm Beach Post.
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More evidence that Haiti’s cholera epidemic started with UN Peacekeepers
“At the close of 1998, there were 23 known weblogs on the Internet. A year later there were tens of thousands. What changed? ” [Mat Honan / Wired]
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The blogging family tree
Artist Martin John Callanan and the Advanced Engineered Materials Group at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory used an infinite 3D optical microscope to capture 400 million pixel images of the lowest denomination coin from many currencies. ” The Fundamental Units ”
Sandia National Laboratories is the nation’s premiere nuclear weapons research facility, and for more than 60 years, its researchers have poked and prodded the interiors of atoms to suss out their secrets—a task that has produced mountains of data that the facility’s copper network struggles to contain. But now, even the most remote building’s on Sandia’s campuses have access to the biggest bandwidth modern technology can muster. More »
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The World’s Biggest Fiber LAN Lives at a Nuclear Weapons Research Lab
The Economist has a chart from Kaspersky Lab , a security firm, that shows that spam mail is on a decline. Supposedly, it’s a combination of spam filters actually working, the authentication of senders and more police crackdowns on Nigerian princes. In fact, in the past year, junk mail has declined from around 80% to 67%. Do you guys agree with this study? Are you noticing less spam in your inboxes? More »
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Are You Getting Less Spam Mail?