twitter-follow – Tech Today w/ Ken May

The Resort Where You Can Swim in Beer

Do you love beer so much that you want to feel it all over your body? The Starkenberger Brewery in Austria can give you that experience: Residing in the old fermentation brewery, there are seven total pools in a Turkish-bath-like room, each of which are heated and contain 12, 000L of water enriched with 300L Biergeläger (remote yeast). Fun fact: ever since the days of ancient Egypt when Cleopatra bathed in beer while Mark Anthony was off conquering empires, beer bath’s have been rumored to have a healing, restorative effect. You’ve gotta make reservations in advance but for $298/ pool (and an additional $6.50/ person) this could be you sharing a beer pool with blonde coeds. Your two hours of beer bathing also come with beer crackers and a “Tyrolean meat spread” plus one non-swimmed-in bottle of suds per person; because actually drinking the pool beer would be insane… right ?? You can do this cheaper in your bathtub with a couple cases of Bud Light, but the ambiance is different. Link -via American Digest (Photo: Starkenberger )

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The Resort Where You Can Swim in Beer

What Are the Weirdest Languages in the World?

According to Idibon, a company that makes language processing applications, these are the weirdest languages on different continents: In North America: Chalcatongo Mixtec, Choctaw, Mesa Grande Diegueño, Kutenai, and Zoque; in South America: Paumarí and Trumai; in Australia/Oceania: Pitjantjatjara and Lavukaleve; in Africa: Harar Oromo, Iraqw, Kongo, Mumuye, Ju|’hoan, and Khoekhoe; in Asia: Nenets, Eastern Armenian, Abkhaz, Ladakhi, and Mandarin; and in Europe: German, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, and Spanish. But is weirdness relative? Maybe the World Atlas of Language Structures provides a source for objective evaluation. Here’s what Idibon did with it: For each value that a language has, we calculate the relative frequency of that value for all the other languages that are coded for it. So if we had included subject-object-verb order then English would’ve gotten a value of 0.355 (we actually normalized these values according to the overal entropy for each feature, so it wasn’t exactly 0.355, but you get the idea). The Weirdness Index is then an average across the 21 unique structural features. But because different features have different numbers of values and we want to reduce skewing, we actually take the harmonic mean (and because we want bigger numbers = more weird, we actually subtract the mean from one). In this blog post, I’ll only report languages that have a value filled in for at least two-thirds of features (239 languages). What’s the weirdest language (subjectively speaking) that you’ve ever encountered? Link -via Marginal Revolution (Photo: Amazon.com)

Spider Silk Dress

Stylish and bullet proof! What’s not to like? This new blue dress by Japanese company Spiber is woven from synthetic spider silk, which is five times stronger than steel, more flexible than nylon, and is extremely lightweight. The electric-blue dress was created from a material Spiber calls Qmonos (from kumonosu , or “spider web,” in Japanese). The high-collared cocktail dress, on display at the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo, was created to demonstrate the technology behind Qmonos. The territorial nature of spiders makes them difficult to farm like silkworms. So instead, Spiber developed a technology that uses synthesized genes and coaxes bacteria to produce fibroin , the structural protein in spider silk. Spiber then uses technology it developed to culture the microbes efficiently and weave the fibroin into fabric. Apart from clothing, Qmonos could potentially be be used to make film, gels, sponges, artificial blood vessels, and nanofibers. Tim Hornyak of CNET has the scoop: Link

College Students Invent a Shoe That Generates Electricity with Every Step

Undergraduate mechanical engineering students at Rice University built a shoe that recovers and stores energy generated by walking. This energy could be used to power small electronic devices, such as cell phones: The Agitation Squad – Carlos Armada, Julian Castro, David Morilla and Tyler Wiest – decided last fall to focus their attention on where the rubber meets the road to create a shoe-mounted generator. Another device to draw energy from the motion of the knee had already been developed and patented and led them to analyze other sources of energy. Working with the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston, the team determined the force at the heel delivered far more potential for power than any other part of the foot. “We went to the lab and saw the force distribution across the bottom of your foot, to see where the most force is felt,” Morilla said. “We found it would be at the heel and at the balls of your toes, as you push off. We went with the heel because, unless you’re sprinting, you’re letting gravity do the work.” […] The prototypes deliver an average of 400 milliwatts, enough to charge a battery, in benchtop tests (and a little less in walking tests, where the moving parts don’t move as far). They send energy through wires to a belt-mounted battery pack. A voltage regulator keeps it flowing steadily to the battery. The PediPower hits the ground before any other part of the prototype shoe. A lever arm strikes first. It is attached to a gearbox that replaces much of the shoe’s sole and turns the gears a little with each step. The gears drive a motor mounted on the outside of the shoe that generates electricity to send up to the battery. You can watch a video of their device at the link. Link -via Inhabitat

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College Students Invent a Shoe That Generates Electricity with Every Step

LEDs in an Engagement Ring

Ben’s engagement ring is awesome not only because it lights up, but because it lights up when he and his girlfriend hold hands: Putting a battery of capacitor inside a ring is nigh impossible, so [Ben] decided to power the LEDs with an inductive charging circuit. A coil of wire wound around kapton tape serves as the inductor and a small SMD capacitor powers three very bright and very tiny LEDs. The inductive charging unit itself is a masterpiece of hackery; [Ben] wanted the ring to light up whenever he and his ladyfriend were holding hands. To do this, [Ben]‘s inductive charger is also a wearable device: a large coil of wire is the charger’s transformer and was would to fit around [Ben]‘s wrist. The entire charging circuit can be easily hidden under a jacket sleeve, making for a nearly magical light-up ring. You can watch a video of the ring at the link. Link

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LEDs in an Engagement Ring

Famous Authors’ Handwritten Outlines for Great Works of Literature

Many authors make outlines of their novels to keep the story arc in place, make sure the important parts are not missed, and to keep up with each character. They each have their own style, as well. See some handwritten outlines from James Salter, J.K. Rowling, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, and more at Flavorwire. The chart shown is how Joseph Heller kept up with the characters and their plot lines in Catch-22 . You can click the image twice at Flavorwire to bring up the large size, but you might need to put on your glasses to read it anyway. Link

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Famous Authors’ Handwritten Outlines for Great Works of Literature

See Inside a Butterfly Chrysalis

Just like everyone else, you learned about how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly (or moth) inside a chrysalis (or cocoon) and you desperately tried to envision what happens inside and what it looks like. Scientists who’ve opened a lot of chrysalises will tell you the caterpillar turns to goop and then a butterfly, but that’s not completely accurate, and the process of opening one destroys the structure anyway. But now, two teams of scientists have started to captured intimate series of images showing the same caterpillars metamorphosing inside their pupae. Both teams used a technique called micro-CT, in which X-rays capture cross-sections of an object that can be combined into a three-dimensional virtual model. By dissecting these models rather than the actual insects, the teams could see the structures of specific organs, like the guts or breathing tubes. They could also watch the organs change over time by repeatedly scanning the same chrysalis over many days. And since insects tolerate high doses of radiation, this procedure doesn’t seem to harm them, much less kill them. Ed Yong explains more about this technology, and you’ll more pictures of an insect going through the metamorphosis at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link (Image credit: Lowe et al. 2013. Interface)

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See Inside a Butterfly Chrysalis

The Most Sleep Deprived Students in the World

Who *yawn* are the most sleep deprived students in the world? Students from the United States, according to new research by Chad Minnich of Boston College: “I think we underestimate the impact of sleep. Our data show that across countries internationally, on average, children who have more sleep achieve higher in maths, science and reading. That is exactly what our data show,” says Chad Minnich, of the TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center. “It’s the same link for children who are lacking basic nutrition,” says Mr Minnich, based at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College. But what about those Asian students who study all the time? Asian countries are the highest-performing in maths tests – and Mr Minnich says this has often been associated with long hours and cramming in after-school classes. “One would assume that they would be extremely tired,” he said. “And yet when we look at the sleep factor for them, they don’t necessarily seem to be suffering from as much sleep deprivation as the other countries.” Minnich placed the blame on smartphones and laptops. Sean Coughlan of the BBC has more: Link

Prisoner of Technology

Feel trapped by technology? In a print campaign for Go Outside magazine, Brazilian designer Felipe Luchi imagined our beloved gadgets as physical prisons: Link (Bonus: if you look closely, you’ll see that there are ways to escape from these prisons) – via Twisted Sifter

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Prisoner of Technology

The Curious Case of the Nonexistent Turtle

With all the stories about “de-extinction” of animal species lately, there’s one method that doesn’t get much notice -when scientists decide that an extinct species never existed in the first place. That applies to the case of Pelusios seychellensis , which, according to specimens collected by German naturalist August Brauer over 100 years ago, lived in the Seychelles off the east coast of Africa. Curiously, these turtles closely resembled turtles on the west coast of Africa, Pelusios castaneus . But they couldn’t be the same, because they lived so far apart. So the separate species name was coined in 1983. But even more curious, no one could find any specimens of Pelusios seychellensis in the Seychelles, and scientists concluded that the species had gone extinct during the 20th century. Not only that, they assumed that humans had caused the extinction. But wait… Brauer took the trip during which he was supposed to have collected the turtles between May 1895 to January 1896. But he didn’t immediately give his finds to a museum. Specimens from his private collection didn’t get transferred to the Zoological Museum Hamburg until five years after the Seychelles trip, and those turtles soon went on to Vienna’s Natural History Museum. Somewhere in all that shuffling, the west African turtles might have been lumped in with the Seychelles reptiles or otherwise confused. Whatever happened, though, a prominent clue indicates that the turtles were not collected from the wild. One, and possibly two, of the turtles have a perforation through their shells identical to the sort that turtle purveyors have traditionally used to tie turtles together until they are sold for food. Wherever Brauer got the turtles from, he seems to have purchased them. Oops. On the bright side, this means that humans did not cause the extinction of a turtle species, because Pelusios castaneus is still around -on Africa’s west coast. Read the saga of the disappearing turtles at Laelaps. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science (Image credit: Stuckas et al., 2013)

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The Curious Case of the Nonexistent Turtle