bTang reBlog

Wow. The Manicouagan impact crater is huge. Apparently it’s one of the largest impact craters still preserved on the surface of the Earth, and was formed during a tremendous impact about 200 million years ago. The annular lake that shows the perimeter is 70 kilometers (43 miles) in diameter. Solarviews.com says:

Although the original rim has been removed, the distribution of shock metamorphic effects and morphological comparisons with other impact structures indicates an original rim diameter of approximately 100 kilometers (62 miles).

Thanks to Mike Scher, Philippe, Keith, Stuart Reid, Andy M, Markus and many others.

Posted by bev at 11:28 PM | Permalink

No, not strawberry fields but a huge amount of Cranberry Fields (or bogs) in Massachusetts.

Thanks to “ironcladlou”, “Daniel Drucker” and many more.

Posted by bev at 02:15 AM | Permalink

...make pretty pictures.

Bacteria have been programmed to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed into their genes.

The research could lead to smart biological devices that could detect hazardous substances or bioterrorism chemicals, scientists say. Eventually, the process might be used to direct the construction of useful devices or the growth of new tissue, perhaps restoring function to a severed spinal cord.

Many lines of research hold similar promise for controlling biology to build useful things. Predictions do not always come true. What's new about this latest effort is that the bacteria are made to communicate, so that millions or even billions of them gather in a predictable manner.

And there are pictures to prove it.

The researchers programmed E. coli bacteria to emit red or green fluorescent light in response to a signal emitted from another set of E. coli. The living cells were commanded to make a bull's-eye pattern, for example, around central cells based on communication between the bacteria.

continued at...

Posted by bev at 09:48 PM | Permalink

Ever since I met Alex Theory at a Planetworks party, I've wanted to work with his music. Today I can finally say I have.

Last week I visited Alex in his studio out by Ocean Beach and got permission to set video to "Oasis", the title track of his next album. I took high-resolution renders of my favorite Electric Sheep from Generation 165, and edited them to follow the lines and structure of the song.

I am pleased to share with you the result: "165 Star Oasis". The video is at full resolution, totalling 100 megabytes in divx format, and is available by bittorrent:

http://spotworks.com/bt/165-star-oasis.torrent

The visuals are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 2.0 by Scott Draves, and the music is All Rights Reserved by Alex Theory.

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More wierd patterns and colours here with some pollution controlling algae in the San Francisco Bay and some salt pools in the Utah mountains. (Via)

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The world’s largest natural bridge. The surrounding landscape is very surreal, it all looks like it is sculpted out of play dough.

Thanks Jeff Reynolds.

Posted by bev at 01:34 AM | Permalink

Available through Electroboutique, the Teleblaster is part of a New age of television.

(via)

Posted by bev at 02:44 AM | Permalink

Manufacturer: Ad Notam

From the website:

ad notam delivers moving images with sound on mirror and glass surfaces.

A glass or mirror surface with an integrated view surface in TFT display technology to playback high-resolution colour films (TV, SAT, DVD, video, etc.) or PC presentations (PC, laptop, flashcard, etc.) provides a completely new, trendy and effective way of communicating information.

ad notam supplies various design products for applications in retail (POS, POI), company presentations (foyers, trade fairs and exhibitions, showrooms), hotel and catering, hair salons and consumer market.

TV in your mirror...

Posted by bev at 01:20 AM | Permalink

The Erotic Museum is conducting an ongoing research project intent on recording the full breadth of natural and altered human physiology. By creating a massive image database of everyday people of every race.

Posted by bev at 01:06 PM | Permalink

[Phoenicians] used a mapping method over 3000 years ago that was quite meaningful to *totally* blind users. It was literally a map without paper.

They assigned names to locations based on the names of parts of the human body. The body was "mapped" to the area so that simply knowing the Phoenician name for the area enabled one to know approximately where it was in relation to other areas (body parts) of the same map. In English, one would call this "the lay of the land", that is, how the body is configured on the ground. #

See also: threatless: Follow It & Shona Kitchen: The City In Man

Related: Bio-graphy & Ubiquity

Posted by bev at 05:04 PM | Permalink

Tovi Grossman, Daniel Wigdor, Ravin Balakrishnan at the University of Toronto have developed a system that allows for direct gestural interaction with virtual objects contained in a crystal ball.

The interface includes 2D menus projected on the display and a browser for selecting 3D objects used to construct models. The browser uses a grid that contains images of objects like cubes, spheres and pyramids.

With finger gestures tracked by cameras, users can point at objects, trigger commands, and move, rotate or resize 3D models projected in the display.

It could eventually be used as an interface for 3D medical, architectural and graphic design applications.

Video.
PDF of the research.

Via Technology Review News.

Posted by bev at 02:39 PM | Permalink

X-Rated Disney on eBay

Here's your chance to own a piece of art/porn history: the original printing plate for legendary illustrator and comic artist Wally Wood's "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" went up for sale on eBay this week.



Eye Of Science




Penis Tree

A rather lewd tree grows in some parts of the world. Its branches resemble a penis.

Posted by bev at 11:58 AM | Permalink

Last week researchers at the University of Tokyo unveiled a flexible, pocket sized scanner as thin as a sheet of paper. The device would cost approximately $10 when it bocomes commercially available. Future development will allow connection to a mobile phone, with scanned images displayed on the screen of the phone. [via New Scientist]

Posted by bev at 11:32 AM | Permalink

Using the combination of chemistry, high-tech equipment, concrete expertise, and graphics technology, Intaglio Composites has developed a process which allows an image to be permanently embedded into the surface of structural concrete.

This particular application benefits from a high performance self consolidating concrete (SCC) to create a higher strength, denser, lower permeability concrete. Intaglio Composites also provides an unlimited range of pigments and additional pozzolanic materials to produce a high quality "fair finish" which achieves the greatest contrast between the form or smooth surface and the etched impressions in the concrete.

Panels are currently available in sizes up to 3' x 3' with larger sizes becoming available soon. Panel thickness can range from 1.5" up to 12" depending on the application. Intaglio Composites has been testing "textile concrete" for applications requiring panels as thin as 3/8" such as floor or wall tiles.

Intaglio Composites recommends the use of high performance fully penetrating siloxanes for maximum weathering and protection, although nothing is required. Horizontal applications require a high performance sealer to reduce wearing of the image.

Posted by bev at 11:21 PM | Permalink

"The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century-and the cascade of print technologies that followed-helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self."

Posted by bev at 01:51 PM | Permalink

DynaScan Japan has developed a 91 inch cylindrical LED screen that lets you see the image within from any angle. The display works with both still images and motion video, either transmitted through the Internet(s) or a DVD/video source.



Pretty cool, if you have about $930,000.



From Nikkei.Net (subscription required).

Posted by bev at 04:13 AM | Permalink

Really brings new meaning to the term “printed circuit board” when Epson goes and creates a process by which an inkjet printer can literally spit out complicated boards. Circuit paths are drawn by conductive ink and layered between coats of insulator ink. Naturally you shouldn’t expect to be able to download and shoot out the latest nVidia or ATI board every 1.3 days they release a new one, but this could mean really, really big things for portable electronics and wearable computing since these boards are only 1mm thick at 20 layers (trust us, that’s pretty amazing).

[Via ArsTechnica]

Posted by bev at 03:57 AM | Permalink

art @ IIT presents the International Rapid Prototyping Sculpture Exhibition at the Kemper Room Art Gallery, Paul V. Galvin Library, 35 West 33rd Street, Chicago, at the Illinois Institute of Technology; from Nov. 10 through Dec. 19, 2004. Reception will be held Nov. 10, 5:30 to 8:30pm. This exhibit will highlight 18 sculptors, many who are using this new technology after working many years with traditional materials. Included is the work of Kenneth Snelson, Michael Rees, and Keith Brown. An additional exhibit will showcase work by four digital artists who materialize virtual sculpture expressing the beauty of mathematically generated forms. The exhibition includes a variety of processes and material; from starch to metal. Info at: art.iit.edu or art@iit.edu or 312-567-5293.

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Fascinating talk by Rebecca Allen from MIT media lab in Dublin.

She first talked about one of the piece here in Ars Futura: developed with Ronan Coyle and Hannes Nehls, Liminal Identity blurs the boundaries between the physical and the virtual worlds.
So there's this shipping box with 2 holes, you put your head inside one of the hole and can see the face of another person who put his head inside the hole too, but the result is an image that mixed both your and his/her identities.

Moreover, the box is "stealing" the image to display it elsewhere, and you see it floating like a ghost among other faces.

Then there's also here a new kind of interface that you activate just using your breath, you blow and see the virtual reality lanscape change: the weather turns sunny or bad, for example.

That's what Rebecca Allan calls Augmented Virtuality. So far, you thought it was cool to talk about augmented reality, but she's working on augmented virtuality where we have a virtual world that we enhance with video images of face or with our own breath.

Posted by bev at 04:44 AM | Permalink

Data mining is often used by businesses such as retailers to find isolated trends buried into the mountains of data gathered at their cash registers. But this process cannot really be applied to science for discovering new materials even if you have huge databases describing all your previous experiments. This is why an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers at Purdue University is working on 'knowledge discovery', a new computer-aided product design method that uses supercomputing, AI and large 3D displays.

"Instead of mining for a nugget of gold, knowledge discovery is more like sifting through a warehouse filled with small gears, levers, etc., none of which is particularly valuable by itself. After appropriate assembly, however, a Rolex watch emerges from the disparate parts," said James Caruthers, a professor of chemical engineering.

The system allows researchers to interact with their data in their own languages and uses a 12x7 feet tiled wall to display the results. Read this summary for selected excerpts.

Posted by bev at 03:35 PM | Permalink

Kidney stone photographs from the Louis C. Herring & Co. Kidney Stone Analysis Laboratory ("We Leave No Stone Unturned"). Painfully and surprisingly beautiful. There’s also poetry in their reports and analyses as well as in they way they describe the initial visual inspection of the stones:

“The true nidus is invisible because it is the first crystal or aggregate of crystals precipitated from solution and deposited at what eventually becomes the stone site. An “apparent nidus” is either a region from which crystalline forms radiate or the geometric center surrounded by concentric laminations.“

[via lonita’s links log]

Posted by bev at 05:20 PM | Permalink

We know what you�re thinking. Crazy flashing lights equals Pokemon-style seizures, but the Japanese scientists who have developed a method of communicating by flashing LED lights at extremely high rates that are faster than the human eye can possibly detect. They�re investigating it as an alternative to using radio waves for position detection (which they is way too inaccurate and theoretically their LED system is precise to within a few millimeters), and also for creating traffic signals which can beam information to your car.

Posted by bev at 02:42 PM | Permalink

The global map of atmospheric nitrogen dioxide pinpoints cities, burning vegetation and even shipping lanes

Posted by bev at 04:24 PM | Permalink

Nicolas Nova's blog points us to MetPhoMod: the METeorology and atmospheric PHOtochemistry mesoscale MODel project (and don't blame me for the funky capitalization, that's what they use) in Switzerland. MetPhoMod is a 3D visualization tool for modeling meteorology and atmospheric chemistry -- that is, smog. MetPhoMod was used to study pollution patterns in Europe in the late 1990s, with a particular focus on the air chemistry over Grenoble and over the Swiss canton of Obwalden. The illustration at right is from work done in 1996 looking at smog patterns in Athens.

What makes this application interesting is the fact that it's free software, under a GPL license. The source code (as well as binaries for Solaris, AIX, Linux and Windows) can be found on the download page. A set of test data as well as data from a 1993 Swiss Plateau study are also available. The technical reference explains the theory and math behind the latest version of the app. MetPhoMod is complex stuff, clearly not meant for casual play, but I'm always happy to see these sorts of simulations made more widely available.

Posted by bev at 12:22 AM | Permalink

Fluorescence spectroscopy detects chemicals in the skin that relate to diabetes.

Posted by bev at 07:02 PM | Permalink

It looks like a ghoulish Halloween trick. Yet the device, which projects a creepy green video image of a patient�s veins onto their skin, is about to go on trial in a US hospital. The idea is that it will help staff to pinpoint a suitable vein for an injection or a drip.
[...]
An array of near-infrared LEDs surrounding the camera�s lens illuminates the skin at a wavelength of 740 nanometres. This wavelength is strongly absorbed by blood, but is scattered by the surrounding tissue. �Fat and tissue look light, veins and blood look dark,� says Zeman.

The image from the camera is fed to a PC running imaging software that maps the image onto a bright green background in real time and boosts the contrast between the veins and surrounding tissue. The PC then feeds this image to a projector that beams it onto the skin.

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The University of Chicago recently announced the installation of the most powerful human brain imaging system to date. While most fMRI systems in use today are powered 1.5-tesla or 3.0-telsa magnets, this new high resolution fMRI system has a 9.4-tesla magnet, built by GE Healthcare (a tesla is a large measuring unit of magnetic strength).

As I've mentioned many times, advances in neuroimaging are critically important in order to understand the workings of the human brain, detect diseases before their clinical signs appear, develop targeted drug therapies for illnesses and to provide a better understanding of learning disabilities. While I might not go as far as Dr. Keith Thulborn, director of the UIC Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, who claimed that this technological leap forward is as revolutionary to the medical community as the transition from radio to television was for society, I would suggest that this definitely a step toward our emerging neurosociety. Also, it looks like the neuroimaging group at University College London will now have some real competition.

Posted by bev at 03:29 AM | Permalink

Digit devised an interactive installation, MotoGlyph for the Miami's M3 Festival (sponsored by Motorola.)

Guests could write on panels (each have their own sound effect) with a 'virtual spray can' and the movements were tracked via ultrasound, then projected onto glass panels, creating a virtual graffiti wall and the sensation of writing in 'light'.

Users created thus their own digital signature or illustration upon the wall from which the variables of the marks and strokes were translated into the author's own sound and animation.

Participants could then go to the MotoGlyph website to download an MP3 of their unique ringtone to their mobile phone.

Motorola plan to tour the project throughout the States over 2004, specific locations tbc.
The website has lots of pics and videos.

Via del.icio.us/tag/technology.

Posted by bev at 01:14 PM | Permalink

Melbourne-based Iatia has been given $2.7 million by the Australian Defence Department to fund development of a military spy camera that could be used by troops on the ground or from helicopters to see through trees, cloud, fog, smoke and dust storms and allowing soldiers to distinguish between camouflaged targets and vegetation.

The technology, called Quantitative Phase Imaging, uses a sophisticated camera that captures three images simultaneously through a single lens. Images thus resolved from between the particles making up fog, smoke, and dust storms are formed into a single picture of the hidden target.

Further research and field trials will now be carried out to develop an operational camera capable of working over a range of about a kilometre.

The technology also has commercial application in industry, science and medicine.

From The Age, via Slashdot.

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David Pescovitz:
In the new issue of Popular Science, Jessican Snyder Sachs has an interesting and well-written article about virtual autopsies as a permanent record for pathologists. Michael Thali and the Virtopsy research team at the University of Bern, Switzerland use computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to create full-body scans of murder victims.

Besides being a bloodless approach to an otherwise messy job, the digitally preserved bodies of the Virtopsy Project have the added benefit of permanency. “Murder victims have the unfortunate habit of decomposing,” Thali notes.

Posted by bev at 04:57 PM | Permalink

The latest from Jared Tarbell. Wow....

Posted by bev at 08:14 PM | Permalink

"An indeterminate number of cameras point towards the sky. The collective presence of all these images are joined together into an additive composite."

Posted by bev at 03:27 PM | Permalink

Globalization has been one of the defining catch-phrases since the 1980's, and it's influence has been acting for much longer than that. A new piece of online art created by Istanbul-based photographer Mike Mike explores this force of homogeneous. By morphing crowds of faces into one "child" Face of Tomorrow gives the world a look at it's future face--one city at a time. The results are startling: beautiful, smooth, and not nearly as homogeneous as we might have feared. We talked to Mike about what he had learned through his work, and how he felt the inevitable sharing of ideas around the world would effect art and design as the face of tomorrow became the face of today.

(more...)

Posted by bev at 03:34 PM | Permalink

Gaia is an ambitious project from the European Space Agency to create the most precise map of a billion stars in our Galaxy and millions of other celestial objects invisible from current telescopes. When the spacecraft is launched in 2010, it will carry the most sensitive cameras ever made. Its billion-pixel camera will be in fact composed of 170 separate cameras, tiled together in a mosaic to register every object that passes through the field of view. Each individual camera or 'charge-coupled device' (CCD) will have a resolution of almost nine million pixels. Gaia will take images for five years. The above link will provide you with more details about this billion-pixel camera, but here I chose to focus on a particular aspect of the mission: checking the usually unobversable asteroids between the Sun and the Earth because of light conditions. Read more...

Posted by bev at 12:44 AM | Permalink

It may not win in any features competitions, but the new Rolleiflex MiniDigi is a cutie, rethinking the famous Rollei Twin Lens Reflex camera as a tiny 2-megapixel version that retains the square format, top-down viewfinder, and dual-lens of the original. Of course, the film is tossed out for an SD slot, and while the MiniDigi is all digital, it retains the film advance crank on the side just to give it that 1920s feeling. Price will be about �40,000 (~$375) and will be released in the States by July.

via Gizmodo

Posted by bev at 09:00 PM | Permalink

The Everywhere Displays project, from IBM Research Labs, aims to develop systems that allow the transformation of every surface in a space into a projected "touch screen".

Posted by bev at 09:12 PM | Permalink

microsoft's Andrew Wilson recently announced a new touch screen called "touchlight" that uses 2 cameras placed in a way that there is no parallax. so when videoconferencing with it, you can look the other person in the other location right in the eye, among other things.....i'm sure ;-) see the interview and demonstration in video. [via]

Posted by bev at 12:28 PM | Permalink

i just came back from siggraph where i finally got to see the Tickle Salon in person. besides being a tickle machine, it can map the body it is tickling when the probe moves along its contours. the probe is suspended by fishing line and the more time it spends on the body, the better it learns about the subtle contours which results in a more detail image of the body.

Posted by bev at 06:07 PM | Permalink

Alison Barth and team from CMU developed a strain of transgenic mice with glowing neurons so they can monitor the neural activity of cells and synapses for their research in perception, behavior, and learning. dying neurons and cells with fluorescent dye is common (like the photo above) but it doesn't show the activity of the neurons as they fire. this seems to do the trick. she recently received a $1.125M award from NIH for this project. [via]

Posted by bev at 10:42 AM | Permalink

Ko Nishino and Shree K. Nayar at Columbia U developed this corneal imaging system that reveals the whole image that lands on our cornea, whether we "see" it or not - what is in our peripheral vision. they can take any photograph of someone and know how the photo was taken, where, by whom, and what else was going on in the scene at the time. [via]

Posted by bev at 12:19 PM | Permalink

Professor Stuart Campbell at the Create Health Clinic in London pioneered a technique that produces 3D ultrasound images and real time foetal movement recordings. thanx to this new imaging technique, it has shown that unborns smile, stretch, kick, open their eyes, scratch, cry, and suck their toes/fingers earlier than previously thought. [via]

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