Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

We’ve taken some totally sweet pictures of other galaxies, but it’s kinda hard to get a decent image of our own Milky Way… There’s just no good place to stand and point the camera. This 12cm glass cube contains a pint sized model of our home galaxy. It’s not just an abstract rendering; there are 80,000 individual points, representing the relative positions of 80,000 real stars, based on data from Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory.

According to Monty Python’s Galaxy Song, our galaxy contains a hundred billion stars, which is a far cry from the mere eighty thousand represented here. On the upside, this model will set you back 1 yen (just under a penny) per star, so if it was more accurate, you’d be paying upwards of a billion dollars instead of the $800 or so it actually costs. Oh, and before you start complaining that the galaxy is off center, this model is geocentric: Earth is in the middle. Yep, we’re kinda off in the middle of nowhere. Humbling, huh?

[ Living World Galaxy ] VIA [ DVICE ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you’re worried about taking your kids outside at night to stargaze because of the risk of asteroids, falling satellites and other space debris, you can now enjoy a considerably less awesome experience indoors. The Discovery Ultimate Star Planetarium will project 88 constellations and 12 celestial objects including the 8 planets, that outcast Pluto and its moon, Charon.

A backlit navigational screen allows you to search a database of over 600 star facts and myths, while an interactive talking computer will take you through a variety of astronomy tours and settings. It uses a couple of “super bright bulbs” to project over 600 dots stars and even has a one-hour timer so your kids can fall asleep under the constellations.

You can find it at the Discovery Channel online store for $79.95.

[ Discovery Ultimate Star Planetarium ] VIA [ GadgetMania ]

By Evan Ackerman

Somewhat unusually, there are a couple things going on up in the sky this Wednesday night, at least for those of us who don’t live in Asia or Australia (sorry chaps). The first thing to look forward to is a total lunar eclipse, which should be visible in its entirety from the central and eastern US and Canada as well as western Europe. Eastern Europe and most of Africa will be able to see the eclipse beginning as the moon sets, and the western US will catch it in progress as of moonrise. The moon will be completely within the shadow of the Earth as of 10pm EST, and won’t start to come out again until 10:50pm. During that time it’ll turn a lovely reddish-orange, thanks to the sunrises and sunsets refracting light past the limbs of the Earth. If you live in North America, your next chance to see something like this will be December 21, 2010, so get your butt out there and take a look.

The other big thing that’s going on Wednesday night (in the middle of the eclipse, in fact) is that the United States is going to try to shoot down a dysfunctional spy satellite over Hawaii with a sea launched interceptor missile. If you live in Hawaii, fear not, the debris cloud is headed for central Canada, and as far as I know, nobody actually lives in Canada. Not that they’d have any toxic hydrazine propellant to worry about. Oh wait, there’s 1000 pounds of it on board. That, in fact, is the US government’s rationale for shooting the thing down: they don’t want it to crash into a populated area. Sounds reasonable, but it’s actually total bunk, according to Danger Room. In fact, it’s far more likely to be a response to the Chinese anti-satellite missile test of a year ago, despite the heavy criticism of that test from the United States. More on why the US Government thinks we need to shoot this thing down, and why none of their reasons make much sense, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By Evan Ackerman

You don’t think about it much, but generally, when stuff falls over, it doesn’t get back up. Off the top of my head, I can think of two exceptions to the rule: Weebles, and turtles. Of course, Weebles (and most other self-righting objects) cheat by having a weight in the bottom. The Gomboc, “invented” last December by Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi, is the first convex, homogeneous object with only one stable orientation, which means that it’ll always turn itself “up” no matter which way you set it down, without any help:

Turtles, though, seem to have had this figured out a while ago… Quite a few of them have shells shaped nearly identically to the Gomboc. As for practical uses for those of us who aren’t turtles, I honestly don’t know what this is good for. How about a cake mold, to make self-righting pineapple upside-down cake? Yeah, okay, got nothin’. It’s definitely cool, though.

If you want to order one, they’re available in a limited edition starting at about 1000 euros. Or you could just go find a turtle somewhere.

[ Gomboc ] VIA [ Neatorama ]

By Evan Ackerman

I’m somewhat of a scale buff. That is, I find it fascinating to think about how big, and how small, things are. The problem (and part of the appeal) is that it’s a really hard topic to wrap your brain around. For example, an atom of hydrogen is about a ten millionth of a millimeter in diameter, which is a hundred thousand thousand times larger than an electron. How do you picture that?

This webpage has taken an electron, and scaled it to the size of one pixel. The rest of a hydrogen atom, including one proton and the space between the proton and the electron, is then displayed at that scale. On a 72 DPI monitor, this webpage works out to be about 11 miles long, and that’s just the radius (the middle of the atom to the edge), as opposed to the full diameter. This webpage takes the same approach to show the scale of the solar system; it’s only half a mile long.

I say largest practical webpage because a quick Google search has revealed that the biggest webpage is actually this one; it contains some 8,100,000,000,000,000 (gasp) ,000,000,000,000,000 pixels. That’s 9 quadrillion pixels wide by 9 quadrillion pixels tall:

At 77 pixels to the inch, this page takes up 3.4e18 square miles and is 1.844 billion miles on a side– an area roughly equivalent to a section of the plane of our Solar System with the sun at the center and the orbit of Saturn on the outside edge (a square 22 AU on a side). That’s about 17 billion times the surface area of the Earth.

Now, I’m not sure what the point of that is, but I’m impressed anyway. After the jump, you can watch an old classic on this same topic: Powers of Ten. Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

Once again the credit card becomes the size standard to which anything miniature gets compared. If you can squeeze it down to fit in a credit card slot, then you’ve done your job. (Back to the drawing board Apple.) And apparently the latest bit of tech to get the card treatment is the microscope. These disposable cards (which come in packs of 5) include a small lens that can magnify a sample from anywhere between 500x to 1000x depending on how close you hold it to your eye, and the available light.

The site suggests using them for checking hair for dryness, or even performing your own blood cell counts. So clearly the target demographic for these cards is the booming hypochondriac market. You can find the 5 pack available at Japan Trend Shop for $89, and oddly enough they include this item under the ‘Beauty’ section of their online store.

[ Microscope Card 5-pack ] VIA [ Boing Boing Gadgets ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you’re the type who can see the ‘art’ in microchip macro shots or complex fractals, then you’ll probably appreciate this PixFlow piece from LAb[au]. The art actually comes from an animated field of pixel particles and vectors that shape into flows as their density evolves over time. These elements also collide and interact with each other, producing unique behavioral results that are also cool to look at.

The hardware behind the PixFlow #2 consists of T-shaped plexiglass boxes that can be stacked or connected end-to-end, depending on how you want them oriented. Each box includes a flash card with the latest version of the software, and they can all be networked together allowing the designs to move from screen to screen. The original version of the PixFlow was created as a permanent 11 screen installation for the Grand Casino in Brussels, so you can probably imagine what kind of price tag we’re talking about if you think this would go great in your den.

[ LAb[au] PixFlow #2 ] VIA [ Bornrich ]

By Evan Ackerman

Please excuse the entirely misleading title; this is not, in fact, a picture of a nano-scale nuclear war. This image was one of the winners of the 2007 Science as Art competition. It’s actually a scanning electron micrograph of an overflowing nanowire array… The false color mushrooms you’re seeing are more like bubbles than explosions. Besides exploding prettily, what are nanowires good for? According to Wikipedia, nanowires might be good for quantum computing. Maybe these guys would have a use for it, then.

Bigger version here, courtesy of Wired.

View all of the winners at Nanowerk.

[ Science as Art ] VIA [ io9 ]

By Evan Ackerman

Back in May, I postulated that GlowFur apparel must be made from some critically endangered radioactive animal. Turns out I was wrong; it’s actually made from genetically modified fluorescent kitty cats. Okay, I’m kidding about the GlowFur thing, but I’m not kidding about the genetically modified fluorescent kitty cats, which glow red when exposed to ultraviolet light:

The Turkish Angola kittens (there are currently two of them) were cloned from skin cells, and a virus was used to add a red fluorescing protein into their genes. The research should help with the understanding of genetic disorders, with cloning endangered species of cats, with the glowing fur industry, and with totally freaking people out at pet-friendly raves.

[ Korea Times ] VIA [ Spulch ]

By Andrew Liszewski

You know if something like this had been available while I was taking high school Chemistry, I wouldn’t have had to get the whole periodic table tattooed on my body ala Prison Break in order to pass the exam. Sure it’s a conversation piece now, but I can’t tell you how quickly I stop being considered for a Calvin Klein ad when I have to take my shirt off at the audition.

The socks are available in men’s or women’s sizes and are made of 75% acrylic and 25% stretch nylon. While the elements are colored blue, red and gold the rest of the sock is black making them perfect for dress attire. They even include the radioactive and synthetically created materials on the table, in addition to the gas, liquid and solid elements, in case you were wondering.

You can find a pair at Gifts For Engineers for just $9.99.

[ Periodic Table Socks ] VIA [ Fashionably Geek ]