Eolian Eiffel

France has made a very powerful statement by installing 2 wind turbines in the Eiffel Tower. Engineer Jan Gromadzki, who oversaw the project for New York-based Urban Green Energy, explains, "This installation is definitely more symbolic. But it is still significant because the merchant spaces on the first floor do consume energy, and being able to offset that consumption is something people can really assimilate and understand."

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Lowly limpet

The humble rock-scouring limpet, which is not as storied as the barnacle, now has a claim to fame. The teeth of the snail-like creature are believed to be the strongest natural material yet found on the planet. British researcher Asa Barber of the University of Portsmouth says of the newly announced superlative, "Until now, we thought that spider silk was the strongest biological material because of its super-strength and potential applications in everything from bulletproof vests to computer electronics, but now we have discovered that limpet teeth exhibit a strength that is potentially higher.”

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Bigbots

When Boston Dynamics developed its first quadrupedal robot BigDog (ABOVE RIGHT), it was agile, but heavy and – because of its gasoline-powered engine – loud like a lawnmower. Now meet its sleeker younger sibling Spot (ABOVE LEFT), whose electric power source makes it quieter and greener (VIDEO HERE). Apparently, it is the organic reflexes of the robot which creep people out. Tech Times points out, "When kicked and pushed, Spot stumbles briefly and quickly regains its balance -- even on smooth surfaces, the robot recovers without falling."

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Not-so-gross anatomy

General Electric has developed and field-tested a new, superfast scanner called Revolution CT at Florida's West Kendall Baptist Hospital that allows doctors to obtain high-resolution images of blood vessels, soft tissue, organs, and bones. The machine, which exposes patients to only a low dose of radiation, can image the hard within a single heartbeat. Hospital CEO Javier Hernández-Lichtl proclaims, "The advanced design definitely makes for a less intimidating, more comfortable patient experience, while yielding amazingly accurate and detailed images.” (FOLLOW LINK FOR STILL AND MOVING IMAGES)

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Spider sinker

Studies have shown how strong spider silk is. But the image above also demonstrates the engineering savvy of the spider mind. When this one strung a web in the shallow area between two rafters in a garage, it used a stone to weight it down. Images were posted by Imgur user Reverseloop (FOLLOW LINK FOR MORE PHOTOS), who remarks, "This clever spider grabbed a rock, dragged it up to the web, and suspended it from the bottom."

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Greek gizmo

When a Roman vessel was discovered off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900, divers brought up half of a strange object known as the Antikythera mechanism. Of Greek origin and dating to the first century B.C.E., it was determined in the 1970s to be an analog computer used to predict celestial movement, including eclipses. This month, an international team of scientists is poised to descend to the wreck to test a new Iron-Man-like diving suit (IMAGES AND VIDEO HERE), and also hope to recover the rest of the mechanism. Underwater archaeologist Brendan P. Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, U.S., is directing the project and admits, "This is the kind of thing that quite literally wakes me up in the middle of the night. I can’t sleep because I’m so excited.”

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Audio from video

In another mind-blowing achievement, scientists have done the seemingly impossible. Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have succeeded in extracting sound from silent films. By using an algorithm to reconstruct audio signals by analyzing the minute vibrations of objects depicted in video, they were able to recover intelligible speech! This is almost beyond my comprehension, so I am just relaying the news. WATCH THE VIDEO HERE AND THEN READ ON. Electrical engineer and computer scientist Alexei Efros of the University of California at Berkeley comments, "This is new and refreshing. It’s the kind of stuff that no other group would do right now. We’re scientists, and sometimes we watch these movies, like James Bond, and we think, ‘This is Hollywood theatrics. It’s not possible to do that. This is ridiculous.’ And suddenly, there you have it. This is totally out of some Hollywood thriller. You know that the killer has admitted his guilt because there’s surveillance footage of his potato chip bag vibrating.”

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Dodecahedron conundrum

Roughly 100 of these 12-sided objects, all of them Roman in origin and dating to the 2nd or 3rd c. A.D., have been found, many of them in France and Germany but extending all the way from Wales to Eastern Europe. The Roman dodecahedrons range from 4 to 11 cm in size and were made of bronze or stone. Were they religious artifacts? Were they standards to calibrate the size of water pipes? Were they devices to measure time or distance? Or were they merely dice or candleholders? Because they are not referenced in any contemporary sources or pictured in any artwork, nobody knows.

Thanks, David and Sue!

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Cold War bore hole

While the United States arguably won the Space Race by putting a man on the moon in 1969, the Soviets won the converse quest to drill as far as possible underground in an attempt to reach the center of the Earth. The Kola Superdeep Borehole on the Kola Peninsula in far western Russia is only 9" (23 cm) in diameter, but extends 7.5 miles (12 km) into the earth – a third of the way through the continental crust. The world's deepest hole is now covered by a welded metal cáp (IMAGE ABOVE). Bryan Nelson writes on Mother Earth Network, "Though the hole's depth is impressive, it's a small fraction of the distance to the center of the Earth, which is estimated to be nearly 4,000 miles deep. By comparison, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has reached the outer layers of our solar system, has relayed information from over 10 billion miles away. The human race truly understands less about the ground beneath its very feet than it does about the cosmos that abound. It's humbling to realize just how much mystery still exists right here on our little blue world."

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Primates in power chairs

"These behavioral results show that non-human primates are able to learn to navigate a powered wheelchair accurately through a real-world environment and that they are able to use the visual input of cues to guide the navigation," write Stephanie Etienne and her colleagues at the University of Bordeaux, who study neurodegenerative diseases. They used a new strategy of placing wheelchair-bound rhesus monkeys to further extrapolations based on the spatial navigation of rodents in real situations or human and nonhuman primates in virtual reality experiments.

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Sand and sledge

It was a long time coming, considering it was depicted in the 4000-year-old tomb painting above, but scientists have finally confirmed how the ancient Egyptians moved the large blocks of stone from the quarry to the site of the construction of the pyramids. In the lab, researchers at the University of Amsterdam determined that watering the sand in front of the sledge prevents a mound of sand from building up, reduces friction, doubles the sand's stiffness, and cuts the force required to drag the sled in half. Which begs the question, how did they stack the blocks up once they got them there?

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Monster soup

After the turn of the 19th c. and the invention of the microscope, people realized that the water they were drinking was full of harmful organisms. In the cartoon above, a British woman is dropping her teacup in horror upon discovering the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of Thames water. These pathogens are still harming billions of people in developing countries, and causing a million deaths a year from malaria alone. Microscopic examination of blood samples goes undone because facilities either do not have the heavy and expensive (and fragile) microscopes or do not know how to use them. But this will soon change with a brilliant invention called the FoldScope. With the help of his students, bioengineer Manu Prakash of Stanford University has developed a low-cost microscope that magnifies up to 2000X; will fit in a pocket; weighs less than 10 grams; can withstand rough treatment; can be used for bright-field, dark-field, polarization, and fluorescence microscopy; and can even work as a projector. The device uses an LED battery with a life up to 50 hours. The body of the instrument is cut and folded from a sheet of heavy paper that includes a piece of conductive copper tape or glass and a sapphire ball lens. Only a short training lesson is needed to construct it in 10 to 20 minutes and to use it immediately. The cost of the FoldScope when mass-produced is $.97. Wow. (WATCH TED TALK HERE.)

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Queen Mary II

Cunard liner Queen Mary II - 236' (72 m) high from keel to funnel -. dwarfs her captain. Kevin Oprey was recently photographed by James Morgan standing beneath the ship's soaring hull. The London-based photojournalist comments, "I’ve always tried to take pictures that capture the public imagination. It is this towering creature and this little man, it is an incredible juxtaposition. He is an incredible man, this beautiful huge liner he controls every day."

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Mini mother ship

"I look forward to seeing your cars out on the road," said American President Barack Obama to 33-year-old Austin entrepreneur Stacy Zoern on May 9, 2013. Born with a disability, Zoern was making a presentation at a Texas think-tank to discuss funding the all-electric smart car she has developed for the physically handicapped. The Kenguru (IMAGE ABOVE, VIDEO HERE) allows a person in a wheelchair to drive right inside and take over the controls, which are all at hand-level. It has a range of 60 miles (96 km), a top speed of 28 miles (45 km) per hour, and a price-tag of about $25,000. With orders for 600 units already and many more expected, production will start this summer in Titusville, Florida. Zoern herself does not have the upper body strength to drive the current model, but plans are in the works to roll out a Kenguru controlled by a joystick. Unlike my own mother ship, the tiny car is only 7' (2 m) long and weighs 1,200 lbs (544 kg), filling a need and appealing to a changing sense of style. As Zoern points out, “Teenagers and people in their 20s don’t want to drive around in a minivan.”

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