FlashLadyBug.com

So, this is a preview of a piece of software which I find to be absolutely ridiculous.
I had not thought that anyone had actually been able to program an algorithm to do this as well as this.
Here, we have a program which allows you to do very rough sketches of an image, say a beach with some birds, sailboats, and a newly wed couple kissing. Very rough sketch.
Well, this program takes your rough sketch and keywords for each object and runs them through image searches online and *builds a composite image of it.* In other words, it outputs a “photoshopped” image composite of what you had sketched.
All fine and good, it sounds relatively meh on paper. However take a look at these images and you will be astounded at how real the final picture seems, especially when compared to what it was extracted from.

Check out their university research page which has more ridiculous images made by Sketch2Photo, as well as the source code of the program itself!

Well, I know things are getting small and all….and nanotubes are getting funding like theres no tomorrow…but really, this is just ridiculous. Berkeley has developed a single nanotube that acts as the antenna, tuner, amplifier, AND demodulator of a radio. It captures signal by mehanical vibration instead of the usual method since its so damn small. Whats very cool is that its got perfectly acceptable quality sound. To demo this, they attached the nanotube onto an electrode. Somehow, through the magic that is carbon nanotube, it transmits the sound as an electric current. There are some awesome pictures and videos of the nanotube in action, along with some audio samplings. Check it out: Nanotube Radio

NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) are developing the Hyperwall-2, a 23 by 10 foot liquid display wall, 128 screens, 128 GPUs, 1024 cores, 74 teraflop processing power, and half a petabyte of storage.
Impressing, though, to be completely honest…i don’t fully comprehend the true use of such a gigantic display…as long as the supercomputer crunches it, it should be easily seen on normal screens, its not like the zoom function doesn’t exist.
But heh, if NASA wants to make a giant screen with ridiculous backend, I won’t say no…heck, let me at it 😛
Thanks NASA for all the fun 😛

Do-it-Yourself Magic Sand.
You know the magic sand that used to be on TV ads, its dry sand that you can make underwater sculptures from, and when you take it out of the water, it’s still dry!
Well…..its rather easy to make apparently.
Just take some normal sand from a beach. Clean it abit so its contaminated 😛
Stick in oven and dry for an hour to make sure its perfectly dry.
Take Scotch Guard Spray and spray liberally, mix, spray again. Let dry, then….spray again. Once its dry again, try it out!
Thank to Bewerten at Google Video

Scientists have found a way to encase oil drops with a nanoparticle that behaves very interestingly. In water, these particles, which look like batons, orient themselves to surround oil. The reason they do this is because the carbon nanotube portion of the baton points inwards towards the oil and encases the oil. The other side of the baton is a gold particle. These nano-gold particles point the other way in a water solution as they are not as hydrophobic. This makes the oil droplets in water gold colored. In oil, the baton flips itself, so that the gold portion points inwards to the water. This makes water droplets in oil black colored. What is quite interesting, is that when hit by UV light or magnetic fields, the particles instantly flip and release whats inside.
This creates two interesting uses. It could be used to isolate oil spills by isolating oil, which requires some studies both on the environmental side, and on the practical side regarding actually implementing this. The second use that pops into mind is using these to deliver medication, site specifically. This of course depends on if the particles are harmful, if the encasement is strong enough, and if the amount of magnetic field is low enough to be used on humans. Interesting thoughts…

Check out the whole article on physorg

For those who have been following the news, disregard this 😛 but the NASA/Canadian Space Agency made Phoenix has landed on Mars and has broadcast pictures 😀
Just a quick little newslet hehe.

An interesting dilemma. Really…I mean, the first thing I thought of when I read the title was, huh?
I mean, firstly, perpetual motion…suuuuure. For 10 seconds? that makes it semi-believable, until you realize thats a direct contradiction 😛

But hey, its NIST. I mean, the scientists there think of new ways on how to make our definition of 1 second become even more exact. And I mean…MORE exact.
So, instead, they made perpetual motion, using bose einstein condensate. So, a long time ago I wrote up a little thing about what BSC actually is…well, too bad for you guys, I don’t feel like resurrecting the forums which have now become BOT TERRITORY. And therefore, let it suffice that it was made using BSC. The reason why it’s perpetual motion is because there is a total lack of friction. It’s at the lowest energy state, meaning there really CAN’T be energy loss.
Now, we gotta admit, right now, this is a totally useless thing. To maintain this toroid of BSC is energy consuming and essentially a power hole. However, since the liquid is moving indefinitely, this opens up the possibility of energy storage that is 100% conserved. There wouldn’t be a loss due to thermodynamics, unless you disrupt the BSC system. Who knows? This could become very useful later on.
Cheers!
Thanks Mark for finding the article, and thanks NIST scientsts 😛

Heh….Well, you’d think this was out of a science fiction plot, but…people have developed a prototype to possible telepathic chat. Electronic of course.
There is a neckband that is worn to detect nerve signals you send to your vocal chords. However, there’s more…you can do this voicelessly, but still talk at the same time. It can differentiate between voiceless signal, and your normal talking.However, the problem at the moment, is that it can only detect about 150 words and phrases. Their working on a better version that detects phonemes, which would allow software to convert that into actual words. We’re getting there 🙂
Check out the entire article on NewsScientist.com

A bit of science for us all. TEAM 0.5 has debuted. What is TEAM? Its the worlds most powerful transmission electron microscope. It gives images with .5 angstrom resolutions, which just so happens to be half the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. It’s located at NCEM at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. THey hope to setup a control room that shows the sample on a screen that looks like an HD flatscreen. 🙂 As of now, their opening date for outside users, is October 08. It corrects for a aberration that has long plagued such high res microscopes that make points of light look like disks. Fixing this has upped the resolution greatly. As of now, they can perform spectroscopy on one atom at a time, which allows scientists to precisely locate impurities of 1 atom per sample.
Here…is a mindblowing example:
Shown here is a gold crystal bridge. Those dots…..those are gold atoms

Thanks Eurekalert, and congrats to the folks at NCEM

Random info for the day. People have translucent concrete. Its not CLEAR….but still pretty cool. When they make the concrete, optic fiber is somehow set into the concrete so that light can pass from one side. The other side though, is fully opaque. One can imagine a concrete dome that is sunlit, and yet solid from the outside. The company claims that the optical fibers are only 4%, and allows concrete to keep its stability. As io9 puts it…that supposedly means that “Pretty light shine through, house not fall down”
I can’t really see anything *groundshaking* pop up from this development, but it would make for an interesting experience to be able to roughly see outside through concrete 🙂
Check out the pics on io9