Pies vs Insects

Macroscopic high-speed video of insects being hit by pies.

Flies, Beetles, Fly, Bugs, Bees, Millimeters Matter

Snowflake Crystals [electron microscope]

Nudibranch [sea slugs]

I was searching for Nudibranch's today for making a nice wallpaper and found this gem called "Glaucus Atlanticus".

Hofmann's Potion [film]

This documentary offers a compassionate, open-minded look at LSD and how it fits into our world. Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "tune in, turn on and drop out," the drug was hailed as a way to treat forms of addiction and mental illness. At the same time, it was being touted as a powerful tool for mental exploration and self-understanding. Featuring interviews with LSD pioneers, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, this is much more than a simple chronicle of LSD's early days. It's an alternative way of looking at the drug... and our world.

See more films at the National Film Board of Canada website.

Hunt for the Memristor [AI]

Currently we are stuck in a lo-fi era of AI (Artificial Intelligence) that shouldn't even be called AI. Our current systems are limited to strict sets of data and extremely specific rules in order to get decent results. Below is an excerpt from a great article giving hope to AI that would truly deserve the AI title.


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Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence

EVER had the feeling something is missing? If so, you're in good company. Dmitri Mendeleev did in 1869 when he noticed four gaps in his periodic table. They turned out to be the undiscovered elements scandium, gallium, technetium and germanium. Paul Dirac did in 1929 when he looked deep into the quantum-mechanical equation he had formulated to describe the electron. Besides the electron, he saw something else that looked rather like it, but different. It was only in 1932, when the electron's antimatter sibling, the positron, was sighted in cosmic rays that such a thing was found to exist.

In 1971, Leon Chua had that feeling. A young electronics engineer with a penchant for mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, he was fascinated by the fact that electronics had no rigorous mathematical foundation. So like any diligent scientist, he set about trying to derive one.

And he found something missing: a fourth basic circuit element besides the standard trio of resistor, capacitor and inductor. Chua dubbed it the "memristor". The only problem was that as far as Chua or anyone else could see, memristors did not actually exist...

...read more

Convert photos to a 3D bump map

Photo


Bump Map


This site turns sets of 2D images into 3D bump maps. To do this, you will need five to fifteen photos of your object that overlap at least 80 to 90 percent. Frames from a video could work well.

How to observe dragonflies

This article exposes the great lengths researchers go through just to observe a dragonfly. The result is a synthetic environment with mimicked sun patterns and high-speed cameras pointed at a few leaves they think the dragonfly will land on.

There are also some great audio segments from the researchers here:
• What's inside a dragonflies arena? [audio]
• How to catch a dragonfly [audio]
• All the species of dragonflies [audio]
• What does it take to study dragonflies? [audio]
• Why are dragonflies so cool? [audio]

I found this article because I was curious how mosquito repelling devices work. It turns out that mosquitos find dragonflies a threat, so mosquito repelling devices generate a tone (around 57hz) that mimics the sound of dragonfly wings flapping. So cool!

Bleeding Billboards [New Zealand]

A campaign to promote safe driving when the roads are wet. These sound dangerously distracting.

Shapeshifting Owl

What do physics symbols mean?

The site Sixty Symbols has some great videos that explain the origin and meaning behind those criptic looking symbols used in mathmatic equations for physics.