Mate these two and you’ll get a pretty smart cookie.

Read the Wired articles here and here.

I recently got my hands on some ferrofluid to play with, and man isn’t it just amazing. I’m going to try to setup something a bit more structured and experiment with it. For now, check out the short clip and a bad image below.

Smart Cities vehicle prototype.

We just got back from Boston after being invited by MIT to give a lunchtime lecture. My good friend Daniel Cardoso, a PhD candidate there was kind enough to show us around the media lab, where a few -very generous- people showed us some of their work. We had a chance to see the fabrication labs and some of the robotic work being currently done there, and it was absolutely mesmerizing. Dimitris Papanikolaou gave us a full presentation on his Mobility on Demand (MOD) project for the Smart Cities group, not only was that incredibly generous, but an amazingly interesting solution to urban mobility. What I think was among the most interesting thing -not only of his project but of the lab in general- is the reality of it all. A lot of the research being conducted there is for real applications / products / solutions, which is very refreshing to see after having been involved in architecture school for some time now, where a very small percentage of what is produced has real-world implications. We had as well the opportunity to meet up with our friends Carlos Rocha (ex-Media Lab and current Honda scientist) and Skylar Tibbits.

View a few more images after the jump below.

Dimitris Papanikolaou and a MOD vehicle prototype.

Daniel Cardoso showing us some of the work done at the S.A workshops.

Carlos Rocha, Daniel Cardoso and Mike Szivos post lecture.

The Millennium Falcon
ps. Daniel sent me this brief history or the MF.

It’s called g-speak. Too bad that dude isn’t as hot as Tom Cruise.

Buckminster Fuller’s exhibition at the Whitney is fantastic. On the first floor is the Dymaxion car, which, cool as it is, is surpassed by the beautiful technical drawings for it.
The fourth floor is where the main exhibit is, and there are some incredible drawings and models of experiments and projects of ranging scales. There were quite a few projects and many drawings, sketches as well as footage of Fuller that I had never seen before, and it was truly a treat.

I left the exhibition feeling a bit uneasy though: there has to be some level of insanity in someone that has such faith in technology as the savior. His completely ‘technocratic-utopian’ view seems in a sense harmless (even naive), yet it displaces man so swiftly.

Don’t miss the fantastic model and drawings of the floating city, the incredible sketch for the World Fair and his geometric models.

Almost without exception, secret service organizations have thrived in times of turbulence and, conversely, have seen their power vanish as turmoil slows. For this reason, they survive by inciting social turbulence, spreading rumors and inventing imaginary enemies, fifth columns, and bomber and missile gaps. They need to keep society in constant alert, in a generalized state of fear and paranoia, in order to sustain themselves. This has led to the development of a gigantic “espionage industry, ” whose entire existence is based on a bluff few governments dare to call:

The agencies justify their peacetime existence by promising to provide timely warning of a threat to national security… Over the years intelligence agencies have brainwashed successive governments into accepting three propositions that ensure their survival and expansion. The first is that in the secret world it may be impossible to distinguish success from failure. A timely warning of attack allows the intended victim to prepare. This causes the aggressor to change its mind; the warning then appears to have been wrong. The second proposition is that failure can be due to incorrect analysis of the agency’s accurate information… The third proposition is that the agency could have offered timely warning had it not been starved of funds. In combination, these three propositions can be used to thwart any rational analysis of an intelligence agency’s performance, and allow any failure to be turned into a justification for further funding and expansion*.

Shouldn’t this be mandatory reading in every country at a very early age?
This is an incredible book. Go buy it.

*Knightley, Second Oldest Profession., pp. 6 and 389.

Charles Darwin’s complete works, as well as thousands of illustrations, letters and documents never published before, have been made available online. The collection is by far the greatest ever compiled on Darwin’s works and will be of course an invaluable resource, and not only for scholars.

Check out the Illustrations page for some incredibly beautiful drawings and diagrams.

Visit Darwin Online here.

Via [Wired]

Funded by NASA and Department of Energy, The Vulcan Project is an effort to quantify the emissions of CO2 within North America at a scale never seen before, up to individual power plants…

Check out their YouTube video here to see some other fantastic visualizations.

via [wired ]

Read the Wired article here.

A gigantic piece of ice in the Antarctic shelf has collapsed…

If you’re in the northern or southern hemisphere, go buy a raft. If in the tropics, start buying gallons of water and a raft. Global warming has come to town.

Read the CNN news here.

Visit the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website here.

View the talk here.

It seems like scientists at U Penn have a bit too much free time on their hands. They set up what they called a ‘Flypub’, and got the fruit flies drunk to see how alcohol (or its fumes in this case) loosened their sexual inhibitions. The male flies started hitting on each other and forming little conga lines after they were completely wasted. Some were passed out on the curb, others were zigzagging, just like in the pubs on the upper east side… As if this wasn’t enough embarrassment for the flies, they then proceeded to film it all and put it on YouTube for the whole world to see.

Read the article in New Scientist here.

Take a look at an impressive zoomed image after the jump.

I wonder where they got those mini-pbr’s?

A group of Japanese researchers has published the results of their recent cognitive experiments involving chimps and humans in which, both were shown sequence of numbers on a screen to then be recalled. The chimps outperformed the university students…

No one can imagine that chimpanzees – young chimpanzees at the age of five – have a better performance in a memory task than humans.
“Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection – better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.”
Dr Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving numbers…The university students were slower than all of the three young chimpanzees in their response. The BBC article reads.

Maybe we should send them to school instead and let us debug ourselves all day.

Read the full article here.