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Category Archives: science/nature
Locksport International Guide to Lock Picking
This is a visual guide to lock picking in comic book format. This guide is easier to read than the classic MIT Guide to Lock Picking. Locksport International is proud to provide a simple, visual guide to lock picking. It … Continue reading
Posted in reference, science/nature, security
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Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2006
Time’s list of their favorite inventions of the year. Link (via Digg)
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Building a Better Battery
Wired has posted an article that explains why lithium-ion batteries explode, and what might replace them in the future. But such technical excuses sidestep the fact that flammability and heat intolerance are long-standing problems that have plagued Li-ion batteries since … Continue reading
Posted in electronics, science/nature, technology
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Rapatronic Nuclear Photographs
An article on how some early, extremely high-speed photographs were taken. During the early days of atomic bomb experiments in the 1940s, nuclear weapons scientists had some difficulty studying the growth of nuclear fireballs in test detonations. These fireballs expanded … Continue reading
Posted in history, photography, science/nature, technology
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How Products Are Made
This site has a large collection of articles on how various things are manufactured. How Products Are Made explains and details the manufacturing process of a wide variety of products, from daily household items to complicated electronic equipment and heavy … Continue reading
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66 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena
Another nice collection of optical illusions. »Optical illusion« sounds pejorative, as if exposing a malfunction of the visual system. Rather, I view these phenomena as bringing out particular good adaptations of our visual system to standard viewing situations. These adaptations … Continue reading
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The Extreme Sport of Origami
I can’t even imagine how you would design a folding sequence that takes 40 hours to complete. These days patterns requiring more than 100 steps are common. Some of that competitive acceleration is due to Lang, who transformed the art … Continue reading
Posted in math, science/nature
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Optical illusion that will make you hallucinate
This is a video that temporarily messes with your vision if you stare at it long enough. Very cool. OK at first I definitely thought this was going to be one of those stare in the center and turn your … Continue reading
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Six Horrifying Parasites
These things make my skin crawl. When it comes to parasites, it’s all about perspective. You may call a lifetime of growing and feeding off another organism lazy, but we call it opportunistic. In fact, these life-sucking go-getters have managed … Continue reading
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NASA Finds Direct Proof of Dark Matter
This is a monumental announcement for astronomers and physicists. NASA has observed dark matter for the first time! This has huge implications for our understanding of the universe. Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous … Continue reading
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US FDA approves viruses as food additive
Does this sound like a good idea? A mix of bacteria-killing viruses can be safely sprayed on cold cuts, hot dogs and sausages to combat common microbes that kill hundreds of people a year, federal health officials said Friday in … Continue reading
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DIY USB Alpha Radiation Visualizer
Inventgeek has a fascinating project that uses a webcam and a small radiation source from common household fire alarms to visualize radioactive decay. This could have applications as a source of entropy for a true random number generator. I started … Continue reading
Posted in diy, electronics, science/nature, technology
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Sharpest Manmade Thing – image of tungsten needle
Check out this image of the tip of a tungsten needle. You can see the individual atoms!!! A field ion microscope (FIM) image of a very sharp tungsten needle. The small round features are individual atoms. The lighter colored elongated … Continue reading
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Picture of the Sun in three colors of ultraviolet light
Incredible image of the sun from Astronomy Picture of the Day. Link (via reddit)
Posted in photography, science/nature
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Imagining the Tenth Dimension
Here’s a nice, clear flash tutorial on how you might visualize from 0 all the way up to 10 dimensions. However, the tutorial concentrates on temporal dimensions rather than spatial dimensions. In string theory, physicists tell us that the subatomic … Continue reading
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Optical Illusion that lasts overnight
Just what is going on here? It’s a mystery why this illusion persists long after the afterimage is gone. It is called the McCollough Effect, and was originally described by Celeste McCollough in a paper in Science in 1965. It … Continue reading
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The Hottest Sauces in the World
This page catalogues the most intense sauces ever made. This page is an attempt to list the hottest sauces in the world. To give you an idea of their heat – Tabasco sauce is rated at 2,140 scoville units while … Continue reading
Posted in food/cooking, science/nature
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The Amazing Song of the Lyrebird
This incredible bird has the ability to mimic other sounds it hears, including artificial sounds like a camera with a motor drive, a chainsaw, and a car alarm. In April 2006, to celebrate naturalist David Attenborough’s 80th birthday, the public … Continue reading
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Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)
This is an interesting essay written by a chronobiologist on modern sleep patterns. Sleep is one of the strongest human needs… While I am not advocating ditching modernity, cutting off electricity and going back to the old sleep pattern, we … Continue reading
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