There’s a reason that towering mammals the likes of King Kong are resigned to fiction. Our aching bones can only take so much weight before they start crumbling under the pressure. But if that’s the case, then why were dinosaurs able to reach such phenomenal heights? According to a new study, the answer isn’t so much about the bones themselves as it is the soft, squishy joints they lay between.
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This article was written on August 10, 2007 by CyberNet.
The thought of boarding a rocket to whisk you off to outer-space for your next hotel stay seems like something you’d see in a movie, doesn’t it? It’s not though because expected in 2012, a hotel called “Galactic Suite” will be the first orbiting hotel. The $3 billion that it will cost to build the hotel has been paid for, mostly by a former aerospace engineer. Guests who travel to the hotel will wear “velcro suits to “crawl” around pod-like rooms so that they can stick themselves to the wall — Spiderman style.”
Any space trip isn’t cheap, and this is no exception. For $4 million dollars you’ll get a three-day stay in which you’ll see the sun rise each day 15 times. The director of the company, Xavier Claramunt says they know that there are at least 40,000 people in the world who could afford the $4 million price for the three-day stay. The hotel would consist of at least three pod-shaped rooms, and Claramunt says the biggest challenge thus far has been designing a bathroom. At this point they believe they have solved the shower problem by designing a “spa room” with floating bubbles of water.
I don’t know about you, but I simply can’t imagine planning my next vacation for a trip to space. The cost not only includes the trip into space and the stay at the hotel, it also covers “eight weeks of intensive training at a James Bond-style space camp on a tropical island.” Even if I had $4 million dollars that I didn’t know what to do with, I still don’t think I’d spend it on a hotel stay in space. Claramunt talked about the fear that many people would have of going into space, but not to worry, “That’s why the shuttle rocket will remain fixed to the space hotel for the duration of the guests’ stay, so they know they can get home again.”
Source: Reuters
Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com
Anyone who’s picked up an Ouya, or demoed one in-store, knows that the controller, with its sticky buttons and flimsy removable plates, could do with a lot of help. Company founder Julie Uhrman’s aware of the issue and, in an interview with Polygon, she revealed that a new version of the Ouya …
Even though digital cameras provide us the same instant gratification after snapping a photo, Polaroid’s instant snapper still has a cult following. Of course, that also means that instant film is more expensive than ever, so if you’re just a fan of the Polaroid camera’s iconic design, this Pola Roll toilet paper holder is a cheaper way to keep one around for posterity.
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A ‘virtual coffee experience’. This is the aim being pursued by a team comprizing Le Laboratoire founder David Edwards and a group of contributors with areas of expertise ranging from coffee to design. Confused? I know I am. Can this confusion be clarified? Let’s hope so. Say hello to the mind boggling OPHONE.
Cnet reports that Google is building something super secret—and super huge—on a barge that’s floating in the San Francisco Bay. What the hell is this thing?
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If you are a professional hand-made carpet or rug maker, submit your best designs for the Carpet Design Awards 2014 for a chance to win international acclaim for your work, a fancy trophy and €2,500 in prize money!
NECA’s upcoming RoboCop action figure caters to a tiny slice of Alex Murphy fans: the now grown men and women who played the 1989 NES RoboCop game. To everyone else, it’ll look like someone dropped the toy in a jar of ink, but in reality it’s the future of law enforcement rendered in the past of video game graphics.
If it still doesn’t look right to you, this video by YouTube channel nesguide should set things straight:
Ah, the bane of RoboCop’s existence: stairs. The action figure is articulated, is 7″ tall and has his signature Auto-9 Pistol, which you can store in its spring-loaded holster.
Dat box art! Your Prime Directive is to remember this date: February 2014. That’s the tentative release date for the action figure. NECA says it won’t make the action figure available ever again after it sells out. So don’t miss it or… there will be trouble.
[via NECA via Gotham News]
Dry ice is one of the most tried and true Halloween special effects. Simply drop a chunk into a liquid, then it begins to "boil" and emit a dense, creepy fog. Not only that, it’s cheap, simple to use, and way easier to find than you probably thought. It also happens to be fantastic—and fantastically ghoulish—in a lot of cocktails.
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A front and side view of a volunteer wearing the Anklebot, which moves the ankle and records its stiffness.
(Credit: Hyunglae Lee/MIT)
The ankle is something of an anatomical puzzle.
“Imagine you have a collection of pebbles, and you wrap a whole bunch of elastic bands around them,” Neville Hogan, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT, said in a school news report. “That’s pretty much a description of what the ankle is. It’s nowhere near a simple joint from a kinematics standpoint.”
So Hogan teamed up with colleagues at MIT’s Newman Laboratory for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation to test Anklebot, a robot that uses electrodes to record the torque and angular displacement at the joint and calculate stiffness in various directions.
To do this, the bot is mounted to a knee brace that is in turn connected to a custom shoe, and Anklebot moves the person’s foot in a programmed trajectory to test the ankle’s normal range of motion.
In testing the bot on 10 healthy volunteers, the team learned that the motion of the ankle when moving side to side is actually independent of the motion when moving up and down. They also found that the ankle is weakest when turning inward, stronger when tilting from side to side, and strongest when simply moving up and dow… [Read more]
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