Hasta La Gadget!

Like most of you, I’m patiently waiting for the day when I can buy a robot that will take care of all the irritating things around house I want to deal with. I want a robot to wash the dishes, bathe the dog, mow the lawn, and take out the trash. While this breakthrough might not solve that problem for me yet, a group of scientists from Georgia Institute of Technology have invented something dubbed “smart skin” that could give robots a sense of touch.

The researchers working on the smart skin used a bundle of vertical zinc oxide nano wires along with an array of about 8000 transistors. Each of those individual transistors is able to independently produce electronic signals when subjected to mechanical strain. The researchers say that these touch sensitive transistors, which they call taxels, have sensitivity comparable to that of the human finger. They say that the artificial skin can feel activity on its surface and the sensation could be translated into control signals for robot in the future.

Having a sense of touch is important because it will allow a robot to know when something is in its hand and how hard can grip that object. It wouldn’t do to have a robot breaking all your dishes after all.

[via BBC News]

Let’s be honest, everything is more difficult in space than here on Earth. It’s hard enough just to get into space and bring all of the things humans need to survive. It’s an amazing technological feat for astronauts to live and work on the International Space Station in and of itself. What you might not think about is how different actually living in outer space is. Take for instance the simple act of using a washcloth.

A group of students recently suggested an experiment to be conducted on by astronaut Chris Hadfield on the ISS involving nothing more than squirting some water onto a washcloth and wringing it out. As it turns out, even washcloths are cool when NASA buys them. The cloths themselves are compacted down into a little pucks and have to be unraveled.

Since you can’t just have a bucket of water in space, Hadfield uses what looks like a large Capri Sun pouch to squirt water onto the cloth. The water just floats in little globs until it absorbed by the cloth. The result is incredibly cool. The surface tension of the water means that it sticks to the outside of the cloth and oozes between the astronaut’s fingers like some sort of gel.

Check out the video above, it’s probably the coolest thing you’ll see all day.

[via Boing Boing]

Toothpaste doesn’t sound like the most palatable thing in the world, but some people have taken it upon themselves to come up with the right formulation to make it edible. It’s called Neonisin and it’s going to be available in Japan this summer.

The active ingredient in the edible toothpaste is Nisin, which is a peptide that’s harvested from lactic bacteria. This is often found in soy bean curd. Natural flavoring, plum extract, mint oil, and corn-based thickeners are then added into the mix to create the toothpaste. In some ways, I guess you could say that Neonisin is basically just a tofu toothpaste – or Tofupaste for short.

When released, Neonisin toothpaste will be cost about $8.90(USD) for a 2.5 ounce tube.

[via RocketNews24 via Food Beast]

Back in my college days, I took microbiology and spent plenty of time in the lab culturing various bacteria. My microbiology professor hated it if we drew patterns or other than random circles or zigzags in our petri dishes. I once made the mistake of growing a nice E. coli “S” and had to start over.

Zachary Copfer, a microbiologist with a penchant for art has developed a new process of making actual pictures using bacteria and petri dishes that he calls Bacteriography.

The artist isn’t saying exactly how he makes these pictures with bacteria, but I’d wager he’s using some sort of screen printing method on top of the traditional growth medium. My personal favorite artwork that he has created is the velociraptor wearing bunny rabbit ears using E. coli.

He has also created some cool prints of Einstein and other scientists using bacteria. Now if you’re wondering if his works are dangerous, Zachary says that he’s got a process that actually kills the bacteria after the work is created, then preserves them inside of resin.

Now that he’s out of graduate school and doesn’t have access to the lab, Zachary has taken to Kickstarter seeking to raise enough money to continue his artwork.

He’s hoping to start his own exhibit in an actual art studio and wants to raise $8000 by April 24. By contributing to his project, you can get photographic copies of some of his petri dish artwork for pledges of $100(USD) and under. To own an actual petri dish artwork requires a pledge of $500, while larger Bacteriographs cost as much as $10,000.

Supercomputers are incredible pieces of technology with thousands of processors, terabytes of memory, and often hundreds of terabytes of storage as well. Back in 2008, the fastest supercomputer in the world was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, called the Roadrunner. At the time, it was the first computer to ever pass the petaflop barrier.

A petaflop is 1 million billion calculations per second. But that’s no longer considered that fast, and this aging supercomputer was officially decommissioned yesterday after being operational for five years. Roadrunner was a hybrid supercomputer featuring 6563 dual-core AMD processors each linked to a special PowerXCell 8i processor that was originally designed for the PlayStation 3.

One of the biggest projects that Roadrunner was used for was the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program. When used in that program, Roadrunner provided key computer simulations for the Stockpile Stewardship Program that had to do with the US nuclear deterrent.

While the computer has been officially decommissioned, for the next month the supercomputer will be used to perform experiments on operating system memory compression techniques and that helped design the future of capacity cluster computers. After that month, Roadrunner will be taken apart.

Why don’t they just put it up on eBay?