This is just hilarious. Even more so than the World Of Warcraft treadmill race across Azeroth. It’s a human-powered mobile treadmill by Alex Astilean. Technically the equivalent of a large hamster wheel for humans, this mobile treadmill will have everyone in the park giving you funny looks. Just be careful not to hit anyone. With the momentum this thing could potentially build up, who knows what kind of damage it could do?
In light of this coming Sunday’s Handcar Regatta, a race of human-powered rail-track creations, the team over at Almost Scientific have created a ginormous 10 feet tall 10 feet wide hamster wheel they’re calling the Lumbering Contraption. What purpose does it serve? Well, it controls a slew of doohickeys that mobilize a giant nose picking machine. Weird, right? If only we could use human-sized hamster wheels.
Sylvain Calinon’s creation, the Robotic Portrait Artist, has received a makeover. Check out its sweet new mustache and beret! It truly has the look of an artist.
This bot is able to recognize human faces and extract relevant characteristics from them. Then, it draws portraits of captured images by converting them into vector art. The produced result is better than anything I could put down onto paper. Then again, I’m not programmed to draw. If I was, I’d be Bob Ross.
In The Matrix, robots are self-aware of their existence. This is a bad thing as it eventually leads to the enslavement of mankind. The idea of a human brain inside a robot is intriguing for anyone whose ever wanted to put their brain in a robot body to become an Adrian Barbobot. Scientists are getting closer to that vision, having equipped a small robot with rat neurons to control itself.
An interesting trait of the artificial brain is that it can get bored. If it doesn’t receive any information from the electrodes it’s connected to, the neurons will break the connections, likewise, when the neurons are stimulated, more connections are formed. The robot that was built runs on wheels with an ultrasound sensor enabling it to spot when it is approaching a wall and redirect itself accordingly. That’s great and all but could’t you just do that with an Arduino?
We’ve seen artificial corneas that could replace damaged organic corneas, but how about a digital image sensor that adjusts itself like a human retina? That’s exactly what John Rogers at the University of Illinois is creating. An improved method of transferring silicon sensors onto a curved surface allowing for the sensor to capture wide-angle views with low distortion. Because it avoids using a conventional flat surface for image capturing, this digital retina is able to perform feats that ordinary cameras cannot. It’ll eventually lead to advancements in security surveillance and capturing wildlife footage.
Using conventional chip manufacturing technology, John Rogers and his colleagues have found a way to bend silicone without forming creases in it. The camera they built has only 256 pixels, making it a low-resolution camera, but they claim the same technique used to craft this camera could be used to craft a wide-angled megapixel camera. The ladies dorm just got more accessible, Porky’s-style.
Kick ass pedal powered Panzers are fighting the good fight. The second annual Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby inspired a group of guys to construct a human powered Panzer Kampwagen III in 11 days for the purpose of crashing the party. By the time they were finished the tank, they were too tired to crash any party, so they just spent the night in the tank.
If you’re in the Philadelphia area, you can visit the tank where it is now being displayed as public art on the west side of Frankford Ave, just north of Norris St. This monstrous skeleton of gears and steel will be the first place you’ll want to go when the bombs drop.
For a moment we thought that Julia Roberts was finally allowing spectators to tour her gigantic pie hole, but now it sees as though we were misled. This gigantic mouth is actually a a new attraction at Corpus, a half-amusement park, half-museum in Amsterdam, which recently opened up a their interactive feature which allows visitors to explore large models of the human body.
Visitors will get the chance to “enter the museum through the knee, then travel through eight exhibit spaces, heading up toward the brain. On the way, they can watch a 3-D film on fertilization, bounce on a rubber tongue while they follow a sandwich being digested and throw beanbags against a video screen to destroy bacteria.” Not to mention, use the airbag sized uvula as a human punching bag. — Andrew Dobrow
