Brooklyn-based inventor Joseph’s Machines makes comical DIY contraptions. His latest video shows a chain-reaction machine deliver him a piece of cake. It also includes a baby poking an iPhone, a string of melting butter, and a chandelier.
The video took 3 months to make. Piece a cake!
Joseph’s gadgets are inspired by the cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg who built complex, interconnected machines in the early 1900s. Today, people use the expression Rube Goldberg machine. to describe anything convoluted, from machines to politics.
While Elon Musk is helping to combine hyperloops and space travel, the Russian architecture firm Dahir Insaat wants to build a hybrid train and plane that transports 2,000 people at a time.
The flying trains reach speeds up to 300mph, not much faster than the speediest train in the world, the 267 mph Shanghai Maglev.
Even if it looks like a giant lego piece, most people would still rather ride in it than sit in traffic.
Furthermore, we wonder how we’ll look at any concept of transportation once SpaceX’s vision to fly people across the globe in 30 minutes becomes a reality.
The Pas-de-Calais department hired a creative agency to promote travel to Northern France.
After taking 350,000 photos, the result is a beautiful look in both timelapse and hyperlapse formats at the diversity of the Pas-de-Calais region’s environment with an emphasis on architecture, landscape, and sport.
This video project was commissioned by the Pas-de-Calais department to promote its territory. While waiting for an original and creative idea, we opted for a dynamic video only realized in timelapse and in hyperlapse.
Through various themes (nature, memory, sport, …) we have, for two months, crisscrossed the Pas-de-Calais to capture the best of this beautiful department. 3 intense minutes to make you want to discover or rediscover this space so rich, conducive to change of scenery and the meeting of a marked culture.
According to the 41st Congress, the proper way to park in cities was on the side of the streets with the roadway running down the center. Of course, in 1870 the members of the Senate were discussing the parking of trees and smaller plants, not automobiles. The first parking system was an early street tree system where parking defined the planting of trees, grasses, and flowers along the side of roadways and the creation of sidewalks for pedestrians.
But given the ubiquity and priority of cars, the park gradually narrowed to make more room for vehicles.
An aerial shot of Manhattan in 1924 with the walkable parks included
As a consequence of the automobile explosion, lawmakers also passed laws to forbid jaywalking. Cars officially ruled the road, not pedestrians. And crosswalks bloomed.
As someone who used to work in New York, remnants of these ambulatory streets are still there, especially around mid-town. Some of the small islands create a little space for statues and decorations, especially around Christmas time.
“No one is too small to make a difference,” says 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
Ever since the Swede took to the Swedish Parliament last year to call for stronger climate action against global warming, she’s inspired similar strikes across the globe.
On Friday, thousands of students skipped school and adults skipped work in cities around the world from New York to Paris, Nairobi, Seoul, Bangkok, Islamabad, and Johannesburg to protest inaction on climate change.
Cover of @TheEconomist is “a data visualization representing the world’s average temperature for every year from 1850 to 2018, compared with the average in 1971-2000.”
“We deserve a safe future,” said Greta Thunberg in her speech at the New York Climate Strike to an estimate 250,000 people.
A reluctant activist who proclaims Asperger Syndrome as her superpower, Thunberg serves as a reminder that all it takes the effort of one dedicated and persistent individual to change the world.
As Margaret Mead once wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
“You could just think your query and download the relevant knowledge directly in your mind.”
Forget Ritalin. Forget Google and Evernote acting as our second brains holding all the information we can’t. And instead, prepare for brain implants where the mind melds with machines. We don’t even have to type, click, or touch anything. We just think and imagine commands.
Art by MattiasA
As part of a clinical trial called “Brain Gate,” 13 applicants at Brown University have had a sensor placed into their motor cortex and so far have been able to control cursor movement on a screen. Says doctor John Simerall at Brown University building the neurotechnology device:
“Simply by imagining intuitive movements participants can immediately control a robotic device.”
Neurological biologist Madeline Lancaster develops cerebral organoids or mini-brains, which she describes as “three-dimensional neural tissues generated from human stem cells which allow us to model human brain development.”
In other words, organoids can model the architecture of a human embryonic brain.
According to the Financial Times who interviewed the scientist, each organoid is about the size of a lentil.
Day 216 of #LMB365 shows a brain organoid, grown by @MinibrainLab in @CellBiol_MRCLMB, seen down a microscope. This one has been injected with a blue dye to visualise the fluid-filled cavities that are similar to the ventricles of the brain. pic.twitter.com/ssca0fB0m5
The implications of Lancaster’s work are enormous, as are the ethics at stake.
She’s building a standalone brain, one that exists without a human body. That to me sounds like some potential hybrid between robot and human, aka cyborg.
Of course, the organoids don’t have a consciousness — at least yet. But Lancaster established a connection between organoid neurons and mouse neurons in tests. “In theory you could make a fully formed human brain in a pig,” said Lancaster.
Lancaster’s stem cell research could also one day treat neurological diseases, including autism, dementia, and epilepsy.
As Lancaster creates the future, obvious moral questions come up around the harvesting of brains with further testing on lab-approved animals. As a scientist, she is willing to drive the discussion over so-called mini-brains forward.
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who famously journeyed to American Samoa in 1925 to study adolescent behavior among the nonliterate peoples of Oceania.
Mead was also widely known for her progressive views on sex, providing a key spark on what would become the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s.
Below is a comprehensive list of her sources of insight for her social anthropology studies.
Famous Margaret Mead quotes:
Always remember you’re unique. Just like everybody else.
There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing…when we save our children, we save ourselves”
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead
“Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man” es una de las citas más conocidas de la reconocida antropóloga🇺🇸 #MargaretMead. De madre y abuelas feministas, ella no podía dejar de serlo y terminó convertida en una de las madres del concepto que conocemos como #Género (1/6). pic.twitter.com/2G7O8QQCsA
— Araceli Martínez Esteban (@AraMtnezEsteban) July 2, 2020
Anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked what she considered to be the first sign of civilization. pic.twitter.com/746CGSGykD
The world is round, and it has been for some time despite the rise of the flat earth movement.
Take a look at some of the armillary spheres below, starting with the Chinese diagram from 1092. Even back then, they had could rationalize that the Earth adopted a round shape.
The curvy nature of the Earth is manifest.
Chinese Diagram, 1092
From Su Song’s book of 1092
Damascus, 1526
Work of Taqi al-Din from the Constantinople observatory
Germany, 1585
Sphere on top of an astronomical clock, made in Kassel, Germany by Jost Bürgi and Antonius Eisenhoit
BBC Earth is back with another excellent special, this time focusing on the intriguing creature of the octopus.
Octopuses are intelligent, containing nine brains, three hearts, and half a billion neurons in their arms which allow the tentacles to function independently from the brain.
The Octopus: Aliens living on Earth?
Alien-like, it is also believed that octopuses have a consciousness. So otherworldly, Hawaiian mythology believes that the octopus is the only surviving member of a previous version of Earth.
The octopus can also adapt to different colors and textures with fluidity, completely camouflaging with their surroundings. Be sure to check out the rainbow octopus!
A professor develops an extraordinary relationship with an octopus when he invites it to live in his home. The octopus, called Heidi, unravels puzzles, recognises individual humans and even watches TV with the family.
The episode also shows remarkable behaviour from around the world – from the day octopus, which can change colour and texture in a split second, to the coconut octopus, which carries around its own coconut shell to hide in. But most fascinating of all is seeing how Professor David Scheel and his daughter Laurel bond with an animal that has nine brains, three hearts and blue blood running through its veins.
