Posts Tagged ‘alien’

sciencehabit writes “Four young boys with a rare, fatal brain condition have made it through a dangerous ordeal. Scientists have safely transplanted human neural stem cells into their brains. Twelve months after the surgeries, the boys have more myelin—a fatty insulating protein that coats nerve fibers and speeds up electric signals between neurons—and show improved brain function, a new study in Science Translational Medicine reports. The preliminary trial paves the way for future research into potential stem cell treatments for the disorder, which overlaps with more common diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Stem Cell Treatment Found Effective For Rare Brain Disorder

Timothy B. Lee at Ars: “the MPAA … urged the Seventh Circuit not to draw a legal distinction between hosting content and embedding it. In the MPAA’s view, both actions should carry the risk of liability for direct copyright infringement.”

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Record companies: embedding YouTubes makes you guilty of infringement

What if you were stuck with a $25,000 professional-grade digital camera back but didn’t have the rest of the camera to go with it? Photographer Mike Martens experimented with that idea a few years back and came up with the “Holga-cam of the Apocalypse” — a DIY mashup of a Phase One P25 camera back, a $25 Holga 120N camera, and some gaffer tape. The cheap, plastic-lensed Holga is connected via a cord from its hot shoe mount to the camera back, and when the shutter button is depressed a signal is sent to tell the sensor to wake up and receive an image. Martens claims the camera is “very stable,” and he says the top of the Holga serves as a sufficient left grip. We’ll just have to take his word for it, but take a look at both source links…

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$25,000 digital camera back paired with $25 Holga camera in experiment

In an age of intuitive interface design and efficient operation, it’s refreshing to know that some people are working towards the exact opposite goal. That’s what the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers has done with its Rube Goldberg machine, which inflates and bursts a balloon over the course of 300 increasingly ridiculous steps involving juicing oranges, making a hamburger, and blowing an antique train whistle. The effort smashes the team’s own world record , which took a comparatively streamlined 244 steps. Think about this team’s work the next time you hear a company in patent litigation claim there was no other way to design its product . Continue reading…

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300-step Rube Goldberg machine sets new world record (video)

We’re still not sure if it’s a phone or a tablet, and now we have another decision to make when shopping for Samsung’s Galaxy Note — the color. A pink version of the five-million-selling device has been made available in South Korea today, according to the manufacturer, though after calling around we weren’t able to find it on sale anywhere just yet. In any case, both the Note and the S Pen are fully clad in the fetching shade of fuchsia, and like the similarly-hued Galaxy S II the company explicitly states its desire to go after women with the product. It might not be a bad demographic for Samsung to target, in general — one of our main problems with the Note was its lack of pocketability, so it’s probably a better fit for bags than… Continue reading…

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Pink Samsung Galaxy Note available in Korea ‘today’

It’s Sunday evening, and you’re probably getting ready for bed — so why not watch this fantastically creepy video that drops a beat to the splanchnic rhythm of some of the most alien-looking microorganisms you’ve ever seen? Micro Empire is a short fim from Austrian filmmaker Clemens Wirth that explores the world of “molecular conflict and mitochondrial warfare,” often in gut-twisting detail, set to music from Radium Audio that’s reminiscent of something you’d hear from Nine Inch Nails. Wirth used a Canon 5D Mark II that’s adapted for a monocular microscope to capture the macro paradise, and says that “it’s unbelievable how much is going on in only one little water drop.” Continue reading…

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Watch this: the alien beat of microscopic life in ‘Micro Empire’

Origin PC has joined HP in the march towards Ivy Bridge, announcing today that its EON15-S and EON17-S gaming laptops now support the Intel HM77 Ivy Bridge chipset — though the new chips still aren’t available. The EOS15-S starts at $1,561 with a 2.5GHz Core i5-2520 processor, the new GeForce GTX660M GPU ( based on the 28nm Kepler design ), a 250GB hard drive, 4GB DDR3 RAM, and a 15.6-inch screen. The EON17-S starts at $1,592 with the same specs as its sibling and a larger 17.3-inch screen.

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Origin PC upgrades EON15-S and EON17-S gaming laptops with Ivy Bridge-ready chipset, prices start at $1,525

Boing Boing pal Joe Sabia, a storyteller and video director who collaborates with us to produce Boing Boing’s in-flight TV channel on Virgin America, sends this snapshot from Istanbul. He’s in Turkey for an international storyteller’s convention. “While visiting a hip Baklava spot in Istanbul,” says Joe, “This chef proudly walked out exhibiting his political

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Baraklava Obama

After that little hiccup of a faux, uninspired Prometheus -related Ted Talk , we’re back on track with Prometheus hype: we have a new extended trailer for the movie, unveiled by Ridley Scott at WonderCon 2012, and it’s looking great. The plot is a little more clear now, and everything just looks amazing and exactly the right amount of desaturated. Scott is a couple decades removed from his Alien and Blade Runner days, but we can’t think of anybody else we’d want to take us on a terrifying journey into space, or toward the brink of humanity’s destruction — in film form, that is. Continue reading…

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Watch this: The new ‘Prometheus’ trailer

Recommended by several readers in the comments, I read the Trilisk Ruins by Michael McCloskey. There is visible evidence of aliens and their technology, but humanity still hasn’t met a live one. Life is pretty tough for Telisa, she’s a xenoarchaeologist in a universe where the UN has banned free access to alien artifacts; how

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eBook Review: the Trilisk Ruins

Samsung started rolling out an update for its Galaxy S II handset today, finally bringing Android 4.0 to Samsung’s flagship. In case you’re not able to update yet, here’s a little look at what’s new in the move from 2.3 to 4.0. To cut straight to the disappointment, not much has changed. Of all the new visual elements in Google’s latest OS, only the multitasking menu has been included. Everything else – aside from a new lock screen – has been made to look as similar to the Android 2.3 TouchWiz interface as possible.

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Samsung Galaxy S II with Android 4.0 hands-on video

French president Nicolas Sarkozy apologized to a policewoman struck Thursday by a tomato possibly thrown at her by his teenage son. Louis Sarkozy, 15, and a friend are the only suspects in the fruity fracas. [Reuters]

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French president’s son in tomato attack on police

This is the town of Kivalina, Alaska. Last fall, when the ocean water that almost surrounds the town started turning a gooey orange, people (understandably) got a bit freaked out. After ruling out the scarier options—i.e.,chemical pollution and toxic algae—scientists eventually pinned the orange tide on the presence of a plant fungus.

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A fascinating conclusion to an environmental mystery

My latest Locus column is “What’s Inside the Box,” a discussion of whether owners, users or third parties should be able to know and/or control what their computers are doing: The answer to this that most of the experts I speak to come up with is this: The owner (or user) of a device should

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Who should know what’s happening in your computer? Who should control it?

Madeline Ashby (whom you’ll remember from such Boing Boing features as Surfaces – a short story for a thesis on border security sez, “This is an invitation to join a 2-day design jam in Toronto, focused on user experience problems common to international border crossings. I’ll be there Friday to give a talk, but what

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Border Town design jam

Veteran author Jim C Hines offered some of his titles independently direct through Amazon’s Kindle store. He discovered that Amazon reserves the right to arbitrarily reprice his books — slashing the cover price of a $2.99 title to $0.99 — and pay royalties on the lower price. Hines points out that when his traditional publisher

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Author discovers that Amazon can reprice his indie Kindle books however they want and cut his royalties, at will

Posted by The Chris Valle to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.

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Trompe l’oil

Get your weekend going with Garoto Nacional by Strausz, a blast of anime, explosions, monsters, NSFW flesh, etc., set to a pounding dance track of similar dimensions. [Released by Penetra Records]

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Anime, pulp and smut in Garoto Nacional

Over at Accidental Mysteries, a delightful collection of Vintage European Soap Packaging. (Thanks, Randall de Rijk!)

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Vintage European soap packages

Virginia Prescott of New Hampshire Public Radio interviewed me today about the Apps for Kids podcast that my daughter Jane and I do each week. With developers pumping out an estimated 2,000 applications daily for use on smart-phones and tablets, reviewers and web-critics are keeping busy sorting out what’s worth downloading, and what’s worth squat.

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Apps for Kids interview on New Hampshire Public Radio

IFPI, the international recording industry lobby, has gone on the offensive to save ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an unprecedented international copyright agreement negotiated in secret (so secret that even Congress and the European Parliament weren’t allowed to see it). In recent weeks, popular protests against ACTA have grown, and many nations are pulling back

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Record industry lobby attains chutzpah singularity

Matthew Frye Jacobson, a professor of American Studies at Yale, made a gallery of hundreds of photographs of commercial buildings that have “Space Available.” Indeed, that’s the name of the photo series. For Jacobson, these signs are visceral representations of the economic crisis. Space Available is part of Jacobson’s larger Historian’s Eye project, a photographic

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Space Available: photos of empty commercial buildings

Artist Mark Reigelman, working with architect Jenny Chapman and engineer Paul Endres, created a rustic cabin and installed it as a parasite on a big building in San Francisco. Too bad nobody is living in it. Yet.

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Building has a parasitic cabin

This summer, Lego will ship an official Minecraft “Micro World” set, with blocks designed to look like the primitives used for construction in the popular game/virtual playset. Help Steve survive his first night in a strange new world. Avoid the creeper and start mining for resources that will help you survive and thrive.

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Official Lego Minecraft set ships this summer

Expensive, yes, but I heard the public schools in the area are very good. It’s 35,000 square feet and includes a a three-bedroom caretaker’s house. It was part of the divorce settlement between Texas billionaire David Saperstein and his wife Suzanne.

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For sale: house in Los Angeles: $125 million