Automatic Mahjong Table

A table with a hole that will suck all your mahjong pieces and returns them perfectly stacked, ready to play. Obviously, it's powered by SORCERY. I wish the same existed with normal tables: Throw in all the dishes and have them returned to you perfectly cleaned and ordered in seconds.

Insulating Foam Made From Wood Makes Your Log Cabin Warm and Authentic

Not only is styrofoam great for all your packing needs, it also makes for an incredibly effective and lightweight insulator. It's just too bad the chemicals and processes needed to make it aren't as earth-friendly as they could be. So researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have successfully created an alternative made from our most popular renewable resource: wood.

What's most remarkable is that the environmentally-friendly foam—which is made from wood that's finely ground until it becomes a slimy goop that can be frothed—will actually harden all by itself after it's been sprayed onto a surface. Natural materials in the wood itself assist in that process so no additional chemicals are needed.

But the wood foam can be produced in sheets as well, like the large panels of expandable polystyrene you can find at home building stores. That process does require additional chemicals to help the foam rise and set, but the final product is still more sustainable and environmentally-friendly than petrochemical alternatives. Not to mention, it adds a whole other layer of authenticity (and warmth) to that log cabin you've always dreamed of. More here.

Scientists Discover the Key to Making Paint That Never Fades

It seems like scientists are all about immortality these days. It's not just plants and people that are getting the treatment, though. A team of Harvard engineers are developing a way of producing color that could produce paint that never fades, and displays that never go dark.

Believe it or not, the method is based on bird feathers, which last centuries without losing their bright hues. This is because of how their colors are formed. Unlike your t-shirt or a painting on the wall, feathers don't get their color from pigments that absorb certain wavelengths and reflect the rest. "What that means is that the material is absorbing some energy, and that means that over time, the material will fade," says Vinothan N. Manoharan, a researcher at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Science who's leading the effort.

Bird feathers, by contrast, stay bright because their feathers contain nanostructures that amplify specific wavelengths of light. It's called structural color. Basically, the feathers' cells contain a series of tiny pores spaced in such a way that they only reflect, for instance, shades of red. Manoharan's team is recreating this effect in the lab by using microparticles suspended in a solution. When the solution dries out, the microparticles shrink and bring the particles closer together. And depending on how much of the solution dries out, the distance between the particles causes them to reflect different wavelengths of color. The effect will even work with pixels on a display.

It's a little hard to wrap your head around, but this graphic might help. The red microcapsule starts out large on the left and shrinks as it dries out, producing shades of orange, yellow, and green:

"We think it could be possible to create a full-color display that won't fade over time," says Manoharan. "The dream is that you could have a piece of flexible plastic that you can put graphics on in full color and read in bright sunlight." Paint and ink that never fade are also a possibility.

For now, the development of such a display or paint is in the early, experimental stages. But can you imagine opening a laptop in bright sunlight and seeing the same vibrant colors you'd see in a magazine? You should. And someday you might for real. More here.

Scientists Use Graphene to Make Bionic, Super-Powered Plants

A team of chemical engineers and biochemists has managed to change how plants work. Well, to be exact, they've made plants work better by embedding carbon nanotubes into the plants' leaves so that they absorb more light. Put simply, they've created bionic plants.

The technique is not quite perfect. "We envisioned them as new hybrid biomaterials for solar energy harnessing, self-repairing materials [and] chemical detectors of pollutants, pesticides, [and] fungal and bacterial infections," said MIT chemical engineer Juan Pablo Giraldo.

The decision to use carbon nanotubes, which are just sheets of graphene rolled into straw-like shapes, makes perfect sense. Graphene can absorb sunlight and convert it into electron flow. Indeed, the photosynthesis rates in the plants injected with the nanotubes were three times higher than those without.

The "detector" bit of the equation also worked. The scientists found that the carbon nanotubes worked like sensors and would cease to glow under infrared light if nitric oxide, a common pollutant, were present. Giraldo suggested that the bionic plants could be used as "biochemical detectors for monitoring environmental conditions in cities, crop fields, airports or high-security facilities."

Using plants as pollution detecting sensors seems kind of dangerous for the plants, but, for the sake of the experiment, they survived just fine. It's unclear how the embedding nanotubes will fare in the long run.

Just imagine the possibilities. Bionic plants with bodies? Why don't these guys use those supercharged photosynthesis abilities to stand up and walk around and shoot laser guns? More here.

Would You Customize Your First Born Child?

The recent announcement by a British medical ethics board in favor of anexperimental three-parent IVF treatment—wherein the genetic material from three donors, not the usual two, is used to create a fetus—and has once again stirred the pot of reproductive controversy. So where exactly is the line between prenatal treatments and eugenic experiments?

Granted, the IVF procedure is being developed in order to prevent debilitating hereditary diseases from mother to child and could, theoretically, be used to wipe out these genetic scourges the same way we did Polio—which is good for everybody. At the same time, what's to stop us from adding more and more donors until we're simply picking the most desired traits at will and not so much making new life but literally constructing it? If you learned that your potential child would likely suffer from an incurable hereditary disease would you be willing to add a third genetic donor to prevent that? What about if you found out your child would be a ginger, would you add a third donor to prevent that? It's a slippery slope. More here.

Lego Robot With a Smartphone Brain Shatters Rubik's Cube World Record

Cubestormer 3 is a robot with just one job—to solve a scrambled Rubik's Cube as swiftly as possible. Today, at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK, it did the task in an astounding 3.253 seconds, faster than any human or robot in the world. Just look at that thing go.

The third-generation robot was built by co-inventors David Gilday and Mike Dobson for pure, blistering speed. The Samsung Galaxy S4 brain is tricked out with an Exynos octa-core processor, with four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 processors controlling eight Lego Mindstorms actuators. It's basically the SR-71 Blackbird of Rubik's Cube bots. Gilday said, "we knew Cubestormer 3 had the potential to beat the existing record but with the robot performing physical operations quicker than the human eye can see there's always an element of risk." Yeah. That fast. 

The smartphone brain analyzes the cube's starting arrangement, then instructs four robot arms to carry out each step needed to get the cube to its solved state. Since the robot uses a speed cube, which allows twisting moves even when the sides aren't perfectly aligned, the robot hands must be amazingly precise to move so smoothly and quickly.

As for the previous robot record, it was held by Cubestormer 2, which clocked in at 5.27 seconds. The world record human solver could only muster a 5.55 second run back in 2013. Clearly, the robot takeover is gaining speed.

Someday You Could Save Your Files With Nothing But a Sticky Note

Today's slim, svelte computers look great. You, on the other hand, look like a total yutz fumbling around to plug a thumb drive into a USB port that's somehow perpetually upside down. What if saving your data was as easy as slapping a sticky note on your screen? That's what a design team proposes with this highly theoretical design for paper-thin, sticky memory cards.

Designers Aditi Singh and Parang Anand theorize that a single layer of graphene sandwiched between two flexible protective layers could provide up to 32GB of storage space. A sticky edge would carry data from an optical data transfer surface conveniently built in to the edge of your computer monitor.

Of course is completely theoretical and in no way buyable, but it's a nice dream. Graphene is a wonder material, to be sure, but graphene-based consumer products are still a long, long way off. And while the designers do an admirable job of explaining how the sticky notes themselves could (someday, possibly) work, they leave the Optical Data Transfer Surface—the engine that makes the whole process possible—completely mysterious. More here.

The Reason We Yawn Might Actually Be To Cool Down Our Brains

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Just like the CPU in your computer, the human brain has an optimal temperature where it runs best. But unlike a computer's CPU, there's no built-in fan to chill the brain when it starts to run hot. Which is why researchers now believe that yawning is actually the body's physiological way of keeping the brain nice and cool.

Traditionally, it was believed that yawning was how the body increased its oxygen intake when someone was sleepy, to help wake them up—but this is a more interesting conclusion. The act of yawning increases your heart rate, blood flow, and uses muscles in the face that are all connected to keeping the brain cooled. It also turns out that exhaustion and sleep deprivation can contribute to a rise in the brain's temperature, which is why we tend to yawn more often when we're tired.

But why do we yawn when others do? It's believed that that phenomenon is tied to our ability to empathize with others. Which is why it's harder to get kids below the age of five to yawn when you do, because their empathetic abilities have yet to fully develop. And it also explains why people with autism are less likely to start yawning when they watch someone else do it.

So, how many times did you 'cool your brain' while reading this post or watching that video?

New Test Predicts Alzheimer's at Least Three Years in Advance

A new blood test developed by scientists from Georgetown University in Washington DC is capable of predicting onset of Alzheimer's with 96 percent certainty three years in advance—and that figure could soon stretch to decades.

The researchers report their new test in Nature Medicine, explaining that it identifies 10 chemicals in the blood which are associated with the disease. While tests already exist to diagnose the condition, this is the first to predict its onset.

The test was developed using a group of 525 people aged 70 and over, who initially showed no signs of mental impairment. They were given cognitive tests over a five year period, and also had blood samples taken. Over the five years, 28 developed Alzheimer's—enough to identify the 10 chemicals which indicated the presence of the disease.

In subsequent trials, the presence of those chemicals in blood samples has been used to predict the onset of Alzheimer's within three years, with up to 96 percent certainty. The next step is to make the test even more sensitive—and the researchers hope that it could then be used to predict the onset of the disease 10 or 20 years in advance.

The only question then is: would you actually want to know? More here.

Watch this guy breaking a Rubik's Cube world record at insane speed

A Simple Digital Watch With a Stylish Handwritten Font

\When you think of a digital watch, you can probably picture the simple boxy numbers created by a traditional segmented LCD display. This Script Watch uses the same technique—an LCD display broken up into static segments that can only be turned on or off—but manages to display the time as if a talented calligrapher just penned it onto your wrist.

Created by Adrian and Jeremy Wright, the watch of course relies on the clever design of its LCD segments. The various curves, swooshes, and contours assemble into the numbers one to nine, vastly improving the font used to show the time without requiring a full pixel-based display which requires more processing and power. It will still set you back $175, but that's reasonable if you think of it as a smartwatch—or at least a watch that looks smart. More here.

Making Plastic, Fertilizer, and Superglue Out of Thin Air

What to do with an environment-wrecking molecule like carbon dioxide? The gas behind global warming and ocean acidification enjoys a pretty rough reputation these days, but scientists have been working on ingenious ways to put carbon dioxide to good use. A little electricity, it turns out, can transform the waste gas into raw material for making plastic bottles, antifreeze, fuel, and more.

Take Liquid Light, profiled in this New Scientist piece. The New Jersey start-up recently showed off a prototype of its carbon dioxide converter, a coffee table-sized "layer cake of steel and plastic." Their first product will be ethylene glycol, a molecule that is used to make plastic bottles and antifreeze. The company says it has created catalysts that can convert carbon dioxide to over 60 different molecules.

It works like this: a lot of useful molecules, such as methanol (wood alcohol), isopropanol (rubbing alcohol), are butonal (a fuel) are just some combination of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms. Zapping carbon dioxide with electricity in the presence of different metal catalysts and other gases turns it into a whole range of carbon-based molecules. It's just plain chemistry.

While industrial products won't be that big of a carbon sink (relative to the massive amounts we're emitting into the atmosphere, at least), using carbon dioxide represents a 180º turn from thinking about the gas purely as a waste. We might imagine carbon credits of the future to include an entirely new line of plastic products—from pens to clothing to water bottles—all made of carbon sequestered out of thin air. More here.

If You Want To Be Immune To Tasers Just Wear Carbon Fiber Clothing

It's no Iron Man suit, but if you've got a knack for civil disobedience and often find yourself on the business end of a Taser, the folks at Hackaday discovered that carbon fiber clothing can actually let you shrug off those electric shocks.

To be more specific, they cut open the lining of a sports coat and lined it with endless strips of iron-on no-sew hem tape and carbon fiber tape so that the resulting jacket still had lots of flexibility. The carbon fiber conducts electricity much better than human skin, and since the strips were placed close enough to let the juice flow between them, they were able to dissipate the charge without shocking down the dapper-looking target.

This approach could actually be used to line and protect everything from pants, to shirts, to gloves, and if you had the budget, you could probably stitch together entire wardrobes from carbon fiber. Just skip the part where you harden it with epoxy and you should be able to move fine. Not that you would use this power in any situation from which you'd need to run quickly, of course. More here.

Pizza Hut and Chaotic Moon Studios Interactive Concept Table

Behold the future, my friends. It isn't hoverboards or laser swords or transportation hailing apps or drone deliveries, it is this: a gigantic touchscreen that lets you build your own pizza on the table that you will eat it on. Use the touchscreen to perfectly customize your order, play games while you wait and pay from your smartphone. The future looks delicious.

Yeah, I know it's a Pizza Hut and Chaotic Moons Studio concept that obviously cribs UI deets from Microsoft Surface but this silly pizza building service (an evolution of the Domino's Pizza Hut tracker if you will) is a good enough reason to eat Pizza Hut and have Microsoft Surface everywhere.

You Can Now Buy the Official Pillow-Fighting Pillow of Japan

Are you one of the All Japan Pillow Fighting Association's rapt and loyal followers? Are you tired of the more conventional sports fans sauntering around in their jerseys while you walk around swag-less? Looks like your day has finally come. As of yesterday, you can finally buyan Officially Recognized by the All Japan Pillow Fighting Association Pillow of your very own.

The pillows, produced by Makura Kabushikigaisha (which, according to Rocket News 24, literally translates to Pillow Corporation), are expressly designed to give you extra walloping power while still remaining relatively harmless to the atackee. Stuffed with "perfectly weighted crushed latex," the packing peanut-esque filling adds the necessary weight to the pummeling device while remaining elastic enough to absorb most of the hit.

Safety is, apparently, a major concern in professional pillow fighting, so the pillow is completely free of any tags or fasteners that might be cause for a bleeder. And it doesn't matter whether you find its grey and white stripes aesthetically pleasing—this pillow is all about function. Supposedly, this combination of colors makes it easier to notice as it comes in for the kill. The pillow will set you back a cool $30. More here.

You'll Never Believe All The Things Made Out Of Chicken Feathers

As a nation, the United States consumes a whopping 8 billion chickens every year, and this results in a few mountains' worth of chicken feathers in pure waste. But no more, some entrepreneurs say: chicken feathers could be the future of plastic.

It all began in 1993, according to Modern Farmer, when USDA researcher Walter Schmidt decided to turn chicken feathers into... something useful. That thing, whatever it was, would remain TBD. They fried it (which apparently tasted a lot like pork rinds). They made it into paper (which turned out textured and tissue-like).

The latest idea is plastics. Not unlike our hair and nails, chicken feathers are mostly a strong protein called keratin. The feathers can be heated, mixed with other materials, and molded into plastic. And, as we in the 21st century know, plastics can be used to make pretty much everything, from shoes to wall insulation to circuit boards to furniture. But chicken feathers could even show up in a few more unexpected places.

Like powder makeup:

For example, the Nixa, Missouri-based Featherfiber Corp. is commercializing Schmidt's group's 1998 patent on technology to separate feather fiber from the quill. Close to opening a production plant, Schmidt says they will soon produce cosmetics and car parts. "The feather fiber grinds to a powdery talc making the keratin useful in beauty products," Schmidt adds.

Or diapers:

Feathers have even been used to replace the absorptive layer in diapers that are usually made out of wood pulp, also called "fluff pulp." Swapping wood pulp out for feathers may save more than a few trees, Schmidt points out. Plus, it just works really well.

There are lots more chicken feather ideas in the works, from oil spill cleanup to hurricane-proof roofing. In fact, Schmidt, the chicken feather evangelist, likes to speculate about the day when chicken feathers become so useful that meat is a mere byproduct of feather production. More here.

Offshore Wind Farms Might Save Us From Hurricanes

In the matchup of wind turbine v. hurricane, our bets have traditionally been with the hurricane. But think about it this way: wind turbines are designed to suck energy out of wind. What if they could suck out so much energy that hurricanes like Katrina or Sandy never form in the first place—with the potentially destructive storm instead spun directly into electricity? That's the win-win situation posited in a new study from Stanford and University of Delaware researchers.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change today, has been provoking scientists since it was first presented at conferences months ago. It's surprising, in part, because it inverts how we usually think about offshore wind turbines.

"Will the turbines be destroyed? That's the main question people ask," says Mark Jacobson, the study's first author. According to their model of Hurricanes Isaac, Katrina, and Sandy, though, offshore wind turbines could have dissipated the storms before their winds even got up to destructive speeds. And the turbines would have turned that wind into electricity, a benefit over other hurricane defense strategies like sea walls.

Will it work? How?

There are exactly zero operating offshore wind farms in the United States right now— northwestern Europe has most of the existing ones—and the farms in the study are unthinkably massive, up to half a million turbines. As a matter of practicality and politics, this isn't going to happen anytime soon. But if we want to dream big about energy policy and hurricane defense, then this is that dream.

And it could theoretically work, according to other scientists. "The study is highly academic and idealized," says Robert Vautard of the Climate and Environment Science Laboratory in France, although "the result is believable." It's all based on a computer model, but it's the best computer model we have.

Think about how quickly hurricanes dissipate on land, says Julie Lindquist, an atmospheric scientist at University of Colorado, Boulder. That's, in part, because the sea surface is very smooth but land is not. "You're essentially building large forests of slender trees in the water," says Lindquist. Of course, that will affect the climate during non-hurricane season, too, but that's a whole other study to do.

When it comes to natural disasters, engineers have come up with ways to withstand them, but never actually tame them. These hurricane-harnessing wind turbines offer a seductively elegant and presently impractical solution to it all. It's possible to imagine—and also question—the potential of tens of thousands of turbines spinning offshore to power and guard our homes from hurricanes. More here.

Whoa, Watch Bacteria Instantly Turn Water Into Ice

Believe it or not, making ice is more complicated than just making water really cold. One thing that helps is bacteria. Yes, bacteria! In this captivatingly magic video, it takes just a second for Pseudomonas syringae to turn a whole jar of water into ice.

How does it work? It's the same principle behind how snow forms in the atmosphere. An ice crystal needs to form around a nucleus, which can be a bit of dust, soot, pollen, or, as we've seen, bacteria. Pure water doesn't have to crystallize into ice until it's as cold as 55 F below zero. In the demo here, the water has been supercooled to about 21 F, but it only freezes over after the P. syringae is added.

Maggie Koerth-Baker, who first spotted the video for Boing Boing, explains where P. syringae's cold superpower comes from.

P. syringae gets this skill from the proteins that cover its surface membrane. The proteins basically form a physical structure that water molecules latch onto. That structure also orients the molecules in a way that prompts the formation of ice crystals. It's these proteins that really serve as the instigator of ice nucleation and they're incredibly efficient at it — far more so than dust...
Commercial snow machines use the proteins (though not the bacteria itself) to help instigate the creation of snow on ski mountains.

In its earthbound life, P. syringae causes disease in plants, so its snow-forming ability might seem bizarre. One hypothesis is that ice nucleation is really a subtle means of hacking the weather system: bacteria drifts up into the atmosphere and falls back to earth as snow and hail, traveling hundreds of miles in between.

We humans might think ourselves clever using bacteria proteins to make artificial snow for ski resorts, but the microbes have been way ahead of us.

A Simple Trick to Keep Your GoPro Footage Steady

GoPro is the bestselling camera in the world because like a good date, you can take the tough sucker anywhere. Just mount it on your surfboard/snowboard/bicycle and it'll snag back dope fisheye footage for your bragging video. Handholding a GoPro, however, yields shaky results.

The above video from professional wakeboarder and video producer MicBergsmademonstrates a simple tip to help you get better results from your GoPro: Hold the GoPro up to your face to use your body's natural stabilization to your advantage. While I've never tried this with a GoPro, it's very similar to clenching a heavy DSLR up against your body, using it as a natural tripod when you're shooting at very slow shutter speeds. It's a common photographer's trick. Of course, MicBergsma's trick isn't going to work in all situations, but it's just another tool to throw on the heap so you can get better footage from you adventures.  

Wheelchair-Bound Woman Walks Again With a 3D Printed Exoskeleton

In 1992, Amanda Boxtel suffered a vicious skiing accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors said she would never walk again. This week, she proved them wrong, with the help of the world's first 3D printed exoskeleton that gives her the ability to climb out of her wheelchair and walk once again.

The Ekso-Suit Amanda wears is fully bespoke. 3D Systems used data from a full body scan to print custom-tailored pieces that fit exactly to Amanda's body. Mechanical components from EksoBionics provide the automation, allowing Amanda to safely use her legs and a pair of canes to walk around.