This aAmazing Fruit fly Evolved to Have Pictures of Aants on its Wings

This is unbelievable, but the fruit fly G tridens has somehow evolved to have what looks like pictures of ants on its wings. Seriously, its transparent wings have an ant design on them complete with "six legs, two antennae, a head, thorax and tapered abdomen." It's nature's evolutionary art painted on a fly's wings.

Recently spotted by the New York Times, the fruit fly is just incredible. Other flies in its family of 5,000 species have other type of markings on its wings but it's the G tridens that has something so intricate and so specific.

The idea of the ant design, as explained to The National by Dr Brigitte Howarth of Zayed University who first discovered G tridens in the UAE, is that these flies use their wings to ward off predators. The fly flashes it wings back and forth to make it seem as if the ants are moving around and that movement would confuse the predator. More here.

This Chair Can Be Worn Like a Backpack

If you demand that your furniture is both reassuringly substantial and also portable, then you probably have a tough time navigating life. But here's something to help: a real chair that can be worn as a backpack.

The Nomadic Chair by Jorge Penades is constructed from wood, but doesn't require anyscrews, nails or glue—it simply uses some smart plastic connectors to fit together. Penades explains the design:

‘Luxury is not anymore a matter of comfort. nowadays, luxury is to be able to decide where you want to have a moment of peace, a chance to escape from hectic activity of contemporary lifestyles.’

Nice. So, when you've finished sitting, dismantle, pack and sling it on your back—ready to find the next spot to take a break. More here.

The World's Thinnest 2TB Hard Drive Is a Mere 9.5mm Thick

Seagate's come along to steal WD's thunder with the ultra-slim 2.5-inch Spinpoint M9T that manages to double that capacity to two-terabytes inside a drive that's just 9.5 millimeters thick.

So you're getting twice the capacity at the cost of just 2.5 millimeters in added thickness—that sounds pretty reasonable. After all, at 9.5 millimeters thick the M9T is still the thinnest two-terabyte hard drive you can currently buy. The drive will also be available in a 1.5 terabyte model as well, which will presumably cost slightly less than the two terabyte model's $129 price tag. More here.

An Awesome guy Made an Insane Thor Hammer that Smashes Everything

This version of Thor's hammer was made by master swordsmith Tony Swatton. He's a Picasso when it comes to recreating movie props like Wolverine's claws, swords from Game of Thrones and weapons of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.


The 11-inch long, 5-inch high and 4-inch wide hammer is beautifully detailed (stick around to watch them etch the hammer) and weighs 20 pounds when hollow. When they fill it up to make it solid, it'd be a 200 pound beast.

Philips Adds a New Bulb To The Hue Lineup

The first bulbs in Philips' color-changing, app-controlled Hue line were designed to mimic the unidirectional shine of standard A19 light bulbs. This made them ideal for conventional lamps, but wasted a large portion of their light when installed in recessed ceiling fixtures. But today, Philips has announced the new Hue BR30 downlight bulb.

The BR30 delivers the same 630 lumen and 2000-6500k temperature range as the standard LED Hues, while drawing just 8W of power. And as with the older bulb model, the new BR30s can be controlled via the associated iOS app (or a meagre Android version). The BR30 starter set (which includes the Hue network bridge) retails for $200 from the Apple Store, while individual bulbs will set you back $60 a pop if you just want to add them on to your existing Hue system. More here.

There Was an Incredible Hybrid Solar Eclipse this Morning

This morning's hybrid solar eclipse was stunning. But depending on where you are in the world you may not have been able to see it at all, cloud cover may have messed with visibility, or you may have had a partial view. So for anyone who missed it, this is what the eclipse looked like from Kenya. Pretty snazzy, huh?

The top image is made of three exposures, all taken by Ben Curtis at Lake Oloidien near Naivasha in Kenya. The image shows the movement of the solar eclipse from right to left. A near total blackout was visible from Kenya, though there was still a small sliver of the sun showing. The photo below was taken in Nairobi by Sayyid Azim. The eclipse was only visible in Kenya for about 15 seconds. More here.

Cell Phones and Brains

Jaw-Dropping Proof That NASA Rocket Scientists Carve the Best Pumpkins

The internet's chock full of wonderful ways to carve a Halloween pumpkin every year, but few can hold a glowing candle to what the scientists, engineers, and researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab come up with. Every year the lab holds a pumpkin carving competitionand the results, and the carving techniques, are exactly what you'd expect from the geniuses who landed the rovers on Mars.

Entries included everything from complete solar systems, to space battles, to aquariums filled with living fish. And the real winners were the geniuses who found a way to get out of an afternoon of work.

Possibly the Comfiest Nutcracker You'll Ever Use

Halloween's come and gone, and as we move towards the holidays, those dwindling bowls of candy will soon be replaced with overflowing mountains of nuts—necessitating some way to bust open those hard shells. A hammer's a little brutish, and using your teeth is just a terrible idea. What you need is this lovely purpose-built nutcracker from Normann Copenhagen, featuring a thick silicone handle so you don't destroy your hands in the process.

The flexible silicone also forces the nutcracker's jaws open after each use, so it's always at the ready for the next nut. At $53 it isn't cheap, but with seasonally-neutral red or black color options, you'll be able to use it all year round. More here.

A Single Cup To Handle All Your Kitchen Measurements

You can finally replace that stack of incremental measuring spoons that never actually seem to to stay stacked with Joseph Joseph's new 2-in-1 measuring cup, which handles both large and small measurements—even at the same time. The cup's larger chamber can hold up to four cups of dry or liquid ingredients, while the smaller chamber in the corner lets you measure out as little as five milliliters.

You'll also notice the $20 measuring cup's unique square corners, which makes it easier to pour out ingredients exactly where you want them. There's also a soft silicone handle that's extra grippy, so four cups of flour don't accidentally end up on the floor. More here.

You Could Get a Ticket For Wearing Google Glass While Driving

Because, as Cecilia Abadie recently found out, you might end up getting a ticket. Pulled over by San Diego police, she got a ticket for wearing the smart glasses while at the wheel just days ago. She explains:

A cop just stopped me and gave me a ticket for wearing Google Glass while driving! The exact line says: Driving with Monitor visible to Driver (Google Glass).

Clearly, Californian police feel that the display on Glass is as distracting as looking at a phone. It's not obvious if that's really the case or not—but it'll be interesting to see what lawyers and judges make of it. What do you think? More here.

The Internet Archive Opens Its Historical Software Collection To All

Gamers of a certain age will no doubt scream Oh wow, I remember that! as they click through the Internet Archive's latest project.

The non-profit organization recently launched the Historical Software Collection, with the mission of making old programs accessible (including plenty of games!) that were originally released for platforms like Atari 2600, Apple II, and Commodore 64.

Software itself isn't new to the Archive, but it's spent the past couple of years making these programs playable in-browser. So whether it's E.T. on Atari 2600 from 1982 or VisiCalc on the Apple II from 1979, there's no need to download a heap of emulators to try them out.

Archiving video games can present special challenges, as David Gibson at the Library of Congress has explained so well. But the independent Internet Archive claims to have thelargest software archive in the world, and it should be interesting to see how the next few years work out for them.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges they'll face is copyright. Technically, all of these programs are still covered under copyright law. And I have no doubt that the myriad companies responsible for managing the rights to something like E.T. are figuring out if they should intervene. Hopefully, no one will try to pull these programs. More here.

A Detailed Description of Why Human Skin Is Amazing

As Minute Earth rightly points out, we could avoid a lot of flesh wounds by having thicker armored skin like a pangolin. But the energy needed to generate and maintain that armor wasn't evolutionarily worth it for us to expend because we put so much fuel into our enormous brains. We can think of ways to escape danger or make intelligent plans to avoid dangerous situations in the first place. And we do have scales, they're just not visible to the naked eye, but they protect us from tons of microbes. A lot is going on with our skin as the layers form, live out their life rising to the surface and then die. Watch this video and then go exfoliate.

7 Things You Do On the Internet That'd Be Creepy to Do in Real Life

You're a different person online compared to your real life. It's okay. You don't have to irrationally like cats just because you're obsessed with cat videos. You don't have to literally poke the people you poked on Facebook. You don't have to like or follow or tag or comment or stalk celebrities like you do on the Internet. Because if you did that in real life, you'd be a total creep. BuzzFeed Video imagined 7 things that'd be super creepy to do in real life, even though you do them on the Internet.

Dinosaurs Were Able to Grow So Huge Because of Their Squishy Joints

There's a reason that towering mammals the likes of King Kong are resigned to fiction. Our aching bones can only take so much weight before they start crumbling under the pressure. But if that's the case, then why were dinosaurs able to reach such phenomenal heights? According to a new study, the answer isn't so much about the bones themselves as it is the soft, squishy joints they lay between.

The scientists leading the new study published in PLOS ONE measured the ends of bones in both mammals and dinosaurs as well as their descendants to see how joint and bone shape changes as size increases.

As mammals grow, our bones become progressively rounder at the ends to be able to support the increase in weight while minimizing pressure as much as possible. Reptiles and birds, however, (as well as the dinosaurs that came before them) have bones that grow wider and flatter as more weight is added to the frame. So considering that these two very different shapes are both meant to sustain more weight, the joints and cartilage that connect them must also work differently.

For humans and other mammals, as the bones become rounder the connecting cartilage continues to stretch thin and tight across the bones surface. Because the soft, connective cartilage is close-fitting and maleable, our weight is able to distribute more evenly. The wider, flatter bones of reptiles, however, solve the problem by packing as many layers of the stuff as they can—which as it turns out, is a much more efficient method. According to Matthew Bonnan from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and one of the lead authors on the study:

More than just evenly distributing the pressure, the joint itself may be deforming a little — it’s actually squishier, increasing the force it can sustain.

Of course, these gelatinous joint fillings weren't the only thing letting dinos tower over the rest of the prehistoric world. The lighter, hollow bones favored by reptiles also meant that larger frames didn't require as much support as our own solid bricks for bones. This does, however, at least begin to explain why dinosaurs were able to reach such larger than (modern) life proportions.

Still, as pillowy and bouncy as their joints may be, everything has its limits. You know, like extinction-event comets. More here.

Can a Sponge Absorb Mercury?

A sponge is a sponge because its porous material is able to absorb liquid of any kind. But what about liquid metal? Can a sponge actually absorb the heavy quicksilver material known as mercury? Not at all. At best, a little bit of mercury goop gets caught on top of the sponge and slides away like its T-1000 shaping itself back together.

We've Finally Figured Out Why Kettles Whistle

This might shock you, but for over a century scientists have been pondering why kettles whistle—and completely failed to find an answer. That's all changed now, though, thanks totwo scientists from the University of Cambridge who have worked out how it happens.

The whistle in a kettle is created when steam passes through two plates, positioned close together, each with a hole in them. But scientists have been trying, and failing, for decades to understand exactly what it is about this process that makes the high-pitched sound.

Ross Henrywood and Anurag Agarwal used insights gained from analyzing noise creation in jet engines to try and answer the question. By analyzing the flow of steam which travels up the spout of the kettle, they were able to pinpoint what creates the whistle.

Their results, which are published in the academic journal The Physics Of Fluids, show that the sound is produced by small vortices—regions where the steam swirls—which at certain frequencies can produce noise. They explain:

As steam comes up the kettle’s spout, it meets a hole at the start of the whistle, which is much narrower than the spout itself. This contracts the flow of steam as it enters the whistle and creates a jet of steam passing through it. The steam jet is naturally unstable, like the jet of water from a garden hose that starts to break into droplets after it has travelled a certain distance. As a result, by the time it reaches the end of the whistle, the jet of steam is no longer a pure column, but slightly disturbed. These instabilities cannot escape perfectly from the whistle and as they hit the second whistle wall, they form a small pressure pulse. This pulse causes the steam to form vortices as it exits the whistle. These vortices produce sound waves, creating the comforting noise that heralds a forthcoming cup of tea.

Which is fascinating. But it could also prove useful, because the knowledge gained from the study could help other scientists and engineers find and stop other similar—but more annoying—noises. Henrywood explains:

The effect we have identified can actually happen in all sorts of situations - anything where the structure containing a flow of air is similar to that of a kettle whistle. Pipes inside a building are one classic example and similar effects are seen inside damaged vehicle exhaust systems. Once we know where the whistle is coming from, and what’s making it happen, we can potentially get rid of it.

Next one the list? High-speed hand-dryers. Look out, Dyson, the University of Cambridge is hot on your heels. More here.

This Runner's Jacket Inflates To Cool You Down

The folks over at Gear Junkie got a chance to visit the product development lab at North Face's new headquarters in Alameda, California, and one of the many new innovations they were shown was this wonderful runner's jacket that uses a clever ventilation system to cool you down.

Tugging on a pair of elastics on the updated Stormy Trail runner's jacket seals off the coat at the waist. So as the wearer runs, air entering the jacket through a series of vents can't escape out the bottom. Instead, it flows up the runner's back and escapes out another vent closer to the top of the jacket, taking heat with it and cooling the wearer in the process. It's as close as a jacket can get to air conditioning, and will be available next July for about $165. More here.

Dolphins Inspire a New Kind of Radar That Detects Hidden Electronics

Not only are they out there keeping fish populations under control and occasionally leading lost boaters to land, dolphins' unique hunting techniques have also recently inspired a new kind of radar that's able to pinpoint hidden electronics like bomb triggers and surveillance devices. Move over dogs, man's officially found its new best friend.

Developed by researchers at the University of Southampton in England who were intrigued at how dolphins were still able to pinpoint fish they were hunting even in the middle of distracting clouds of underwater bubbles, the TWIPR—or twin inverted pulse radar—borrows techniques from the ocean's smartest inhabitants.

Namely, a technique where two signal pulses are sent out instead of one. This approach allows dolphins to distinguish between fish and bubbles, but with the TWIPR technology it can be used to detect electronics. When the pair of positive and negative pulses hit something like a tree, a rock, or even metal, they cancel each other out and disappear. But when the pulses hit a device made with semiconductors, the negative pulse becomes positive, doubling the signal and making the electronics very easy to spot.

What's particularly awesome is that the new technology—which could easily find a bomb hidden in a dumpster full of trash—measures just two inches in size and can be built from electronics costing less than a dollar. So putting it into production and into the hands of those in danger shouldn't require much further development. More here.

Scientists Discover Gold Literally Growing on Trees in the Outback

Every parent's favorite line about how money doesn't grow on trees just became a little more irrelevant, thanks to a fascinating find down under. Researchers in Australia recently found gold—yes,real gold—in eucalyptus trees growing in the outback.

A team of unlikely prospectors recently ventured into the arid land of the Goldfields-Esperance region in Western Australia, hoping to learn more about what was underneath its soil. The area earned its name for being rich in gold deposits—that were, however, notoriously difficult to find. So the researchers looked in an unlikely place: The trees.

Eucalyptus trees in this region are known for their resiliency, and for roots that reach impossibly deep to find the groundwater needed to keep themselves alive. It just so turns out that the elusive gold deposits are down there, too.

Chasing a longstanding rumor that the trees' leaves get their gold luster from the deposits, the scientists analyzed the leaves of eucalyptus trees in the area—and sure enough, they found traces of gold. Apparently, the trees' roots grew ten stories deep into the soil and absorbed gold particles from nearby deposits. To confirm that these particles came from the soil under the roots, they grew eucalyptus trees in gold-laced potting soil in a greenhouse. And sure enough—they found gold in those leaves, too.

The idea that plants absorb minerals from the soil around them is hardly new, but this is an extraordinary case. "Gold is probably toxic to plants and is moved to its extremities (such as leaves) or in preferential zones within cells in order to reduce deleterious biochemical reaction," reads a study about the research published today in Nature Communications. The authors also point out that this is "the first evidence of particulate gold within natural specimens of living biological tissue." That's a hell of a first, even for you alchemy nerds out there.

Don't go thinking you can get rich by cutting down eucalyptus trees, though. Each tree contains such a small amount of gold—46 parts per billion, to be exact—that it would take hundreds to compile enough for a wedding ring. But the trees could be used to scout the location of underground gold deposits. And since approximately 30 percent of the world's gold reserves are thought to lie underground in the Goldfields-Esperance region, the search may be well worth the trouble. More here.