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January 15, 2013 Andy Cush

Digital artist Andy Willis creates the above beautiful collages by analyzing each second of a film for its most prominent hue, then displaying those colors on a 60-wide grid–turning iconic movies into abstract streams of color. His works, called “Spotmaps” are as functional as they are aesthetic: scanning the maps of the first three Die Hard films, […]

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January 14, 2013 Andy Cush

The newest addition to NASAs fleet of spacecraft may be filled with air, as the agency awarded a $17.8 million contract to Bigelow Aerospace to develop an inflatable extension to the International Space Station. Though it sounds a bit like sci-fi fantasy, inflatable space technology is very real, and has been in place since the […]

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Andy Cush

From now until April humpback whales will gather off the coast of Hawaii for mating season. In hopes of attracting their counterparts, males will sing their beautiful, eerie songs, with long, complex, repeating melodies that can last for hours on end. Since 2003, Hawaii’s Jupiter Research Foundation has been dropping waterproof microphones 60 feet into […]

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January 10, 2013 Andy Cush

Take eight floppy disk drives, some MIDI software, an Arduino, and a little programming know-how, and you’ve got yourself a personal, polyphonic orchestra. At least, if you’re YouTube user MrSolidSnake745, you do. SolidSnake programs his eight little drives to perform music by systematically altering the speeds at which they run. “The concept behind this is basically […]

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Andy Cush

After we posted about this high-speed, six-legged, cockroach-inspired cardboard robot yesterday, Duncan Haldane, the VELOCIRoACH’s creator, got in touch to share the above image and a few more details about the bot’s construction and inspiration. Haldane points out that though his cockroach isn’t the fastest robot ever–that honor belongs to Boston Dynamics’ LS3, as far […]

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January 9, 2013 Andy Cush

Photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman use Twitter as a location scout for their haunting, beautiful images. The two artists scan the social network for tweets with location information embedded but no picture, head to those locations to shoot, then caption each photograph with the tweet’s original text. If the photographs weren’t so good, the concept […]

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Andy Cush

As if regular cockroaches weren’t awful enough, a professor at University of California, Berkley has created the VELOCIRoACH, a six-legged cardboard robot modeled on roach anatomy that can run at 2.7 meters per second–26 times the length of its body–making it the second-fastest self-propelled robot on record. Check it out, skittering around disgustingly, in the […]

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January 8, 2013 Andy Cush

The parents among you might consider this the next time you’re looking for that killer gift for your small child: CrayonCreatures, a service from Spanish designer Bernat Cuni, turns kids’ drawings into multicolored, 3D-printed sculptures. For the mere price of $150 (plus $20 shipping if you’re in the states) your child’s animals, monsters, and various […]

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January 7, 2013 Andy Cush

There’s been some concern lately of Skype communications being monitored without users’ consent , after the Microsoft-owned service began allowing law enforcement agencies to surveil text chats. Fueled by these privacy concerns, a group of hackers at Warsaw, Poland’s Institute of Telecommunications have come up with an ingenious sub rosa method of communication on the service: hiding […]

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Andy Cush

In an effort to give its theme park patrons a more customized, interactive experience, Disney is adopting the tactics of law enforcement agencies everywhere: giving out wristbands embedded with tracking devices and information about the people wearing them. Uses for the wristbands, dubbed “MyMagic+,” range from the pedestrian–like tracking purchases and attractions visited, presumably to […]

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