The Light Bulb Effect - Bulb Candles by Helbert Ferreira & Remi Melander - SYSTEM DESIGN STUDIO The Light Bulb Effect Let me put on my monocle and tell you a story. You see long ago before Swan or Edison invented the lightbulb, people used candles. When lightbulbs became the norm, the candle went the way of the wind. DUH right? Well I’m feeling a bit nostalgic so I’m keen on The Light Bulb Effect – a wax candle shaped like a bulb. Designers: Helbert Ferreira, Remi Melander – SYSTEM DESIGN STUDIO
Lucid Dreaming/Using Dream stabilization[edit] Once you are able to dream lucidly, you may find that it is difficult to stay in the dream; for example, you may wake instantly or the dream may start “fading” which is characterized by loss or degradation of any of the senses, especially vision. Alternatively, a new lucid dreamer could easily forget that they are in a dream, as a result of the shock of the sensation. Don't worry if you wake immediately after becoming lucid. As you gain more experience of becoming lucid, it will come as less of a shock and you’ll be less likely to wake up. Make sure you do a reality check to be sure you’re not still dreaming. You can avoid more gradual fadings by stimulating your senses. Ideally you should be able to use the techniques below to stabilize your dream before it starts to fade (or “black out”). Hand Touching[edit] Rub your hands together and concentrate on the rubbing. Spinning[edit] Slowing it down[edit] Touching your dream[edit] Regaining waking memory or skills[edit]
UK scientists invent artificial petrol - Business News Boffins at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Oxford have invented an ‘artificial’ petrol, which costs just 90 pence per gallon and could run in existing cars. Motorists could even be able to drive for 300 to 400 miles before needing to fill up. The breakthrough comes as average UK fuel prices have hit a record high. The new hydrogen-based fuel produces no greenhouse gases and could be available in as little as three years. Professor Stephen Bennington, the project’s lead scientist, said: “In some senses, hydrogen is the perfect fuel. “Our new hydrogen storage materials offer real potential for running cars, planes and other vehicles that currently use hydrocarbons.” How is it made? It says: "Storing hydrogen up to now has required either high-pressure storage cylinders at up to 700 times atmospheric pressure or super-cooled liquids at -253 degree Celsius. The company has a found a low-cost way to trap the hydride compound inside a nano-porous polymer micro bead.
Australian scientists discover new immune cell Red blood cells (red) and platelets (orange) amidst different immune cells. The newly discovered cell belongs to the family of lymphocytes, here depicted in blue. Credit: STEVE GSCHMEISSNER / SGS / Science Photo Library LONDON: A new type of white blood cell that plays an important role in the immune system has been discovered by Australian scientists. This research, published in the current issue of Nature Immunology, could improve our understanding of conditions such as infections and cancer, and may help develop new therapies for these diseases. “The discovery of these cells was accidental,” said Adam Uldrich, a biomedical researcher at the University of Melbourne and one of the investigators in the study. “We observed a population of cells that we did not expect to find. How immune cells sense their enemy A large family of immune cells, called T-cells, have special receptors on their surface to identify invading germs. Discovering unknown cell Synchrotron fast-tracking research
Deer found in middle ocean What is that?! Can it be, really!!! It ‘s a DEER!!! Not too much of a struggle? He was very glad to be on board. He was sooo tired and was glad to get into our boat and rest! And yes, we turned him loose when we got back to shore. 10+ Amazing Short Films You’d Not Believe Were Made With Free Software Blender is cross-platform so you can learn the basics right now with the QuickStart and plenty of other tutorials on the official site and all over the net. Blender’s not the only 3D content creation software available for free though. Just to name a few, there’s: Google SketchUp that’s great to create buildings and objects,Wings 3D, a cross-platform, open-source 3D modeler,MakeHuman, another cross-platform, open-source tool to model human characters,Sculptris, free Windows-only 3D modeling and sculpting software,MeshLab, cross-platform and open-source tool to process 3D scans,trueSpace, a free Windows-only 3D content creation tool. There are a few more alternatives which you can see here but Blender seems to be very popular so most of the following open-source-generated masterpieces are made with this powerful suite. Short Films Big Buck Bunny is an award-winning animated short film released online by the Blender Foundation in 2008. Shorts
Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear NOTE: Some major wind projects like the proposed TWE Carbon Valley project in Wyoming are already pricing in significantly lower than coal power -- $80 per MWh for wind versus $90 per MWh for coal -- and that is without government subsidies using today's wind turbine technology. The International Clean Energy Analysis (ICEA) gateway estimates that the U.S. possesses 2.2 million km2 of high wind potential (Class 3-7 winds) — about 850,000 square miles of land that could yield high levels of wind energy. This makes the U.S. something of a Saudi Arabia for wind energy, ranked third in the world for total wind energy potential. The United States uses about 26.6 billion MWh's, so at the above rate we could satisfy a full one-third of our total annual energy needs. Now what if a breakthrough came along that potentially tripled the energy output of those turbines? You see where I'm going. Well, such a breakthrough has been made, and it's called the "wind lens." Editor's note: Want more info?
Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 1 When I posted about decals last week, a number of readers commented that they would be interested in posts about linear algebra as it applies to game development. I decided if I'm going to write about that, I might as well start at the beginning! This will be review to many of you who have written games before or taken classes in kinematic physics, so please bear with me for this introductory post -- I will get to more advanced topics later. Why do we care about linear algebra? Linear algebra is the study of vectors. If your game involves the position of an on-screen button, the direction of a camera, or the velocity of a race car, you will have to use vectors. What is a vector? In games, vectors are used to store positions, directions, and velocities. The position vector indicates that the man is standing two meters east of the origin, and one meter north. As you can see, a vector by itself is just a set of numbers -- it is only given meaning by its context. Vector addition Next time
Behind Intel's New Random-Number Generator Imagine that it's 1995 and you're about to make your very first online purchase. You open your Netscape browser, sipping coffee as the home page slowly loads. You then navigate to Amazon.com, a new online bookstore your friend told you about. As you proceed to make your purchase and enter your payment information, the address your browser points to changes from one starting with “http” to one that begins with “https.” That signals that your computer has established an encrypted connection with Amazon's server. Unfortunately, your first online transaction was doomed from the start: It will soon be discovered that the supposedly secure transfer protocol your browser just followed wasn't very secure after all. The problem was that the secret keys Netscape was using weren't random enough. Netscape's programmers would have loved to use a completely random number to form the encryption key, but they had a hard time figuring out how to come up with one.