Professor Miklós Zrínyi of Semmelweiss University in Budapest, Hungary, has invented a magnetic gel which can be shaped in various forms and then moved using magnetism.
Soft magnetic materials like this one could be used for artificial muscles in robots, or to replace rigid machine components, such as valves. Other teams are also working on making robots more flexible: an electroactive polymer was recently used to create a motor that rotates, without any gears or ratchets. A chemical gel that can walk like a caterpillar could also be used as a component of future robots.
If you guys haven’t discovered YouTube star MeekaKitty yet, you’re in for a treat. Her latest music vid, “Navi’s Song (Hey, Listen!)” was just released this week. Check it out below, as well as her Star Trek Girl vid.
Yikes! While being on the subject on ninjas, wow would YOU react if someone would jump out of no where like this and start dancing right in front of you?
“Internet” abbreviations such as LOL have made it into the Oxford English Dictionary — but it turns out some of them aren’t quite as modern as might be believed.
The new update also features the first ever symbol to be listed as a word, ? (as in I ? Huckabees.) The symbol is listed specifically to represent the use of “heart” as a verb — a use that enters the dictionary for the first time, although dictionary editors say that it dates back at least to bumper stickers displayed in 1984.
The changes come in a quarterly update which is part of the OED’s modern schedule: as well as working through alphabetically to revise existing listings over many years (the current update revised “roto” through to “Ryvita”,) editors add a batch of words that have become widely used enough to justify an entry.
The complete list of additions and revisions includes LOL for Laugh out Loud (meaning my mother is now officially wrong in using it to mean Lots of Love), FYI (For Your Information) and OMG (Oh My God). While the terms have become popular through text messaging and online chat, they are by no means new: OMG was first recorded in a personal letter from 1917, while FYI dates back at least to memos of the 1940s. But while there’s evidence of LOL in use in 1960, in that time it referred neither to laughter or love, but rather a “little old lady.”
Other tech-related terms include a dot-bomb (referring to a spectacular failure of an Internet company), rotoscoping, and ego-surfing (searching online for mentions of yourself). Meanwhile the world of “culture” brings car crash (in a figurative rather than literal sense), the muffin top (midsection flesh that spills over a waistband), WAG (a wife or girlfriend of a sporting star) and the tinfoil hat (of a conspiracy theorist.)
(Editorial note: this may be hard to believe after our Chrome/Firefox coincidence earlier this week, but the presence of this story alongside this GaS headline is completely unintentional!)
Niche dating sites have been popping up all over for the last couple years, including those for book-lovers, pet-owners and people who love a guy with a mustache.
So, it’s really nothing new to see a nerd-specific site out there on teh interwebz, since, hey, this is where we all are, right? But, really, shouldn’t the founders of NerdPassions.com really try to step up their game a bit? I mean, who wants to join a dating site that features this guy as a representative member?
There’s no featured female nerd, either, which I can only assume means a) women aren’t nerds, according to NerdPassions.com, or b) geeky women are less hot than that guy up there.
The hell, I say.
The fact that this site doesn’t take any realistic features of real-life nerds and geeks into account, instead relying on long-outdated (and hardly attractive) stereotypes, reeks of site-mill manufacture. It smells exactly like the inside of a tauntaun. The site would be better served if they hired one of their member-geeks to redesign it with some real world examples of geeky people. Cosplay chicks and guys in lab coats for instance, or hey, how about a normal-looking person who loves to code? I know these people–why doesn’t Nerd Passions?
We at [GAS] know geeks are sexy as all get-out. Really, it’s all we ever talk about. Thankfully, there are some geek and chic dating sites out there for people who know that “Revenge of the Nerds” was not a documentary.
Believe it or not, vFx superstar Freddiew has recently ran into an alien, and was surprisingly able to film the whole encounter from a third-person perspective! No special effects software was used in the making of this video. None at all.
If you’re a science geek and you aren’t watching Dr. Kaku’s Universe, prepare to spend a few hours catching up.
Over on Big Think, theoretical physicist at C.U.N.Y. and popular radio host and television personality Michio Kaku answers reader questions about physics and futuristic science. This week he tackles Star Trek’s “photon torpedo” and talks about improving efficiency in space travel with the microwave rocket.
You mean I can’t annihilate the enemy with my flashlight? But… that was my back-up plan. Damn you, Star Trek!
