tingilinde

solar energy + water = fuel

A holy grail. You can use electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, but the efficiency is low.

Daniel Nocera from MIT has just published in Science (an MIT pr piece here), something that claims to be efficient and easy to make.

potentially very exciting and probably much more work to be done.

the fine line between cool and tacky

monkeyelectric

an accurate functional model of the workings of congress

and made of wood

(thanks Greg!)

lhc rap

yikes -- thanks to the 18 (and counting) people who sent this

(actually factual)

bike commuting tips

Someone asked for resources ... Paul Dorn's notes are very good as is his blog

cute iphone app

Some of us talked about this when it was announced the iPhone has an accelerometer built in (hi Mike and Alan) - I haven't tested it, but it is may work well.

I can't recommend it as it may encourage dangerous behavior (be careful where you use it!), but it is still cute.

how to kill a company in less than a day

Yesterday I spent 30 minutes trying to use cuil.com (I won't put in a hyperlink to save you the waste of time).

To call this overhyped is an understatement. Magic words were said about the capabilities of the founders and how much better search would be, but the experience was painful and unproductive. This is probably the biggest mismatch in promised to delivered user experience of anything I've seen on the net since the dot com bust.

It would take glowing reviews from people I trust to get me to visit the site again. A quick check of other blogs, emails and IMs indicates everyone had the same bad experience.

A fantastic example of how a hype machine whipped up millions in free advertising, but since it was only hype, the word quickly grew and the promotion turned into a huge negative campaign they couldn't control.

Even if they have some deep tech that works (and there are indications they don't), their investors should think about cutting their losses and bailing. The cost of attracting users back is going to be incredibly high.

$10 microscope on a chip from caltech

A very nice project by Changhuei Yang of Caltech.

snip

"Our research is motivated by the fact that microscopes have been around since the 16th century, and yet their basic design has undergone very little change and has proven prohibitively expensive to miniaturize. Our new design operates on a different principle and allows us to do away with lenses and bulky optical elements," says Yang.

The fabrication of the microscopic chip is disarmingly simple. A layer of metal is coated onto a grid of charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor (the same sensors that are used in digital cameras). Then, a line of tiny holes, less than one-millionth of a meter in diameter, is punched into the metal, spaced five micrometers apart. Each hole corresponds to one pixel on the sensor array. A microfluidic channel, through which the liquid containing the sample to be analyzed will flow, is added on top of the metal and sensor array. The entire chip is illuminated from above; sunlight is sufficient.

When the sample is added, it flows--either by the simple force of gravity or drawn by an electric charge--horizontally across the line of holes in the metal. As cells or small organisms cross over the holes, one hole after another, the objects block the passage of light from above onto the sensor below. This produces a series of images, consisting of light and shadow, akin to the output of a pinhole camera.

pigs in space

this squeals for narration. Thanks for the link Bjarne .. and also for the title (although Jim Henson must be smiling)

first paperclips and now this...

Norway claims to have invented the paperclip - Jim is visiting the place and points out we need to remember the cheese slicer is also a norwegian innovation.

It is sad the claim on the paperclip isn't that solid. In WWII they were a symbol of independence in Nazi occupied Norway.