Cobbling together some LEGOs and a smartphone running a custom Android app, Mike Dobson and David Gilday built CubeStormer II, a lean, mean Rubik’s Cube-solving machine. Cracking a Rubik’s Cube in 5.35 seconds, Cubestormer II made mincemeat out of Ruby, the previous robot record holder — 10.18 seconds. And it even edged out the existing world record, 5.66 seconds, set by Feliks Zemdegs earlier this year. Watch him go below.
To see Cubestormer II in action, you can visit ARM TechCon 2011, to be held in Santa Clara, California on October 26 and 27. H/T Science Dump.
It all started when filmmaker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are) met handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan and asked her to create a Catcher in the Rye embroidery for his wall. She asked him to collaborate on a film in return. And so Jonze and Le-Tan, together with French director Simon Cahn, spent six months writing a script, then animating 3,000 pieces of felt cut by Le-Tan herself. The result is Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a short stop motion film set inside the famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and it features a skeleton, his lover, and some famous book covers that spring to life.
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For 17 days this past June, timelapse cinematographer Joe Capra traveled across Iceland, capturing its natural beauty during the months when the sun never sets and never rises. Making Midnight Sun was no easy feat. Capra worked at it around the clock, taking 38,000 images and traveling 2900 miles. Our recommendation? Watch the film on Vimeo, in HD and with a full screen.
Bonus: Don’t miss this new Cambridge Ideas film, Memories of Old Awake, that looks at how Iceland’s centuries old sagas are deeply intertwined with the everyday lives of people who live there.
As a chronicler of war, Don McCullin is a legend. Henri Cartier-Bresson once compared him to Goya, and John Le Carré wrote, “He was a communicator of the world’s worst agonies, a pilgrim to the front line of human suffering, returning with his kit-bag of horrors to appal the comfortable, the wilfully blind and the unknowing.” As a photojournalist for The Observer and the Sunday Times Magazine, McCullin covered all the major conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the minor ones: Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Cyprus, Biafra, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War. But McCullin has always hated the term “war photographer” for what he calls its mercenary ring. In recent years the photographer has turned his lens on more peaceful subjects, like the English landscape. Yet even in pastoral settings, McCullin’s work retains a sense of menace. The very light seems to brood, as one colleague put it. “My favorite time to photograph landscape is evening,” McCullin said in a 1987 interview. “I can’t avoid wanting everything to go dark, dark, dark.”
A major exhibit of McCullin’s work is on display at the Imperial War Museum in London through April 15, while a smaller exhibit of his non-war photographs (see above) is on display at the Tate Britain through March 4.
You may have seen levitation tricks performed by magicians, but rest assured that they can’t beat this: quantum levitation. The video above was captured at the 2011 ASTC conference, a gathering of scientists in Baltimore, Maryland, with the purpose of demonstrating “how science centers and museums are putting new ideas to practical use to serve their communities.” The School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel-Aviv University has put together this physics experiment showcasing quantum superconductors locked in a magnetic field.
While the video fails to explain the science of what is happening here, the complementary website is helpful. The white round disk (essentially a sapphire wafer coated with a thin layer of yttrium barium copper oxide) is cooled to below negative 185 degrees C. At that temperature (dubbed the critical temperature), the material becomes superconductive, meaning that it has zero electrical resistance. From the website:
Superconductivity and magnetic field do not like each other. When possible, the superconductor will expel all the magnetic field from inside. This is the Meissner effect. In our case, since the superconductor is extremely thin, the magnetic field DOES penetrate. However, it does that in discrete quantities (this is quantum physics after all! ) called flux tubes.
Inside each magnetic flux tube superconductivity is locally destroyed. The superconductor will try to keep the magnetic tubes pinned in weak areas (e.g. grain boundaries). Any spatial movement of the superconductor will cause the flux tubes to move. In order to prevent that, the superconductor remains “trapped” in midair.
And in case you’re wondering: are there practical applications for quantum levitation? The answer, of course, is yes!
Find free physics courses in our big collection of Free Courses from top universities — 400 great courses and growing.
Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
Novels — they’re in inevitable decline. They can’t compete with the movie screen, the TV screen and now the computer screen. Give things 25 years, and there will be just a small cult of readers left. That’s the prediction of American author, Philip Roth, who has 27 novels to his credit. And apparently, Roth is personally hastening the process. Earlier this year, he told a reporter for the Financial Times: “I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.” When asked why, he quipped: “I don’t know. I wised up … ”
For Paul Auster, another productive novelist, the reports of the novel’s death are greatly exaggerated. Humans hunger for stories. They always will. And, the novel, it knows how to adapt and survive. Will it survive with the help of technology? Auster might not be the best person to ask. He owns neither a computer nor a mobile phone. Lucky man.
Bonus: You can listen to Paul Auster read The Red Notebook, a collection of short stories published in 2002, right here. (He starts reading at around the 8:30 mark.) We have it listed in our collection of Free Audio Books.
“If you had to give rock and roll another name,” John Lennon once said, “you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’ ” The man known as the father of rock and roll turns 85 today and he’s still going strong. To celebrate, we bring you this powerful 1958 performance of “Johnny B. Goode.”
Berry was born October 18, 1926 in St. Louis, Missouri. He developed a love of music early, and made his debut playing a blues song in a high school talent show. While still in high school, Berry was sentenced to juvenile prison for armed robbery. After getting out, he joined pianist Johnnie Johnson’s trio. It didn’t take long before Johnson was the sideman and Berry was the bandleader. His big break came in 1955, when he made a road trip to Chicago and sought out his hero, Muddy Waters. Waters suggested he go see Leonard Chess at Chess Records. Berry returned to Chicago with a demo tape that included an up-tempo adaptation of a traditional country song called “Ida Red.” Chess liked it, but said it needed a new name. Berry recorded it as “Maybellene.” The song went to number one on the Billboard rhythm and blues chart. Over the next few years Berry virtually invented the Rock and Roll form, with songs like “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Johnny B.Goode,” and “No Particular Place to Go.”
“He was the king of rock and roll,” Jerry Lee Lewis said in the biopic Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. “My mama said, ‘You and Elvis are pretty good, but you’re no Chuck Berry.’ ” When Keith Richards inducted Berry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, he joked that he had stolen every lick Berry ever played. “The beautiful thing about Chuck Berry’s playing,” Richards wrote in his autobiography, Life, “was it had such an effortless swing. None of this sweating and grinding away and grimacing, just pure, effortless swing, like a lion.”
For one more look at the lion in action–this time playing “Roll Over Beethoven”–here’s another clip from the 1958 television broadcast:
The Open University strikes again. In June, they released The History of English, a series of witty animated videos that covered 1600 years of linguistic history in ten minutes. Now, they’re back with 60-Second Adventures in Thought, another animated sequence that highlights six famous thought experiments. It all starts with Zeno’s ancient Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. (Watch above.) Then we head straight to the 20th century, to five famous thought experiments in physics, math and computer science.
The Grandfather Paradox (time travel)
Chinese Room (artificial intelligence)
Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (the concept of infinity)
The Twin Paradox (special relativity)
Schrödinger’s Cat (quantum mechanics)
You can watch the full series on YouTube and iTunes.
El Caminito del Rey (The King’s Little Path), often abbreviated to El Camino del Rey, is a walkway that winds its way along the walls of El Chorro, a gorge in southern Spain near the village of Álora. It is generally considered one of the most dangerous hikes in the world. The construction of the walkway was finished in 1905, and after King Alfonso XIII crossed it in 1921, it became known by its current name. In recent decades, large parts of the concrete resting on steel rails have deteriorated so badly that it has become a life-threatening endeavor to traverse the camino. After several fatal accidents, authorities officially closed the path in 2000. But there are still daring hikers who manage to get around the barriers and make their way across the gorge. The video above shows in impressive detail how dangerous the camino is.
If you feel an inner urge to walk the camino, there are two important things to keep in mind:
It really is insanely dangerous. Matador has some life-saving tips if you want to trek the camino.
If you want to get the true camino experience, you have to hurry up. The walkway will be restored for 9 million euros between 2011 and 2015.
Bonus material: The Cheap Route has a first-person account and some fantastic photos of a camino hike.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Take a deep breath and watch this 1964 television performance of “The Girl from Ipanema” by Brazilian bossa nova singer Astrud Gilberto and American jazz saxophonist Stan Getz.
The arrangement is from the classic album, Getz/Gilberto, which launched the bossa nova craze of the early 60’s. The album was primarily a collaboration between Getz and Astrud’s husband, the guitarist and vocalist João Gilberto, but when someone got the idea of including an English translation of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema,” Astrud was recruited. She had never sung professionally before. The recordings launched her as an international sensation.
Since then, “The Girl from Ipanema” has weathered a half-century of heavy rotation on the Holiday Inn lounge circuit and Muzak. (Remember the elevator scene in The Blues Brothers?) So it can be hard to imagine just how cool the song must have seemed in 1964 with the release of Getz/Gilberto. That saxophone. That voice. As the person who posted this video on YouTube put it: “Chill, baby, chill…”
When it’s all said and done, you can also meet Heloisa Pinheiro, the woman who inspired the song all of those years ago.
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