Category: Sciences
-
Scientific experiments on video
One of the most complicated problems of Science is to reach full reproductibility of experiments. Even more, it is merely an issue of knowing how one experiment was done. It is in this context of research and education that the JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) web site was created to present videos of some scientific…
-
Man fined for ‘pregnancy’
A man living near Johannesburg (South Africa) was recently fined by a court for a bizarre reason: He stole a pregnancy certificate and forged it to get seven days off work. Apparently, he did not think that somebody would notice the ‘difficulty’ a man would have to become pregnant. Source: BBC news.
-
Bugs shot in macrophoto
Here is a photo gallery with nice macro photos of little critters and bugs. Some of them look like actual ETs from StarShip Troopers. I do think that these are really great shots from Igor Siwanowicz.
-
AntiGravity: Toilets flush and Microsoft
There is no end to jokes about what Microsoft did wrong (they’re the number one target for many jokes and many grievances, just from their being #1 software company). Today, I want to point you to an excellent little paper by Steve Mirsky published in his excellent column in Scientific American magazine. In the October…
-
The 8.6 giga-pixel image
In the rush for higher resolution images, HAL9000 Iconos has a significant advance over the competition with its 8600 mega-pixel image. They obtained this enormous image by assembling it from 1145 individual photos of about 12 Mega-Pixel each. The result is on the Italian web site of HaltaDefinizione.com and it is impressive. You can also…
-
Public-Key cryptography ready to shatter?
Public-Key Cryptography is a very common technique used to protect sensitive information by encoding it in such a way that decoding relies on the extreme difficulty of some mathematics techniques (like finding the root factors of a prime integer). Today, a large part of our security is relying on this (including most of the secure…
-
Spider pictures
Not only for exclusive insect and arhtropod lovers, but also for those who want to see nice photo snapshots, the spiders are a bottomless source of nice pictures. A web site is offering an impressive link collection about these: Arachnology. Not all links are working (far from it), but the choice is impressive and leaves…
-
Click prohibition
The dontclickit.com web site is an experience definitely interesting for all who (like you and me, no doubt) are used to intereact with a web site using the click of our mouse. This special web site – it is a research experiment about man-machine interfaces – is 100% usable without ever clicking on anything. It’s…
-
The digital museum for the Achaemenid Persian Empire
You certainly remember the (somewhat ephemereal) success of the many cultural CD-ROMs that appeared on the shelves five years ago to offer quality presentations of painters, museums, cities or historical periods (they were flourishing just before Christmas of course). Even if it did not disappear completely, this market seems to have been overwhelmed by the…