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The Kuru-Kuru Nabe is a self-stirring pot that was invented by a Japanese dentist who goes by the name of Hideki Watanabe.
Watanabe created his initial prototype by using dental plaster to coat the insides of the pot so that it creates a natural whirlpool when boiled – simple and effective.
I find it interesting that a lot of people have translated “kuru-kuru†to “round and round†– my preferred translation would be “spinningâ€.
[Source]
from The UberReview
Researchers from Yale University have discovered a mushroom in the jungles of Ecuador that is able to survive on a diet of polyurethane.
The fungus, namely Pestalotiopsis microspore is able to survive by eating plastic alone and has no need for air or light. The discovery was made by students Jonathan Russell and Pria Anand, who have published their findings in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
The pair has isolated the enzyme within P. microspore that allows it to decompose plastic; the next step will be to extract the enzyme so that it can be put to work dealing with plastic waste. Now all we need is a mushroom that can dine on cesium and we’ll be set.
[Source]
from The UberReview
The last controlled moon landing was in 1976. Now it’s time to go back and the reasons are more compelling than ever, argue space scientists
It’s almost 40 years since the last humans visited the lunar surface during the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972.
While algorithms for turning raster images into vector images are nothing new, the usual suspects perform terribly when it comes to sprite-sized pixel-art type images where each pixel matters a lot. Enter this cool project that Johannes Kopf and Dani Lischinski presented at Siggraph 2011. Their paper, which nicely explains the nitty gritty, is freely available (PDF), and there’s also an online gallery where you can see how their method stacks up against a bunch of other algorithms when it comes to scaling up some classic sprites. I especially like the new streamlined Space Invader shapes. I always wondered what they really looked like. [via O’Reilly Radar]
from MAKE
Among the many lessons the US military learned from the war in Afghanistan (beyond, of course, don’t engage in a land war in Afghanistan) is the need for continuous battlefield surveillance. To help do that work, Boeing developed the Phantom Eye UAV, a drone aircraft that can scout a theater of operations for up to four days at a time without blinking. More »
from Gizmodo
I’m a big fan of the blog There, I Fixed It, which covers “Epic Kludges and Jury Rigs,†according to their tag line. While most of the time, they’re posting about the bad and the ugly, every now and then a really good jury rig comes through my feed from them. This particular one caught my eye and one commenter tracked down the source. This drawbridge-style window garden, named Volet Végétal, comes to us from Paris-based design and architecture firm BarreauCharbonnet. As one of the selections from the “Jardin Jardin†design contest, they’ll be showing their prototype at le Jardin des Tuileries exhibition this summer. Check out this video for how they made it.
from MAKE
Last week, I had the pleasure of testing out Oru Kayak, the world’s first origami kayak. It was wonderful!
Anton Willis, the designer, and I met at the Berkeley Marina to put his latest iteration to the test. I had been watching Anton construct the kayak for months at TechShop and had always bugged him about taking me out for a test ride. I finally got my wish.
He pulled the folded kayak, roughly the size of a large artist portfolio, out of his car and set it in the grass near the docks. A small crowd began to form as he unfolded the cut sheet of corrugated plastic, the same material as the political advertisement in your neighbor’s front lawn. The entire build time took about ten minutes, but easily could’ve been halved without the peppering of questions from the onlookers.
Before I knew it, I was paddling around the marina at a surprisingly high clip. I don’t consider myself a kayak expert, but the Oru design felt fast and comfortable. You quickly forget that it’s a neatly folded piece of plastic. The big question on my mind, and probably everyone else’s, was: how much water would it take on? It was, after all, an origami kayak. After kayaking around the marina and near the larger waves of the San Francisco Bay, I was still completely dry without a drop of water inside the vessel.  Anton told me it doesn’t take on any more water than a typical kayak - spray and paddle drip.
Anton expects the kayak to retail for about $500. You can sign up to receive the release date announcement on Oru’s website.
from MAKE