Awesome Science

At heart just a bunch of nickel particles in a beaker, the behavior of the metallic snakes above is remarkably lifelike; scientists believe they could yield valuable information on emergent behavior.

Seed Magazine’s Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an accurately scaled video depicting various major biological milestones; humankind is relegated to a blip near the end.

Masters students Brette and Rajinder take video up a dimension with their Spatially Augmented Reality Toolkit; above, embedded photosensors on a box allow for 3D projection.

The U.S. National Ignition Facility will be completed this month; its 192 lasers can shoot 500 terawatts into pellets, igniting fusion reactions that create 20x more energy than was put in.

DNA Heroes mixes Guitar Hero and genetics, swapping out Guns N’ Roses for Watson & Crick; correct base pairs grow your DNA strand, but miss ’em and you may grow an extra eye instead.

Make Magazine’s John Park not only talks about consumer ‘bots like the Roomba but shows us how to build our own, including a solar junkbot and a more complex beetlebot.

The Physics of Superheroes author and professor James Kakalios explains the science behind Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan above; it’s “not strictly correct… but cool nonetheless.”

Sony recently showed off portable fuel cells which charge devices via a USB port; it’s a hybrid system that uses a methanol fuel cell with Li-ion battery for storage and backup power.

Carl Sagan’s prescient prose really resonates in this amazing short by Michael Marantz; it’s titled The Pale Blue Dot, after Sagan’s 1994 book and Voyager 1 photo of the same name.

The ESA will be giving 1m euros to UK-based Reaction Engines for the Skylon; the jet- and rocket-engine spaceplane is designed to take off and land on conventional runways.

Making perfect sense those who live in sunny climes, this SunCat Batteries concept uses photovoltaic cells glued onto NiMHs to trickle charge depleted batteries with sunlight.

Journalists have been abuzz over Tuesday’s Iridium and Russian satellite collision; Analytical Graphics (AGI) has released a video showing the impact and subsequent debris clouds.

There’s nothing like monkey business to celebrate Darwin’s 200th: Devolve Me takes your picture and “devolves” you into one of four ancient ancestors (up to 3.7 million years ago).

Infinitely cool for math geeks: Perfectly Scientific’s Prime Number posters show primes up to 2^43112609 – 1; they’re printed so small you’ll need a magnifying glass to read them.

Not for the big ego’d: To22’s Universe Ring is actually a toroidal (doughnut) model of the universe inspired by Stephen Hawking; a tiny speck represents the current known universe.

We’ve heard about MIT’s Sixth Sense device, but didn’t “get it” until Wired posted this video; it’s a camera and projector that uses the internet to act as a real-world, real-time assistant.

There’s nothing like singing about Seaborgium in the shower; we like how this 71″ square Periodic Table Shower Curtain conveniently masks your subatomic parts as well.

If you thought one year in 40 seconds was cool, 650 million years in 1 minute 20 seconds will blow your mind; watch continents slide from prehistory to 250 M.Y. in the future.

Directed by Melih Bilgil, History of the Internet starts from the early days of Arpanet to the modern-day development of TCP/IP; we like the way he puts it in perspective of world events.

If ping-pong balls, rubber hands and inverted binocs sound strange, just wait until you read Boston.com’s article on brain hacking: it shows you how to hallucinate and trip out without drugs.

The video above shows a year’s worth of edits to the OpenStreetMap in glorious, world-spanning detail; the effort is akin to an open source version, wiki-fied version of Google Maps.

Created by Harvard’s Samuel Arbesman, this Milky Way Transit Authority map was inspired by a reading of Carl Sagan’s Contact and applies subway mapping on a galactic scale.

There’s nothing like flying through a supernova remnant to give you a bad hair day, but this 3D tour by MIT astrophysicist Tracy Delaney lets you do it safely; it’s visualized using real data.