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HOWTO: View the Transit of Mercury on November 8
The Exploratorium has instructions for building a projector to view the transit of Mercury across the Sun, an event that occurs only 12 times a century. Link (via BoingBoing)
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“Fossil” Virus Resurrected from Human Genome
French researchers have resurrected the “Phoenix virus,” a “fossil” virus that lay dormant in the human genome. The retrovirus infected our ancestors millions of years ago, and is apparently still infectious in its new revivified form. The researchers showed that the newly crated virus could infect a variety of human cell lines and replicate. But…
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Hors d’oeuvres?
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=40492213&size=o
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Robots Staff Automated Restaurants
The Bytes restaurant in Canterbury, England is a sit-down restaurant where you order on touchscreen panels (games replace the menu when ordering is complete). Food preparation will be handled by the AIC-AI Cookingrobot–which is forecast to be ready for home use by next year–and food will be brought to the table by Hong Kong’s new…
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The Next Best Thing to a Replicator
Gareth at STREETtech.com says: I love some of the insanely great things that people are doing with rapid prototyping technology. Here, members of the Swedish design group FRONT use motion capture tech to record the free-handed strokes of their furniture drawing and then a rapid prototyping machine fabs the pieces they’ve drawn in liquid plastic.…
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Gentlemen, Start Your Novels
(Ladies, too.)Today marks the start of National Novel Writing Month. National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has…
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The Rise of the Machines
News at Seven is a scary-smart automated news project from Northwestern University. It pulls news stories in from RSS feeds, finds related video and still images, and then composes a story that’s “read” by a video-game character from Half-Life. It even cuts away to a different reader narrating posts from blogs related to the day’s…
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Snow Crash Comes to the Metaverse
Penguin Books has launched an in-game publishing venture in the virtual world Second Life, leading with Neal Stephenson’s wonderful Snow Crash. Which is nice, since the book’s Metaverse was the inspiration for the Second Life game. Penguin worked with the London-based virtual world design agency Rivers Run Red to create an in-world version of the…
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Really Short Stories
Wired Magazine challenged authors to write SF stories in just six words. Some of these are surprisingly evocative. Internet “wakes up?” Ridicu – no carrier. – Charles Stross It cost too much, staying human. – Bruce Sterling It’s behind you! Hurry before it – Rockne S. O’Bannon I’m your future, child. Don’t cry. – Stephen…
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Locus Magazine Reviews The Prestige
Two reviews of the new steampunk movie starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are up on the Locus home page: One by Gary Westfahl and one by Howard Waldrop & Lawrence Person. The movie also stars David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, which brings a smile to my face just thinking about it.