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While an off-the-shelf chemistry set of today consists of little more than baking soda, some vinegar and a plastic volcano, old sets were filled with good stuff, like explosive nitrates and deadly cyanide compounds.
You probably only read Consumer Reports if a) you are at your grandparents house or b) you are a grandparent yourself. But that's too bad, because tucked quietly away in the NYC suburb of Yonkers lies one of the biggest and best electronics testing labs money can buy. And what goes on here at Consumer Reports main test facility probably puts most other tech pubs to shame.
Gmail has just added a new Labs feature that you can turn on if, like me, you're very lazy: Canned Responses. Find yourself always typing the same message in emails, over and over again? You know, like "Dear Mum, Please send money, I'm still looking for a job, I promise" or "Can't hang out tonight, playing video games and feeling sorry for myself" or something like that. Well, now you can write those once, save them as canned responses, and easily pop them into any message you're writing.
I've spent the morning at Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and I've seen some pretty amazing inventions that may not be far away from a shop near you. One of the coolest was these magnetic LED tiles that allow you to build any kind of 2D- or 3D-shaped display by just attaching one to the next. The results, combined with the beauty of the animated colour LEDs behind the diffusing glass, are stunning. The way it works seems like magic.
These are the walls of a Human-Computer Interaction Institute lab at Carnegie Mellon, and as you can see, they provide plenty of opportunities to create such interactions on the fly when you snag your sweater on some spiky solder leads or that ZIF socket handle. Chris Harrison, a PhD student, bought old motherboards on eBay by the pound to completely adorn the lab in mo-bos. And while this is great for the computer science lab and maybe OK for the garage (maybe), don't even think about doing this in your bedroom if you ever want to have sex again. It does look pretty sweet, though.
Science lab night-time routine goes like this: the experiment concludes, equipment winds slowly down. You rub bleary eyes, stretch your stiff neck, hit "save" on the data for analysis tomorrow. Then you deal with the forest of coffee mugs, flick the light switch and bumble out of the door. But the lab's still there: racks of equipment that can't be turned off humming, shining in the glow of its own LEDs... The technical bounds that give us our gadgets happen in these places of science, thought and, as it turns out, a kind of weird beauty when everyone's gone for the night. And that's the subject of this amazing photo set over at Seed Magazine. Check out the link for the full set: it'll get you thinking, or possibly reminiscing (it certainly did for me.) [Seed Magazine via Wired] Photos: Noah Kalina.
I've spent the morning at Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and I've seen some pretty amazing inventions that may not be far away from a shop near you. One of the coolest was these magnetic LED tiles that allow you to build any kind of 2D- or 3D-shaped display by just attaching one to the next. The results, combined with the beauty of the animated colour LEDs behind the diffusing glass, are stunning. The way it works seems like magic.