Pictured: a meat smoker. And next to him, a contraption for cooking meat.

Before you write hate mail about my calling this guy a meat smoker, keep in mind that his name is Peter Rauch, and rauch is German for “smoke”.  Peter smoke.  Deal with it. (Wholly unnecessary disclaimer: He probably isn’t a meat smoker . . . not that there’s anything wrong with that.)  Anyway, Richard Peter here built an awesome, text-message sending meat smoker with a touch screen interface and built in temperature sensors.  He sets the desired temperature, and the smoker sends him a text message when the meat is ready.  The interface can also automatically hold the meat (heh heh) at a specific temperature for a long period of time.

It’s built out of a couple terra cotta pots, a 4-loop Gefran GFX4 temperature controller, a doohickey 5000, Modbus remote terminal (RTU) interface, words words words, a TS8010 HMI Touchscreen, and a bunch of other stuff I’m not going to list (the full parts list is in this pdf file).  I wonder what the text messages actually say.  If I built this, I know what I’d program it to send.  “Honey, this machine just called us meat smokers,” I would say to my imaginary husband.

[Make]

Sure everyone knows that Charles Darwin came up with the Theory of Evolution, but did you know that he was also one of the world’s first terraformers? That’s right, Darwin helped create one of the first self-sustaining ecosystems…and he did it on a barren island in the 1800’s.

Ascension Island is a tiny, volcanic speck stuck between South America and Africa and in the 1800’s, it was completely lifeless, with no trees and very little fresh water. (It was also a British military base intended to keep an eye on Napoleon, who was exiled on the nearby island of St. Helena.) Darwin visited the island during his historic voyage on the HMS Beagle, and several years afterwards, encouraged his friend, botanist Joseph Hooker, to develop a plan to forest Ascension with trees from England. And by England, we mean English gardens, which had trees from all over the world, including bamboo, Eucalyptus and Banana.

Today, Ascension Island is a lush oasis, as the hodgepodge of trees that never lived together before co-exist and suck moisture from the sea. It’s the first ever self-sustaining artificial ecosystem (Suck it, Biodome 2!), but few people have heard of it, including the scientists who should be learning from it.

BBC News recently interviewed Dr. Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool Johns Moores University, who has written extensively about the strange hodgepodge ecosystem that’s been created on the island and feels that it could tell us a lot about how a similar environment could be created artificially in space or on another planet.

“What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error.” He later added, “It’s a terrible waste that no-one is studying it,”

[BBC NEWS]

Why, yes, we intentionally went out of our way to write the weirdest headline we could think of for this news story, but it’s 100% true. A bunch of Canadian scientists, specifically the guys up at the Nanorobotics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, have figured out how to make certain bacteria do their bidding.

It works because the bacteria are “magnetotatic”, which means they swim in the direction of a magnetic field. So it’s fairly easy to manipulate them into moving around small blocks of epoxy and get them to build simple structures.

This may sound pretty goofy and pointless, but it’s not. This is actually a major step forward for nanotechnology. This is a proof of concept: we can actually do the stuff that heretofore was limited mostly to cyberpunk novels and hand-wringing by fundamentalists who barely grasp how robots work but can understand the term “gray goo”. Now it’s just a matter of making it effective. Check out the video under the jump and marvel at how kinda gross the future looks.

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Mark Zuckerberg has made billions off of basically demanding you tell the world about your crotch itching, and has been busted repeatedly for crapping all over user privacy. In fact, Facebook is one of the most unethical social networks out there, and people mostly only stay on it because A) their friends are all on it and B) it’s still way better than either Friendster or MySpace.

Now Zuckerberg, while dealing with an overdramatic movie that makes him look like a huge douche, is complaining that one of the multiple frivolous lawsuits that he’s got to deal with (you don’t make a few billion without somebody deciding they can get a piece with the right lawyer) is violating his privacy.

At root is a suit by one Paul Ceglia. Ceglia is claiming he’s got a contract with Zuckerberg that gives him 84% of Facebook. How, precisely, a guy who runs a wood-pellet business five hours away from where Zuckerberg lived would be involved, let alone why Zuckerberg would sign a contract giving him 84% of Facebook, is something Ceglia hasn’t bothered to explain in public yet, but we’re betting it’s got something to do with Ceglia being full of crap. This feeling is only intensified by Ceglia’s legal moves, which are basically designed to inconvenience and embarrass Zuckerberg. He’s trying to keep the trial in New York state courts while Zuckerberg is trying to relocate it to federal court (i.e. they’re fighting over who has to get on a lot of airplanes), and Ceglia is trying to force Zuckerberg to turn over personal details. Zuckerberg, of course, has suddenly become a profound advocate of personal privacy.

On the other hand, screw him, he’s worth $4 billion and he’ll win this, so let’s all point and laugh at the rich hypocrite played by Jesse Eisenberg. You know, the guy they get when Michael Cera turns you down.

[ via Slate ]

If the swimming robot wasn’t terrifying enough for you, there’s good news, as Carnegie Mellon University has released a new video of their tree-climbing robot.  This biomimetic robot mimics the movements of a snake to reach places people and other robots can’t reach.

Moreover, these highly articulated devices can coordinate their internal degrees of freedom to perform a variety of locomotion capabilities that go beyond the capabilities of conventional wheeled and the recently developed legged robots. The true power of these devices is that they are versatile, achieving behaviors not limited to crawling, climbing, and swimming. [CMU Biorobotics Lab]

Wait, not limited to crawling, climbing, and swimming?  What else?  Do they jump?  Holy crap they totally jump don’t they?  I knew it.  I bet they can fly, too.  Oh lawd flying snakebots, I need to lie down.  Oh god, it can do Inception too can’t it?

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“Scientifically accurate”

Quantum Quest: A Cassini Space Odyssey has been in development hell since 1996, which is also the year the animation in the trailer below seems to have come from.  It’s a $10 million (funded by NASA’s JPL) 3D animated film incorporating footage from the Cassini Huygens mission, and it’ll be screening at DragonCon tomorrow if you’re in the neighborhood and hate yourself.  I think about $9.9 million of that budget went to the voice cast, which includes Neil Armstrong, William Shatner, Chris Pine, Amanda Peet, Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Hamill, Hayden Christensen as a lizard in sunglasses, James Earl Jones, Brent Spiner, and Jason Alexander.  And, at some point, the cast also included John Travolta, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Christian Slater.

Whatever money was left over after paying the constantly-revolving voice cast was spent on the ear-raping website and on hiring Taiwanese animation studio Digimax to make the gigantic mess in the trailer below.  Topless Robot is calling it “Delgo in space”.  I’m calling it “footage you would see in an ITT Tech commercial.”  They just animated a lizard wearing sunglasses!  Those are the skills I need today for the jobs of tomorrow.

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