For the past five years, Peter Jansen, a Canadian scientist whose PhD is in neural computation and cognitive modelling, has been developing a series of open source hardware “tricorders” — handheld sensor packages running GNU/Linux that can be used by everyday people to make and record observations about the world around them. There are several versions of the tricorder, some with sensors attached (atmospheric, electromagnetic, spatial), others that are “blank,” with places to mount your own sensors. The latest version, the Mark IV, is still in development, and is intended to be mass-produced at low cost. The Tricorder project emphasizes accessibility. The devices we build are meant to be as inexpensive as possible, so folks might have access to them without having to worry about the cost, or their difficulty of use. My hope is that someday every household and every child who wants one might have access to a small device that can easily be kept close in a pocket or bag, and quickly pulled out when curiosity strikes. By turning a walk home through the park into a nature walk, and Dad’s spring time home repairs into a lesson about heat flow, it’s my hope that everyday experiences will become opportunities to learn and develop an intuitive understanding and deep fluency with the science of our everyday world. It is my deep belief that knowledge brings about positive change. It’s possible that the same instrument that can show a child how much chlorophyll is in a leaf could also show how them much pollution is in the air around us, or given off by one’s car. As an educator and a researcher, I feel that if people could easily discover things about their worlds that were also important social topics, that they would then make positive social choices, like reducing their emissions, or petitioning for cleaner industry in their communities. By having access to general tools, people can learn about leaves, or air, or clouds, or houses or light, or magnetism, or temperature or anything the Tricorder can help them see. Most of all, the Tricorder is designed to discover things that we don’t already know. I’m excited about what you can discover with it. And that’s what it’s about. Little discoveries, everywhere. the Tricorder project: ( via MeFi )

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Open source "tricorders": handheld sensor packages for everyone

Three billion years ago was way, way before humans. It was before mammals. It was before dinosaurs and insects and even plants. It was before Earth had any forms of life more complex than microbes. But it still rained back then, and paleoclimatologists have used fossilized raindrops to figure out what kind of atmosphere our planet used to have.

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Fossil raindrops reveal climate secrets from 3 billion years ago

Bob sez, “Nemanja Jevremovic has replicated some of Nikola Tesla’s equipment. There are lots of dials, switches, knobs, and meters. The guts of the equipment are beautifully crafted and on proud display. He calls it ‘Technical Art’. These creations would be equally appropriate in a gallery or on the set of an old science fiction movie.” Technical Art ( Thanks, Bob! )

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Artistic and functional replicas of Tesla’s equipment

Artist Berndnaut Smilde makes clouds . These surreal, indoor installations require a fog machine and a close eye on temperature and humidity. Sure they only last for a moment, but how cool is that image?

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Image of the Day: man-made cloud exhibit merges art and science

An experimental printer documented by Cambridge University scientists in a paywalled Royal Society paper is capable of laser-ablating the toner off of sheets of previously printed paper, leaving them ready to be reused. The device uses picosecond pulses of a green laser that passes through the cellulose in the paper, but vaporizes the toner. The primary goal of unprinting is to cut down on the carbon footprint of the paper and printing industries. Manufacturing paper is incredibly messy business that produces millions of tons of CO2 every year. Recycling paper is definitely a step in the right direction, but its still a very resource-intensive process. If we could simply delete sheets of paper, rather than re-pulping them, we could cut down on electricity usage, CO2 output, and most importantly fresh water, which is growing more scarce by the year. It would also be rather handy if you never had to buy another ream of paper, too. In a worst-case scenario, The University of Cambridge unprinting method has half the carbon emissions of recycling; best-case, unprinting is almost 20 times as efficient. Its now a matter of building the technology into a commercial device, which the team admits is probably a long way off. High-powered picosecond lasers are the reserve of labs for now! The laser unprinter ( via /. )

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Laser de-printer lifts ink from paper, leaving it ready to be reused

Over the last year or so, crowdsourcing has emerged as a way for lots of people to contribute small amounts of money to make amazing new things possible. Kickstarter (which focuses on commercial projects) has been the best example of this, and a new site called Petridish.org wants to take that model and apply it to scientific research. It’s brilliant.

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With crowdsourced funding, science wins and so do you

Snails — you know those slimy mollusks (they’re not bugs or insects) with the hard shells that move reaaally slow? Yeah, scientists at the Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York want to harvest the electrical power from their blood after they’ve been implanted with biofuel cells. So much for being worthless slugs.

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Biofuel cell-implanted snails can produce months of electricity

Fusion is the way our sun powers itself. It’s clean, it’s efficient, and all you need is hydrogen, which we’ve got a bunch of stashed away in the ocean. We’ve been having trouble making fusion happen here on Earth, because we don’t have any suns lying around to do it for us, but this could be the year where we make it happen, efficiently, with giant lasers .

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This could be the year we break even with laser fusion

Your average QWERTY keyboard really isn’t average. Researchers believe that words containing more letters from the right hand side stir “warmer feelings” than those words on the left.

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Why the left side of your keyboard doesn’t get any love

Here’s an interesting Bloomberg News item on Metabolomx , a 12-person venture based in Mountain View, CA that’s designing a PC-sized device to detect cancer by smell . “The problem with cancer-detecting dogs is that, well, they’re dogs. Hospitals haven’t embraced the idea of a diagnostic tool that poops, barks and requires feeding.” Enter the cancer-sniffing machines.

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Startup developing machine to mimic "cancer-sniffing dogs"