27-01-08 01.57 – Cool Websites (#11)

Nothing says art like a huge fork sticking into the ground. Click here for 32 more.

This poor sap looks like she’s been injected with testosterone as her and her pals have a nice sing-a-long in another hyperactive clip from Japan.

Further to this discovery of a ‘face in Mars’ EM radiation background noise has been converted into an audio file that could be ethereal nonsense or perhaps an Enochian point of contact. Indeed, as this archive claims, ‘The universe is divided into 33 aethyrs, each separated from the others by almost impassable walls…The physical world is the lowest of the aethyrs, surrounded by higher and higher spheres.’

If there’s one thing I like then thats hot goth girls. Here’s one and here’s plenty more.

In a technologically changing world we have become acquainted, since plastic at any rate, to a regular supply of new and potentially useful materials. New elements, new isotopes and new applications. Here’s a run down of 3 i really like.

• Aerogel – Used by NASA to recover dust particles from comets United Nuclear certainly make it sound interesting:

Aerogel (also called ‘frozen smoke’ because of its hazy blue appearance), is a truly remarkable material. It is the lightest and lowest-density solid known to exist, and holds an unbelievable 15 entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, including best insulator and lowest density solid. Aerogel is composed of 99.8% air and is chemically similar to ordinary glass. Being the world’s lightest known solid, it weighs only three times that of air.

• Beta carbon nitride – Nanosized beta carbon nitride (β-C₃N₄), of grain size several tens of nanometres, has been synthesized by mechanochemical reaction processing. For those of you who don’t know, beta carbon nitride is harder than diamond on the Mohs scale. Could do with making it bigger though, wouln’t mind my clothing in 20 years time to be made out of that!

Interestingly mechanochemical reactions are also useful for self replicating manufacturing systems. Josh Hall, Chief scientist with Nanorex asks us to ‘Consider a system composed of a population of replicating machines. Each machine consists of control and one or more “operating units” capable of doing primitive assembly operations (e.g. mechanochemical deposition reactions).’ Well it will certainly be interesting to see what influences the primitive assembly operations will have on the lowly swarm. Seeing as we’re here…

• Low-density, vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays that are engineered to have a reflective index of 0.045 have just been completed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As usual as the limit approaches 0 the level of scientific difficulty increases. This could make heating a lot more abundant at no cost to the environment.

We’ll end todays trip through the future with one idea of the origin of man.

Previous cool websites: (#1), (#2), (#3), (#4), (#5), (#6), (#7), (#8), (#9), (#10)