Floating Bonsai trees are better than floating speakers

Floating things on magnets makes most things cooler. Bonsai trees are certainly no exception. Kickstarter project “Air Bonsai” combines together magnetic levitation, wee plants and traditional Japanese “monozukuri” (craftsmanship). Using the same magnetic floating trick we’ve seen in speakers, everything that the tree — or plant of your choosing — needs is contained within the floating ball. The team has already passed its goal of $80,000 but you can still add to the money pot, with $200 enough to land you a basic starter kit.

Because of the import issues of sending plants between countries, US-based backers will be receiving locally-sourced, tiny pine trees, but there’s nothing to stop you floating different tiny plants for your own bizarre anime dream. Depending on your aesthetic tastes, you can upgrade the “little star” floating orb, with a particularly attractive lava-stone pot at the top of our shopping list. There’s four designs for the “energy base” that maintains the magnetic field: all of which look classier than the chintzy speakers we’ve seen at tech trade shows. And if you’re feeling classy to the extent of $10,000 ,then you can get an exclusive handmade cushion, base and Bonsai “star”, as well as a tour of both a Bonsai garden and the workshop behind the project.

Source: Kickstarter

Hubble shows some of the galaxy’s biggest, brightest stars

The Hubble Space Telescope still isn’t done providing insights and pretty pictures — far from it. Researchers have published a composite Hubble image showing the massive, extra-bright stars of the Trumpler 14 cluster, which sits 8,000 light-years away in the Carina Nebula. It’s dazzling, of course (NASA likens the stars to diamonds), but it’s also a reminder that some celestial bodies lead short, intense lives. Many of the stars you see here are young (under 500,000 years old) blue-white variants burning so fiercely that they’ll explode as supernovae within a few million years, rather than die relatively quietly over billions of years.

Don’t mourn their brief lifespans. Those violent deaths will likely help form new stars, some of which are bound to last far longer than their predecessors. Nebulae already have a reputation as stellar nurseries… this picture just serves as vivid proof.

[Image credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz, Acknowledgment: N. Smith]

Via: Wired

Source: NASA

The internet is making public grieving acceptable again

Grieving used to be a public affair, but it was gradually suppressed in the 20th century as psychology made those outward displays socially unacceptable. Death and loss were things you were supposed to deal with privately. Well, public mourning is back — and you largely have the internet to thank for it. As The Atlantic notes, the deaths of David Bowie and other famous artists in recent months (including Alan Rickman, Glenn Frey and Scott Weiland) have shown that social networks are quickly becoming mainstays of the grieving process. Those profile pages, mentions and hashtags enable a sort of connected wake, a place where everyone can share their fond memories with fellow sympathizers.

The concept isn’t new, of course (the sites themselves have anticpated post-death needs for years), and it has its fair share of critics. After all, it takes just a few seconds to send your condolences. Unless people write detailed stories, it’s hard to know whether they’re genuinely sad or just paying a token amount of respect. There’s certainly a case to be made for keeping some grief offline, since there are likely far fewer people who can relate to losing one of your close family members than there are for a rock star.

However, the rapid rise of internet-based mourning (especially in the past several weeks) suggests that people have wanted this public outlet for a while. It’s just that technology and cultural norms have shifted enough to make it viable — you can post that Twitter tribute or YouTube response knowing that there will be plenty of people who can see and share what you’re going through. You probably won’t see formal online grieving periods any time soon, but you also won’t be left wondering if your friends and acquaintances miss a celebrity as much as you do.

[Image credit: Xinhua/Han Yan via Getty Images]

Via: MIT Technology Review

Source: The Atlantic

Lockheed Martin works on smaller, more powerful telescope tech

To make space telescopes more powerful, scientists would have to make their lenses larger. The bad news is it’s not only tricky to make huge lenses (remember Hubble’s spherical aberration?), it’s also expensive to manufacture and ship them out to space. That’s why Lockheed Martin is currently developing a technology that could lead to lighter, thinner and relatively cheaper alternative to the traditional two-lens telescope design. The tech called Segmented Planar Imaging Detector for Electro-optical Reconnaissance (or SPIDER) replaces the classic lenses with thousands of tiny ones.

Each teensy lens feeds light to a silicon-chip photonic integrated circuit (PIC) — one PIC is smaller than your fingernail — developed by University of California, Davis researchers. Lockheed Martin senior fellow Alan Duncan explains how it works like so: “They can take a snapshot, process it and there’s your image. It’s basically treating interferometer arrays like a point-and-shoot camera.” The company claims SPIDER could reduce the size and weight of telescopes by 10 to 100 times. It also likens the idea behind the project to slimming down bulky old TVs until we’ve gotten to the point that they’re thin and light enough to hang on the wall.

The DARPA-funded project is still in its early stages, and it might not be ready until five to 10 years from now. When its development’s done, though, space agencies could use it to monitor, say, outer planets, since its components are much lighter and will be much cheaper to ship. We might also see telescopes of various shapes, sizes and configuration, seeing as they don’t need to be cylindrical anymore in order to house big lenses.

Via: Gizmag

Source: Lockheed Martin