How much was in those change jars on top of the fridge? I weighed the coins and then ran them through the counting machine at QFC.

Coin Weight Mass ea. Est. by wt Coinstar Diff. Quarters 621 5.670 110 = $27.40 ( Read more... )

"‘epic’ new Burgess Shale site in Canada's Kootenay National Park"

"A new phyllopod bed-like assemblage from the Burgess Shale of the Canadian Rockies"

edited to add: "Mighty Burgess Shale fossil site discovered in Kootenay National Park" (pictures)

So, there are visual afterimages, right? But apparently the equivalent auditory afterimages also exist: if you listen to white noise with a notch cut out of its spectrum, and the noise suddenly stops, you will sometimes briefly hear a tone that would have filled the notch. Web page with spectrograms and a .wav file.

Contact lenses with a zoom mode. Sorta. (I can't read the paper but it sounds like they haven't worked out such minor details as aligning the annular shutter pattern to the wearer's gaze, being able to blink over a 1mm-thick angular object, etc.)

Not as cyberpunk as this but still.

Their slime doesn't just make for tasty(?) scones, it can also be spun into thread.

Reasons I like The Register's science coverage:

1. They usually link to the actual paper, and show signs of having read it
2. They make Hitchhiker's Guide references

Imaging FlowCytobot wishes to show you diatoms.

OK, this is a FDM process instead of a CandyFab-like sintering process, but still: this scheme prints a vasculature network out of sugar, grows some cells around it, then washes away the sugar so that the cell culture has a working nutrient perfusion system (if I have the terms right). Neat!

On the Challenge of 3D Printing Sugar for Regenerative ( Read more... )

Abstract

Wet fingers and toes eventually wrinkle, and this is commonly attributed by lay opinion to local osmotic reactions. However, nearly a century ago surgeons observed that no wrinkling occurs if a nerve to the finger has been cut. Here we provide evidence that, rather than being an accidental side effect of wetness, wet-induced wrinkles have ( Read more... )

1800s-vintage wave motors on the California coast.

(Technically Victorian, so does this count as steampunk? Can it be steampunk if it's made of wood instead of painted PVC brass? Were the engineers wearing goggles?)