This lithe Honda CB350 comes from London-based Untitled Motorcycles, and was commissioned as a prop for a film. The brief was to avoid making the bike too obviously customised or show-bike-ish
— which meant keeping the original tank, along with its paint, scratches and dings — via Bike EXIF
A harmless virus that lives on our skin could be used as a treatment for acne, scientists believe.
The virus, called a phage, is naturally built to target and kill bacteria that cause acne — Propionibacterium acnes.
Experts at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Pittsburgh found 11 different versions of virus in this phage family that had this power.
They plan lab work to see if they can harness it as a therapy — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Tasmanian timber company Gunns has entered voluntary administration after losing the support of its bankers.
Gunns has told the stock market that it was relying on the support of its lenders to continue paying wages and meet debt repayments.
The lenders have informed the company they will not be extending more than $500 million worth of loans and Gunns is now in the process of appointing an administrator.
In August, Gunns reported a loss of almost $1 billion for the past financial year and its shares have been in a trading halt for more than six months — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Mill Hill is a landmark heritage church, located in Bondi, close to Sydney’s center in Australia.
Baker Kavanagh Architects have converted the church into two luxury apartments, planned around internal courtyards.
The original ironwork and windows have been retained, while new timber floors reference the existing timbers of the church ceiling.
Two contemporary terraces with a contrasting aesthetic were built adjacent to the church, in stark contrast to the heritage features that have been retained inside the church apartments — via HomeDSGN
Lawyers say a NSW government proposal to keep violent prisoners who show no signs of rehabilitation in jail beyond their imposed sentence is flawed and threatens to undermine the justice system.
The NSW Law Society says it has serious concerns about the legislation announced yesterday by the Attorney-General, Greg Smith, who said the changes were about protecting the community from the worst of the worst
.
The changes, modelled on existing legislation for serious sex offenders, will allow the state to apply to the Supreme Court to have a violent prisoner kept in jail or placed under extended supervision upon their release. This can include the use of GPS tracking devices on released offenders.
The proposed laws follow a Sentencing Council report that said the government should introduce a continuing detention and extended supervision scheme for high-risk violent offenders
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hitachi is showing off a storage system using quartz glass that it claims will retain data for hundred of millions of years.
Company researchers displayed the storage unit, consisting of a sliver of glass 2cm square and 2mm thick, which can hold 40MB of data per square inch, about the same as a standard CD. The data is written in binary format by lasering dots on the glass in four layers, but the researchers say adding more layers to increase storage density isn’t a problem.
The volume of data being created every day is exploding, but in terms of keeping it for later generations, we haven’t necessarily improved since the days we inscribed things on stones,
Hitachi researcher Kazuyoshi Torii told AFP. The possibility of losing information may actually have increased,
he said, pointing out that CDs and tape storage are predicted to last less than a few decades at best, and in many cases fail within years — via redwolf.newsvine.com
New Zealand authorities have informed the nation’s High Court that individuals at the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) acted unlawfully while assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrants
in the case of Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload service.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key issued a statement saying, in part, that “The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances without statutory authority.” That information is said to have led to the arrests of some involved in the case.
Key has also announced an inquiry into the GCSB’s role. The statement says the inquiry will be conducted by New Zealand’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Paul Neazor, whose role is spelled out here — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Manchester Unity Building, originally uploaded by Igor Prahin.
The year was 1932 and, between the two world wars, Melbourne had just built a 13-storey masterpiece in a record 10 months — the art deco Manchester Unity building at the corner of Collins and Swanston streets.
On the evening of Monday, 12 December, with the push of a button by Victorian premier Sir Stanley Argyle, this architectural miracle lit up like a Christmas tree. For the first time,
reported The Argus, the ornamental turreted tower, and the flag surmounting it, leapt out of the dark in dazzling splendour, illuminated by hidden floodlights from all sides.
Well, 80 years later it is all going to happen again. On the eve of the AFL grand final, accompanied by 21st-century fireworks, the Manchester Unity will light up the night sky thanks to a project led by a dentist with a great passion for the building – and the funds to indulge it.
Kia Pajouhesh, son of Iranian migrants, bought the first floor of the MU in 2003 and has spent the past nine years buying and restoring large sections.
The new lighting installation will illuminate the full exterior — and both the inside and outside of the tower — each evening from grand final day onwards — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The clients, an interior designer and a DJ, requested a complete renovation [Bates Masi Architects] and addition of a 1960’s kit house in Amagansett, NY to be a weekend retreat from their urban apartment — via ArchDaily
The Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium is celebrating some big news! For the first time in over 45 years there, a baby Black Rhinoceros was born to mum Azizi. The female calf weighs about 70 pounds and appears to be doing very well. We are so excited to welcome a big, beautiful, bouncing, female rhino,
says Dr Barbara Baker, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium. The birth of a Black Rhino is significant because they are critically endangered and Azizi’s calf will introduce new blood lines into the zoo population
— via ZooBorns
They are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centres that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.
A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness.
Most data centres, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centres can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.
To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centres has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centres appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.
Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centres in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Psychology Prize: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan [The Netherlands] and Tulio Guadalupe [Peru, Russia, and The Netherlands] for their study Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller
.
Peace Prize: The SKN Company [Russia], for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.
Acoustics Prize: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [Japan] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person’s speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.
Neuroscience Prize: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.
Chemistry Prize: Johan Pettersson [Sweden and Rwanda]. for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people’s hair turned green.
Literature Prize: The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.
Physics Prize: Joseph Keller [USA], and Raymond Goldstein [USA and UK], Patrick Warren, and Robin Ball [UK], for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail.
Fluid Dynamics Prize: Rouslan Krechetnikov [USA, Russia, Canada] and Hans Mayer [USA] for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
Anatomy Prize: Frans de Waal [The Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
Medicine Prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [France] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance that their patients will explode — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Eliminating spirits makes one feel invigorated! — via deviantART
i’m including them here because i’m impressed that someone would fully commit to not having a beige house. i mean, it takes a lot of moxie to say i want an orange house. and not just an orange house, but a very bright orange house. and while i’m at it i’m going to build a second orange house. so that i shall have two very bright orange houses
— via Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog
I said at the start of this polemic that there’s never been a better time to go blind: we are busy converting the world to digital, and digital is supremely easy to convert.
The web is particularly excellent for this: it runs to open standards and, in general, you don’t have to know or care anything about what browser, what operating system, what network providers, what servers or what back-end software is involved in getting content onto your screen. For most of the history of computing, such a scenario was purely theoretical: open standards — and only open standards — have allowed it.
Anywhere that open standards can be excluded, they are. Anywhere open standards are excluded, the game changes — the people who control a closed system are at liberty to manage it according to their business model, and are free to deny whatever they feel goes against their interests. Whether they are actually against the business’s interests, or whether they’re actually very advantageous to the customer, are secondary considerations — via redwolf.newsvine.com
We’re lucky to live in a modern age, an age when, instead of ripping out a painful cavity-ridden tooth, we can have dentists drill away the rotten bit and plug up the hole with a filling. But a new discovery reveals that fillings aren’t just modern conveniences: they date back to the Stone Age. Researchers have discovered that a tooth on a 6500-year-old human jawbone has a large cavity covered by a beeswax cap—making that wax the oldest dental filling ever discovered.
The well-cared-for jaw was discovered in a cave in Slovenia. Radiocarbon dating indicates that both the jawbone and the wax filling come from the Stone Age. And a close examination of the teeth shows that the left canine has worn enamel, a vertical crack, and a beeswax cap that partially fills the cavity — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Meet Perth Zoo‘s new Asian Small-clawed Otter pups. Perth has had two litters of four pups born at the zoo in the past few months. One of the litters can be seen in their exhibit opposite the Red Pandas. Perth Zoo is part of regional breeding program for Otters and the births are the zoo’s first in 18 years. These highly social critters pair for life, with males playing an important role in the rearing of pups. Dad’s duties can include building the nest, supplying food for mum and her pups, as well as teaching the young to swim! Hunted for their fur, meat and body parts, otters are under threat in the wild — via ZooBorns
Create your own custom fabric with my quick and easy fabric printing tutorial. I love my bright, bold snail fabric, and I can’t wait to see your custom designs. Just follow the steps, and you’ll be well on your way to patterned fabric bliss — via The Zen of Making
RSS – Posts