Common Paradox Tech Blog

What you’re looking at is not only the winner of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council photo competition, it’s also the moment when humans became fearful of the mighty weightlifting ant race.

As your eyes have clocked from the words “500mg” written on the weight, it’s lifting approximately 100 times its own body weight. Also visible in the photo (apart from the ant’s cruel fate flashing before its eyes, as it envisions a future taking on human civilization, only to be crushed with a single lazy spray of Rentokil) is the tiny little wet pads on each foot that helps lift heavy weights. I could do with some of those for the gym. [PopSci]

This bad-boy-in-a-shell could be used as inspiration for body armor, according to scientists. Meet the Crysomallon Squamiferum, or ‘scaly-foot gastropod.’ He could end up saving your life.

Hailing from the Central Indian Ridge, the snails can ward off attacks from crabs and other menaces thanks to what its hard shell is composed of. Inside hydrothermal vents iron sulphide particles are found, and combined with a spongy middle layer it means that when something strikes it—like a mean crab’s claw—it absorbs energy by allowing the shell to crack, or “microcrack” as the scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are calling it.

The shells also offer a form of attack, as well as defense. In a small way, at least. The iron sulphide will apparently make any attacking claws blunt, by grinding them down.

Whether we’ll see it on the next stab-proof vests is anyone’s guess, but at least we now know to avoid these scaly-foot gastropods. I’m certainly not going to eat any when I’m next in France, anyway. [New Scientist]

Your ordinary log cabin is laid out with lengthwise logs stacked to make its outer walls. Piet Hein Eek, charged with building a cozy recording studio for friend and musician Hans Liberg, did not make any ordinary log cabin.

This log cabin isn’t even really that: the log facade just covers a plastic and steel frame. It isn’t what you’d expect on the inside, either. Instead of dark, dingy room with a stove in the corner, Hein Eek’s cabin conceals a clean, bright, and quite modern recording studio.

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Passers by might mistake the structure for a pile of logs, but they’ll know something’s up when Liberg props open all the unique, top-hinged windows on the sides of the pile. If they’re still nonplussed, they won’t be when the shack rolls away; it has wheels and can be hitched to an automobile for relocation, if Liberg ever gets tired of the view.

Check out a huge set of photos at the Thomas Mayer Archive. [Thomas Mayer Archive via Tree Hugger]

When a UK electric rail was disabled by the snow and cold, 100 passengers were left stranded. Until a Tornado came and whisked them home. That is, the steam engine named Tornado, built with 1940s tech. Speed isn’t everything. [BBC]

How do you measure influence on Twitter? While follower count is perhaps the most obvious metric, other activities, like the numbers of times you’re retweeted, provide a bit more insight.

Along those lines, INQ Mobile has just released their 2009 Twitter influence study, determining the most influential Twitter users in both the UK and the world. The winner? Not Oprah, not Ashton and not Diddy, but Mashable’s founder and CEO Pete Cashmore!

Of course, news publishers naturally have an advantage in these types of studies – by posting dozens of articles daily to Twitter, they’re likely to get far more retweets than a random tweet about “that dirty money.”

And despite all of the hoopla about her joining the service, the incredibly influential Oprah is yet to make much use of Twitter, while other celebs post less frequently with updates that are more personal (or mundane) in nature.

Nonetheless, we’ll take the recognition where we can get it, and congratulate Pete on another cool achievement to close out the year. You can read more in The Telegraph and The Daily Mail.

Reviews: Mashable, Twitter

Tags: mashable, pete cashmore, press, trending, twitter

StonyCreekBare writes “I am wondering what slashdotters have to offer on the idea of Linux based security systems, especially DVR software. I am aware of Zoneminder, but wonder what else is out there? Are there applications that will not only monitor video cameras, but motion sensors and contact closure alarms? What is state of the art in this area, and how do the various Linux platforms stack up in comparison to dedicated embedded solutions? Will these ‘play nice’ with other software, such as Asterisk, and Misterhouse? Can one server host three or four services applications of this nature, assuming CPU/memory/disk resources are sufficient?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “A new model suggests that the Mediterranean Sea was filled in a gigantic flood some 5.3 million years ago. According to Daniel Garcia-Castellanos’ paper in Nature, the sill at the Straight of Gibraltar gave way rather suddenly, with 40 cm of rock eroding and the water level rising by 10 m per day at its peak. They imagine a shallow, fast-moving stream of water (around 100 km/hr) several kilometers wide pouring into the basin with a flow greater than a thousand Amazon rivers — that’s about 100,000,000 cubic meters per second.” The flood would have dropped worldwide sea levels by 9.5 meters, probably triggering climate changes. In this model the Mediterranean filled in anywhere from a few months to two years at the outside.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Think of CoolerBot like the paparazzi of the woods. It’s solar powered and waterproof, so it stops at nothing to get that perfect shot. Of course, it looks like it should be diffusing bombs, not taking nature photography.

CoolerBot uses a tail-dragger design with 14″ wheels in front and a 10″ castering wheel in the rear. The caster wheel is mounted using PVC pipe. The robot is capable of moving in either direction. CoolerBot uses two NPC-41250 motors powered by a 10 amp hour 12 volt SLA battery. The logic is powered by a separate 10 amp hour 12 volt SLA battery and both batteries are recharged by the two onboard solar panels. The motors are driven by two Parallax HB-25s are which are controlled by a Propeller. Currently the robot is remote controlled through a 912 MHz Transceiver.

As far as an “arsenal” is concerned, CoolerBot is equipped with an infrared video camera and a Nikon DSLR. Check out the terror in the eyes of the bunny in the shot above. It’s just waiting for a missile launcher to pop out of the cooler and reduce him to a smoking crater. At any rate, it seems like overkill unless your objective is to capture lions with their cubs or dangerously unstable celebrities. Now that is a good use for this thing…a paparazzi-bot that goes in on the really dangerous missions. [Norris Labs via Make]

Guess who just passed 600 apps, just a week after hitting 500? That’d be the Palm webOS App Catalog. Yesterday’s new applications were decidedly basketball themed in nature, though that is the way it goes with a first come, first served system. Basketball wasn’t the only newness that we saw, with a handful of other new apps and a slew of updates to boot. It’s a lot of apps, and thus a list too long for the front page. If you’ve surmised that the list is after the break, then you would be correct.

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