This is a great way to teach chemistry to kids :)

Two New Zealand schoolgirls humbled one of the world's biggest food and drugs companies after their school science experiment found that their ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C. Students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the blackcurrant cordial against rival brands to test their hypothesis that cheaper brands were less healthy. Instead, their tests found that the Ribena contained a tiny amount of vitamin C, while another brand's orange juice drink contained almost four times more.

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Slatterz writes "Security giant Symantec claims to have found the public release of source code for a Trojan that targets Skype users. Trojan.Peskyspy is spyware which records a voice call and stores it as an MP3 file for later transmission. An infected machine will use the software that handles audio processing within a computer and save the call data as an MP3. The file is then sent over the internet to a predefined server where the attacker can listen to the recorded conversations."

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Adam Dunkels writes "Inspired by the Twitter-sized program that crashes Mac OS X, I just wrote a really, really rudimentary IP stack called twIP, small enough to fit in a Twitter tweet. Although twIP is very far away from a real IP stack, it can do the first task of any IP stack: respond to pings. The entire source code can be found in this 128-character-long tweet. For those who are interested in low-level network programming, a code walkthrough with instructions on how to run the code under FreeBSD is available here. The FAQ: Q: why? A: for fun."

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Here are some of my favorites from CRAFT this week:

CRAFT Video: Intro to Metalworking

Spore Prints

How-To: T-Shirt Quilt

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AUDIO EMBED ABOVE: Two trolls on ham radio, one identified as "G-K," the other as "Robert" or "R-J" overheard accidentally on August 29, 2009, while surfing first responder frequencies during the August 2009 Los Angeles wildfires. The two men argued with each other about various technical subjects of interest to radio ops, then discussed drugs and past jail time, then notes on an Andy Griffith show marathon, then torture they'd like to perform on each other in great detail because they hate each other so much. Stay with it.

Technical note: sorry about the audible LOLs -- a friend held the scanner in their lap, and I held my iPhone 3Gs above the scanner, using "voice memo" app to record the audio. None of us could contain ourselves.

Archive.org: Random Ham Radio Trollfight: August 29, 2009, Los Angeles CA (thanks, Chief Fulfiller of Needs + fam!)

scrubl writes "The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has revealed its latest flight simulator runs on SUSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers and uses an open source graphics platform. The Defence Science and Technology Organisation's (DSTO) Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne creates virtual worlds that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground. The visuals software was written in OpenGL, using commercial and open source scene graph engines and making 'heavy use of OpenGL Shader Language programs.'"

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scrubl writes "The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has revealed its latest flight simulator runs on SUSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers and uses an open source graphics platform. The Defence Science and Technology Organisation's (DSTO) Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne creates virtual words that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground. The visuals software was written in OpenGL, using commercial and open source scene graph engines and making 'heavy use of OpenGL Shader Language programs.'"

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Old CD drives are a decent source for parts to make things from. Since the computer industry has encouraged manufacturing churn for so many decades, it is pretty easy to find at least a few surplus drives to dissect. Inside these dusty relics, you will be lucky to find DC motors, switches, gears, springs and more. The tools you will need are pretty easy to come by as well. From the parts you will find, you can make a number of interesting projects.

You can get drives from old computers, which always seem to be at the dump, on the sidewalk of some neighborhoods, out on the loading dock of the school, in basements and garages, etc. It is important that wherever you get them they come to you legitimately free of expectations. These will not be functioning drives after a few minutes of the project.

Teach your family to solder! Take a few pictures tagged as "MAKEcation" and put them in the MAKE Flickr pool by September 9th to enter to win a $100 Maker Shed gift certifiate!

Supplies:
Old computer CD drives (older ones often have better parts)
Plastic bags for storing parts (zippered half size sandwich bags are great)
Small cardboard boxes for storing the larger metal and plastic parts
Battery holder
Tape
Paper and pen
Digital camera
Paper clip

Tools:
Safety glasses
Small phillips head screwdriver
Straight screwdriver
Jeweler's screwdrivers
Pliers, needle nose or channel lock
Utility knife
Soldering iron
Wire cutters/strippers

Concepts:
How does it work?
How is it made?
Differences in technique and age of manufacture
Identifying electrical components
Getting and organizing supplies for future use

Time frame:
An hour or more is ideal

Mastery Objective:
Students and participants will know how to safely disassemble a CD drive or similar electrojunk for parts and project supplies so that they can name the parts inside the device, compare the varieties of manufacturing techniques to solve the same problem and organize the usable parts and components for future use in projects.

Process:
What do you have?
Probably the first thing to do is look at the exterior of the drives you have.
Make note of any markings on the drive. Some things you will likely find are the manufacturer, model number, read/write speed of the drive and my favorite: Date of Manufacture.
The date of manufacture will give you some context to judge the drives in your collection by. Often the older the drive is, the more "off the shelf" the components are.

Use your camera:
Take some photos with your camera or camera phone to show the process of taking the drive apart.
You can also have participants and students take pictures of each of the systems they find, and each of the types of components they find inside.

Case disassembly:
Put on your safety glasses.
Use a screwdriver to take the metal case off the drive. It will usually be 4 phillips screws on the sides that hold it together.
In taking off the metal case, try to keep it from getting deformed. The steel can be useful later. You may find that there are plastic tabs holding one of the pieces in place.
Try to get the case to just fall apart without having to be forced. Most of the time it will just come apart after you remove the screws and press on the plastic tabs.
If you do have to tug on the parts, you may have missed a screw under a sticker. If all else fails, make sure all of the eyes are protected, and pull it apart carefully, probably below the table.
Pop open the CD drawer by straightening out a paper clip and slipping it into the hole on the front panel. The drawer should open easily. You might even find a disc inside.
To remove the drawer, you may have to pry apart the plastic sides, or it might just come apart easily. Different models have varying designs. Be careful if you put force on it that the parts don't fly and hurt somebody.

Be careful not to Over-Disassemble!
You may find that there is a dc motor that is in a plastic housing that holds it in contact with a gear which could serve as a nice little drive wheel. Take it out, but secure it together so it can be used in a future project. If it doesn't stay together with screws or pressure fitting plastic, run a bit of tape around it to hold it.
You may also find that the CD reading eye moves nicely on its' slides. If it is controlled by a DC motor, this could be a neat system to use later.
Basically, look at the things you are taking apart, and see if they can be used as systems or components.
Securing the wires coming from the motor with a bit of tape will help keep them from breaking off later.

Motors and how to read them:
You should find two types of motors inside: DC motor and Stepper motor.

The easiest way to identify a DC motor is by looking at the number of wires coming off it. Most have just two wires. DC motors are controlled by sending electricity through the motor, causing it to turn either clockwise or counterclockwise. Sometimes you may find that there are several more wires going into another area of the case. These can be to an encoder that helps read the speed and direction of the motor.

Stepper motors have more wires coming from them, and often are built right onto a circuit board. These turn by receiving a series of pulses, each of which advances the motor one step. By controlling the timing and quantity of the pulses with a microcontroller, it is possible to precisely set the speed and even the number of degrees the motor will turn.

Save the good bits
As you go, put the useful parts into plastic bags or bins. Label the bags with scraps of paper for easy identification.
You should be able to find at least the following:

• DC motors, usually one will open the tray, sometimes you will find a second to move the eye.
• Gears to drive the mechanisms
• Switches, either momentary pushbutton or other mechanical contactors
• Headphone jack
• Potentiometer
• LED
• Screws

Desolder the components you want from the circuit boards:
The headphone jack, LED, momentary switches and sometimes motors will be soldered directly to the circuit boards. You can use a desoldering braid and an iron to free these items from the boards. If they have fittings, you may want to keep the fittings and instead remove the headers that connect them to the board. You should be able to scrape the coating off the metal traces to solder the fittings to a wire for future projects.

Extensions:
Make a vibrobot.
Practice soldering and desoldering with the components on the boards.
Use a battery holder to power some of the things you find inside.
Use a fishing tackle box to store your parts in labeled bins.
Make a video explaining what you have found inside your CD drives.
Make a poster identifying each of the parts of a CD drive and telling what each does.
Use the parts of the drives to make something amazing!

So give it a shot!
You can try this solo, but it is definitely more fun scavenging old drives in a group with the stuff all ending up on the table. You can compare the differences and similarities between drives better in a group, and you can share observations about the systems. Having a nice collection of stuff to pick from is a great feature of the project. An added bonus is finding handwritten markings made by the people who made the drive. Give yourself and the group some time to explore what you find. In my experience, it takes a few hours to dig through the drives and then make something from the debris. You can do it in one workshop, or you can spread it over a few classes. Share your findings in the comments, and add your photos to the MAKE Flickr pool.

More:

• Homemade microscope using web cam and a CD-ROM lens
• How-To: Quick, cheap soldering stand
• How-To: Free DIY battery holders
• Drawing techniques for making

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binarybits writes "I've written an article for the free-market Cato Institute about how patents impede innovation in the software industry. It points out that people tend not to realize how vast the software industry is. It's not just Google and Microsoft; virtually every organization has an IT department producing potentially-infringing software. Organizations as diverse as J. Crew and the Green Bay Packers have been sued for patent infringement. It's crazy to expect all these organizations to worry about potential patent infringement. Hopefully the Supreme Court's Bilski decision will lead to new limits on software patents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a pithy and startlingly accurate summary of the state of science reporting (be sure to click through for the whole thing).

How Science Reporting Works (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

T Murphy writes "Wind farms can appear like storms or tornadoes on Doppler radar when placed too close to the radar. Tornado alley is a good area for wind farms, and good terrain for the turbines is also ideal for Doppler radar. With many new farms being constructed, the problem is growing. A false tornado warning was issued in Kansas by a computer, although canceled by a meteorologist aware of the problem- there are fears that false positives will grow. Worse would be a tornado ignored as a wind turbine. While meteorologists are trying to work with wind farm owners to shut off the turbines during bad weather, they have no control over the placement or operation of the turbines. Efforts are being made to improve detection technology to avoid further problems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that according to new research, nitrous oxide, the colorless, sweet-smelling gas with a long history as a medical and dental anesthetic is the next big threat to Earth's protective ozone layer. Its role in destroying ozone has long been recognized, as well as its role as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas but the new study puts nitrous oxide's ability to deplete ozone into numbers comparable to those used for other ozone-depleting gases covered by the 1987 Montreal Protocol. The researchers note that the health of the ozone layer has been improving since the adoption of the protocol and that nitrous oxide looms large today as an artificial destroyer of the ozone layer, in part because the emissions of other harmful chemicals have been so sharply reduced." (Continues.)

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In the early-mid-90s there was a Mac desktop app that was a Domain Name Server. Here's how you'd set it up.

1. Put it in your Startup Items folder so it would launch at startup.

2. When it booted a window opens with a list of all the domains it was managing. Of course initially it was empty. You could click on the name of any of them to edit the settings in a dialog. There was a place to edit the name of the domain. A place to add an A record or a CNAME. (In other words it works more or less the same as any web app we use to manage DNS.)

3. An Add button at the bottom of the window. Click it and a dialog like the one in #2 would appear, except all the fields would be blank.

4. There was a text file that also configured the server, in fact the dialogs above just served to add, remove or change the text in the file. I suspect the file was in a standard format that all DNS's use.

Anticipating what people are going to say, yes, I know there's a DNS built into the Mac, but it doesn't have a graphic interface and the instructions for setting it up are ridiculous. I think the one on Windows has a graphic UI, but I can't find any comprehensible instructions that explain how to set it up.

A college classmate, Sandy Wilbourn, who I think of as a brother, is an expert in DNS, and he says the app I'm looking for doesn't exist. I threatened to write it myself, he advised against it. Oh man. What is it with these simple web services that we're allowed to use them through a web app, but they don't want us running our own. I'm going to run my own DNS at some point, and I'd rather do it sooner than later.

Someone is going to ask why I need to do this. I have a good reason. You can either take my word or pay me $1000 and I'll explain.

Update: Chuck Shotton points to MenAndMice's server for Windows, and JY points to CutEdge's server for Mac. Both appear to fit the bill. Thanks guys!!

Scythal writes "In-game advertising provider Massive Inc., acquired by Microsoft in 2006, has signed up or renewed contracts with several publishers, notably EA, Blizzard Entertainment, THQ, and Activision. Eagerly anticipated games like Need for Speed: Shift will feature the technology that continuously collects 'anonymous' information about users, sends them to the Massive database for analysis, and downloads advertisements to be shown in the game. All that happens insidiously, without the users' explicit consent and out of their control, which raises further concerns about privacy, security and quite frankly, customer abuse. Would you feel concerned about software that collects personal information and sends it so that you get more personalized ads in a game you paid for?" (More, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years, challenges BusinessWeek. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem. So what's the answer? Basic research can repair the broken US business model, argues BW, saying it's the key to new, high-quality job creation. Scientific research legends like Bell Labs, Sarnoff Corp, and Xerox PARC are essentially gone, or shadows of their former selves. And while IBM, Microsoft, and HP collectively spend $17B a year on R&D, only 3%-5% of that is for basic science. In a post-9/11 world, DARPA's mission has shifted from science to tactical projects with short-term military applications. Cutting back on investment in basic science research may make great sense in the short term, but as corporations and government make the same decision to free-ride off the investments of others, society suffers the 'tragedy of the commons,' wherein multiple actors operating in their self-interest do harm to the overall public good. We've reached that point, says BW, and we're just beginning to see the consequences. The cycle needs to be reversed, and it needs to be done quickly."

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An anonymous reader writes "While most of the attention at Thursday's Canadian copyright town hall was on the recording industry's strategy to pack the room and exclude alternate voices, the most controversial activity took place outside the hall. It has now been revealed that security guards threatened students and a Member of Parliament for distributing leaflets, and the American Federation of Musicians termed the MP's leaflet, which called for balanced copyright, 'disgusting' and demanded a retraction and apology. At this point, such an admission seems unlikely."

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Attila Dimedici writes "According to Cloudmark, 419 spammers are using the democrats.org website to relay email and bypass spam filters. 'The abuse, which dates back at least to the beginning of this month, helps evade filters that internet service providers employ to block the messages. ... The messages were sent courtesy of this page, which allows anyone with an internet connection to send emails. The PHP script employs no CAPTCHA or other measure to help ensure there is a real human being behind each email that gets funneled through the service. The service allows messages to be sent to 10 addresses at a time and even provides a way for people to import contacts they have stored in their address book.'"

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Trepidity writes "About seven weeks after the judge tentatively overturned Lori Drew's guilty verdict for 'cyberbullying' following her online harassment of a teenager that was linked to the teenager's suicide, the case was finally officially dismissed. In a 32-page opinion [PDF], the court avoided a minefield of possible follow-on effects that civil-liberties groups had warned of by holding that merely violating a website's Terms of Service cannot constitute 'unauthorized access' for the purposes of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030)."

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EtaCarinae writes "Nokia didn't succeed in convincing Riverbank to change its licensing terms on PyQt, and so decided to create their own LGPL'ed version of it. From the FAQ at the PySide site: 'Nokia's initial research into Python bindings for Qt involved speaking with Riverbank Computing, the makers of PyQt. We had several discussions with them to see if it was possible to use PyQt to achieve our goals. Unfortunately, a common agreement could not be found , so in the end we decided to proceed with PySide.'"

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RazvanM writes "At the beginning of this month the Mac OS X 10.5.8 closed a kernel vulnerability that lasted more than 4 years, covering all the 10.4 and (almost all) 10.5 Mac OS X releases. This article presents some twitter-size programs that trigger the bug. The mechanics are so simple that can be easily explained to anybody possessing some minimal knowledge about how operating systems works. Beside being a good educational example this is also a scary proof that very mature code can still be vulnerable in rather unsophisticated ways."

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Dale H sent this one in from the New Scientist with an amazingly anatomic movement in the robot.

Conventional humanoid robots may look human, but the workings under their synthetic skins are radically different from our anatomy. A team with members across five European countries says this makes it difficult to build robots able to move like we do.

Their project, the Eccerobot, has been designed to duplicate the way human bones, muscles and tendons work and are linked together. The plastic bones copy biological shapes and are moved by kite-line that is tough like tendons, while elastic cords mimic the bounce of muscle.

Neat stuff. This technology looks promising for prosthetic limb replacement. It seems that they are using something kind of similar to Muscle wire.

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These tiny Austrian 2mm pinfire guns look to be exquisitely engineered. From the video description:

Originally made by Austrian watchmakers as decorative pocket watch chain fobs or as cufflinks, these miniature pinfire pistols are now prized collector's items. These are some from my own collection dating from 1904 to the 1970's. All of them fire 2mm blank pinfire cartridges. The revolvers are the world's smallest working double action blank firing pistols. They measure just 38mm in length and are smaller than the famous Swiss Mini Gun which measures 55mm.

(via MAKE)

Researchers from the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo presented this incredible video of a high-speed robotic hand at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The laboratory's Web site has many more videos related to this project, called Sensor Fusion. Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots

London artist Stuart Semple has built a machine that makes a lighter-than-air foam using glycerin, food dye, and helium, and extrudes cakes of it through a die to create floating foam happy faces, which he releases into the air 2,000 at a time. Check the vid below.

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coondoggie writes "Software designed to beat Chinese censorship may behave in ways that seem suspect, but it is all part of the application's strategy to fool the Great Firewall of China, according to one programmer of the software. 'There are many built-in tricks that do all kinds of things to confuse the firewall,' says David Tian, a scientist for NASA who works spare-time on UltraSurf, the free software designed to promote unrestricted Internet access for citizens of China persecuted for being members of Falun Gang, the religious group the Chinese government is trying to suppress."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Where do I start with this thing? It has some many elements of awesome!

It's a model of an old-fashion Penny-farthing bicycle that has been brought in to the modern world with the incorporation of 3 cutting-edge technologies:

• It was built, layer-by-layer, using laser sintering rapid prototyping. It's a demonstration project by Italian firm CRP Technology to demonstrate their capabilities.
  


• It's made out of WindForm XT, a carbon-fiber reinforced polyimide material that's usually used to craft high-performance motorsport racing parts.
  


• It incorporates a planetary gearing system. Penny-Farthings have large front wheels so that they can travel further on one pedal stroke; by using this gearing, the front wheel can be a more-comfortable 20% smaller. Planetary gears are used in some 3-speed bicycles, but their beauty is hidden within the rear hub.
  

I love the options that rapid prototyping allows the designer - these handlebars are simple, elegant, and formed as a single piece:

The material used was flexible enough to make the seat, suspension spring, and the body all one piece, too:

Alas, it's just a model - just 16 inches long. Here's hoping that someone builds a rideable version.

More details:

• easy-to-read html, but small pictures


• more detailed paper (.pdf link)

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