The BBC has a report on a proposal that will be submitted to NASA for funding — a mission to Saturn's moon Titan that would deposit a lander of its hydrocarbon sea. (We recently discussed the widely circulated photo of sunlight glinting off one of Titan's seas.) "The scientific team behind the idea is targeting Ligeia Mare, a vast body of liquid methane sited in the high north of Saturn's largest moon. ... 'It is something that would really capture the imagination,' said Dr Ellen Stofan, from Proxemy Research, who leads the study team. 'The story of human exploration on Earth has been one of navigation and seafaring, and the idea that we could explore for the first time an extraterrestrial sea I think would be mind-blowing for most people,' she told BBC News. ... The Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) has already been under study for about two years. It is envisaged as a relatively low-cost endeavor — in the low $400m range. It could launch in January 2016, and make some flybys of Earth and Jupiter to pick up the gravitational energy it would need to head straight at the Saturnian moon for a splash down in June 2023."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's another human-powered clock, called Standard Time. Artist Mark Formanek and a team of helpers kept this clock running for 24 hours, updating the display by hand every minute. I wonder if they kept the time by watching a real time clock? [via neatorama]

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Professor Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK shows you ten cool, quirky tricks of science you can show off at your next party. [via Boing Boing]

Top 10 quirky science tricks for Christmas parties

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Applying Earth science to science-fiction scenarios might not be easy (or particularly necessary) but it sure is fun. Here, fans take the cutting-open-a-furry-beast-and-using-its-carcass-as-an-emergency-blanket scene from The Empire Strikes Back and attempt to deduce how long Luke Skywalker could have actually survived on the sweet, sweet warmth provided by Tauntaun entrails.

In a normal environment, a carcass gets cold in 8 to 36 hours losing an average rate of 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit per hour. However, the ice world of Hoth is not an average environment. The Star Wars database lists that Hoth reaches nightly temperatures of -60 F. In a frigid, sub-zero environment, body heat can be lost almost 32 times faster. This means a Tauntaun's body heat could drop almost 51.2 F every hour.

The initial estimate is probably off, as it looks like the author is using human body temperatures to figure how warm the Tauntaun would be when it died and how fast it would lose heat, but some of those issues get hashed out in the comments.

Wolf Gnards blog: How Long Could Luke Survive in a Tauntaun?

loconet writes "This article in Gizmodo claims that Android's fragmented model is harming it, but Google has the power to save it. The rumored Google Phone could be a ploy to upset the wireless industry, or it could be an expensive niche device. Either way, it would be a bid to take Android back from the companies that seem hell-bent on destroying it. '...once handset manufacturers (and carriers, through handset manufacturers) have built their own version of Android, they've effectively taken it out of the development stream. Updating it is their responsibility, which they have to choose to uphold. Or not! Who cares? The phones are already sold."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I read Lamebook sometimes, but I've never seen anything there that made me snort tea out my nose. Until now. It begins in the magical kingdom of Facebook, with a "What Lord of the Rings Character are You?" quiz ...

Fair warning: There is some NSFW language and liberal doses of the stupid, preteen usage of the word "gay".

Lamebook: FroDOH!

Appfrica has a great infographic that looks at the number of Earth's dead humans and the causes of their deaths, and creates comparisons between the population of the dead and that of the living.

"How many people have ever lived?" The numbers in this piece are highly speculative but are as accurate as modern science allows. It's widely accepted that prior to 2002 there had been somewhere between 106 and 140 billion homo sapiens born to the world.

One interesting fact he digs up: There are more people currently alive in Asia, Africa and Latin America than the total number of people who died—anywhere, and for any reason—during the entire 20th century.

Appfrica: Population of the Dead

(Thanks, Maria Popova!)

GirlTalk Radio is a podcast made by girls who love math and science. Hosted by 11-to-16 year olds, the program features interviews with diverse cadre of science-minded women—from stem cell researchers and computer scientists, to marine biologists and computational linguists. Even a CIA intelligence officer. Worth a listen for geek girls of all ages. (Thanks, Deborah Berebichez!)

Fact: The Great Yarmouth Sea Life Centre in Norfolk, England, gives its Green turtles brussels sprouts as a Christmas treat.

Fact: Brussels sprouts kind of make you gassy.

Fact: In 2008, the bubbles produced by sprout-induced turtle farts triggered overflow alarms in the middle of the night.

Now the Yarmouth turtle tank—12 feet in depth and width holding 250,000 litres of water along with George the 3-ft-long green turtle—has been partially emptied for the festive season. Thousands of litres have been removed to lower the water by a six inches and keep the sensitive alarms clear.

Phew.

The Telegraph: Aquarium lowers water levels after feeding turtles brussel sprouts

(Thanks, Marc Abrahams!)

Image courtesy Flickr user pauljill, via CC

A few months ago, William Kamkwamba spoke at MIT as he wrapped up a speaking tour of the US with coauthor Bryan Mealer. This video is the whole evening's presentation, and includes the introductions and question/answer session afterward. William starts at around 11 minutes.

The talk was sponsored by MIT's Technology and Culture series and he was introduced by Amy Smith of D-Lab. There is a brief segment in the evening on Moving Windmills, a documentary film about William and his story. The Boy who Harnessed the Wind is an excellent and inspirational read that makes real the importance of supporting local makers around the world.

More:

• William Kamkwamba at MIT
• William Kamkwamba's Malawi Windmill Blog
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind -- fantastic new book about a how a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind
• The boy who harnessed the wind

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Spotted in the MAKE Flickr Pool, this hand-held bat signal based, in part, on the Alien Projector from MAKE Volume 16. From Flickr user Oceaneer99.

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Flo Kaufmann used an old vaccum as an enclosure for his analog synth project, the "satrap activ" -

It contains 2 cmos based VCO's , a Moog ladder filter, a 555 based ADSR, a cmos based 8 step sequencer, a PIC based vc to midi interface and a PIC based auto trigger unit. There are 4 tunable knobs on top, mostly to play base lines, and 2 conductable wires, which act as voltage dividers to generate variable tones. the wires do not vibrate. so it is not a cord instrument. satrap activ can also control other synthesizers either by midi or cv/gate interface.

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Espen sez, "The Norwegian broadcaster NRK recently made a 7 hour program about the very scenic train journey from Bergen to Oslo. The program was hugely successful (the TV version offered interviews and various things along the ride). The raw film from the front camera is now being offered as a free Bittorrent download under a CC license and there is even a competition (in Norwegian) for best reuse.

Download Bergensbanen in HD (Thanks, Espen)

USS_Natas writes "Capitol Records and other labels have sued Vimeo in federal court, charging that the site's emphasis on 'original works' only extends to videos, and that songs are widely used on Vimeo without a license. The plaintiffs hope to prove that Vimeo staffers know about the infringement, since they've been doing it themselves." NewTeeVee has a PDF of the court filing in a Scribd frame.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

elyons writes "Another neat discovery has come from the lab of Larry Lyons at UCLA. As reported earlier on Slashdot, Lyons' group studies the dynamics of auroras. Their most recent discovery reveals for the first time the sequence of events leading to dramatic space-weather disturbances. Using a network of cameras deployed around the Arctic in support of NASA's THEMIS mission, they recorded over 200 instances of auroras colliding, causing brilliant displays of northern lights (see time 8:22 for such an example)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This article at CNet takes a detailed look at the growth of social gaming through Apple's iPhone, a market many developers — and Apple themselves — are still struggling to figure out. The piece also speculates on how such games and networks will continue to evolve. Quoting: "While competition has spawned better features among these services, the future brings a growing need for a more unified network. Even if all these networks begin to become impossible to differentiate, users are eventually going to want a less-disjointed platform when jumping from game to game, and app to app. Thus far Facebook, and even Twitter to some degree have provided that constant, just by giving users a way to log in to these platforms. The unification can shake out in a number of ways though, the most likely of which is consolidation. Open Feint can continue to grow until it's snatched up by a larger company (like Apple). Or it can begin absorbing, or muscling out the other, less popular networks. As mentioned before, Apple plays a big part in this: not only in how it changes the hardware, but also how it continues to evolve the business of the App Store and information sharing between applications."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the arguments for the music industry not suing Napster out of existence in 2000 was that they had all the music on the Internet under one roof. By deleting Napster, they forced music to shard into a million pieces, and then reform later as iTunes and Amazon and a myriad of Internet startups. If it had stayed in one place it would have been possible to build all kinds of community services that reached everyone on the Internet who loves music. That might have been very amazing.

If you believe, as I do, that Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future, it's pretty clear we're at a Napster-like place now. Everyone has a name prefixed by an at-sign that takes you to their profile page. Twitter is, right now, the default identity system for the realtime message network. But that is changing very quickly.

Recently Facebook changed the meaning of at-sign to take you to your Facebook profile page. And on WordPress and Tumblr the at-sign will presumably take you to your home blog or profile page on either system. It's hard to imagine them defining it as your profile on Twitter. Technically it would be nearly impossible for them to do it. And politically, it's not very appealing.

A few years from now we may look back at the Twitter of 2009 as we now look back at the Napster of 2000 -- a time when there was a great opportunity to build, that was missed. In this case, it's the owners of Twitter who are missing the opportunity. They could now be defining the loosely-coupled version of Twitter, and let your home page on Twitter act as the glue that joins all the networks you belong to that link through your Twitter ID.

The address of my Tumblr profile page could be:

http://twitter.com/davewiner/tumblr

And my WordPress profile page would have this address:

http://twitter.com/davewiner/wordpress

And the implementation of the Twitter API on twitter.com would have new features that make it easy for me to find other API implementors of networks that join together through my presence on Twitter.

There probably isn't enough time to architect this, but maybe there is. It's certainly worth thinking about.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Verizon is defending its decision to double its Early Termination Fee from $175 to $350 after being called to account by the FCC. They claim it's because the higher fees allow them to offer more expensive phones with a lower up-front cost (PDF), and they also say that because they pro-rate the fee depending on how much of your contract is left, they still lose money. Apparently doing something about the Verizon customer service horror stories isn't as good a way to retain customers as telling them that they have to pay several hundred dollars to leave."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Nature reports that data collected on the timing of attacks and number of casualties from more than 54,000 events across nine insurgent wars, including those fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 and in Sierra Leone between 1994 and 2003, suggest that insurgencies have a common underlying pattern that may allow the timing of attacks and the number of casualties to be predicted. By plotting the distribution of the frequency and size of events, the team found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. This means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties (316 is 10 to the power of 2.5). 'We found that the way in which humans do insurgent wars — that is, the number of casualties and the timing of events — is universal,' says team leader Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami in Florida. 'This changes the way we think insurgency works.' To explain what was driving this common pattern, the researchers created a mathematical model which assumes that insurgent groups form and fragment when they sense danger, and strike in well-timed bursts to maximize their media exposure. Johnson is now working to predict how the insurgency in Afghanistan might respond to the influx of foreign troops recently announced by US President Barack Obama. 'We do observe a complicated pattern that has to do with the way humans do violence in some collective way,' adds Johnson."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After considering splitting a winter's firewood with a maul, a device like this one sure does look more fun. It's made by Hahn Machinery in Minnesota. [Thanks, Elijah!]

More:

• Arduino-controlled firewood cutter/splitter
• Skid steer robot

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ssv03 writes "The New York Times is reporting that Chase Community Giving of Chase Bank recently held a contest on Facebook in which users were encouraged to vote for their favorite charities. At the end of the contest, the 100 charities with the most votes would win $25,000 and advance to the next round to have a chance to win $1 million. Initially, the vote counts for each organization were made public, but two days before voting ended they were hidden, and the final totals have still not been released. While Chase had no official leader board during the voting, several organizations were keeping track of projected winners. Those projections were almost identical to the final results, yet several organizations including Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), Marijuana Policy Project and several anti-abortion groups were not finalists. They had been performing very well (some within the top 20) until the vote counters were removed. Chase Bank has so far refused to discuss the issue with the organizations. SSDP has spoken out in a press release (PDF) and is calling for a boycott."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nice video of the "Iodine clock reaction"... here's how to do it too.


Don't forget, MAKE has a great Chemistry section on our blog and the Maker Shed.

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Dave Knott writes "The notable science fiction screenwriter and director Dan O'Bannon has died at the age of 63. O'Bannon's career began with a writing credit for John Carpenter's Dark Star and he went on the write many enduring science fiction and horror films such as Blue Thunder, Lifeforce, Screamers and Total Recall. He was also an occasional director, whose credits include The Return Of The Living Dead, the campy horror film that made popular the zombie chant of 'braaiiiinnnsss.' However, he will be best remembered as the writer of Alien, one of the all-time classics of both the science fiction and horror genres. O'Bannon died after a 30 year battle with Crohn's disease and is survived by his wife, Diane, and son, Adam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist Marc Woods made this collection of oddly erotic "fetish objects" for the London Wapping Project. Charlie Stross once wrote one of these into a novella we were working on together -- this is exactly how I pictured it.

To Have and to Hold by Marc Woods (via Cribcandy)

Airtrax's omnidirectional wheels for industrial vehicles can roll forward, back, sideways, diagonally... Like something out of a Neal Stephenson novel. I want an electric car with these things (though who know how they wear on road conditions?).

Airtrax (via Red Ferret)

Aaron sez, "This piece from the LA Times includes a stunning description of how an undercover cop lifted a DNA sample from Stephanie Lazarus, a police woman was under investigation for murdering her romantic rival."

An undercover officer surreptitiously trailed Lazarus, 49, as she ran errands, waiting until she discarded a plastic utensil or other object with her saliva on it. The DNA in her saliva was compared with evidence collected from the murder scene. The genetic code in the samples matched conclusively, police and prosecutors have said.

And this is one of the main reasons that biometric identifiers are so very risky... You can protect the PIN for your debit card by shielding the keypad when you enter it, but how do you keep counterfeiters from getting your DNA for authenticating the debit-card of the future? We throw off fingerprints, DNA, hand-geometry impressions, gaits and other biometrics at a titanic rate, and there's no way to stop, short of spending all your time in a hazmat suit.

Bail is set at $10 million for LAPD detective accused of murder (Thanks, Aaron!)

(Image: DNA Molecule display, Oxford University, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from net_efekt's photostream)

Thomas Nybergh writes "The Etherpad code was released by Google under the Apache license a few hours ago. Google's initial plan, after acquiring the service, was to use Etherpad's tech with its new Wave collaboration platform and to shut down the original service entirely. Soon after the Etherpad code was released, the Swedish Pirate Party launched their instance of the service at piratepad.net. An announcement, which also mentions a new Tor node, is published on the party website (Google translation). The original Etherpad service had in a short time become a killer application for collaborative work within at least the Swedish, and according to my personal experience, in the Finnish Pirate Party as well. The Etherpad open source project is available at Google Code."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

al0ha writes "Techniques recently invented by researchers at the California Institute of Technology which allow the real-time, real-space visualization of fleeting changes in the structure of nanoscale matter have been used to image the evanescent electrical fields produced by the interaction of electrons and photons, and to track changes in atomic-scale structures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gorgeous! DAM :: Exhibitions :: early plotterdrawings from the 1960s via Waxy.

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Magician/Psychologist Richard Wiseman shows you how to perform 10 (count 'em) science-based stunts. You now have no excuse for awkward pauses in conversation this holiday season. Entertain your coworkers! Shark money off your uncles! Impress members of whatever sex you wish! All with the help of science.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user srqpix, via CC

A guest dispatch on cool things spotted at Art | Basel in Miami, from Kristen Philipkoski:

Mexican-born sculptor Margarita Cabrera lovingly recreates symbols of the plight of Mexican immigrants using ceramic or stuffed nylon and other fabrics. At the Aqua Art Miami hosted by <a href="http://www.GenArt.org"<GenArt in Miami, the Walter Maciel gallery exhibited Cabrera's felled, defunct, bicycle made out of stuffed, crinkled and stitched together nylon. The sculpture at first appears simple, but looking at it for more than a moment evokes sadness and affection for whoever may have abandoned this once-useful piece of machinery.

At their Los Angeles location, the gallery has also exhibited Cabrera's "Arbol de la Vida," a ceramic tractor covered with flowering vines. Similar works include a wheelbarrow, ladder, wheelbarrow and pick axe festooned with moths, butterflies and birds. Other nylon work includes the spilled contents of "immigrant backpacks," and household appliances like toaster, blenders and vacuum cleaners.

[Photo: Robyn Ross]

Mark Rosedale (an employee of O'Reilly) was the first of a few to send in David Pogue's recent column in which he discusses the question of ebook DRM. Remember, just recently a Sony exec claimed that you couldn't make money on ebooks without DRM. Yet, Pogue relates his own experience in running a test with his publisher (which is O'Reilly) in putting out a non-DRM'd ebook, and he found that sales increased:

As an author myself, I, too, am terrified by the thought of piracy. I can't stand seeing my books, which are the primary source of my income, posted on all these piracy Web sites, available for anyone to download free.

When I wrote about my concerns a year ago, my readers took me to task. "For all you know," went their counterargument, "the illegal copies are just advertising for you; people will download them, try them out, then go by the physical book. Either that, or they're being downloaded by people who would not have bought your book anyway. Why don't you try a controlled experiment and see?"

Well, it sounded like it could be a very costly experiment. But I agreed. My publisher, O'Reilly, decided to try an experiment, offering one of my Windows books for sale as an unprotected PDF file.

After a year, we could compare the results with the previous year's sales.

The results? It was true. The thing was pirated to the skies. It's all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying.

The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slightly during that year.

Now, it's worth noting that it really was just last year that Pogue insisted that publishing digital versions of his books was a terrible idea, because he had tried it twice and they were pirated all over the web. So it's really nice to see that he's actually come to his senses and realized that piracy does not automatically mean lost sales, and he was willing to run an experiment and actually look at the empirical data.

He's still not totally convinced however -- as he notes that the reason his experiment worked was because it drove sales of the physical (paper) book. But he's worried that when more people have ebook readers, then things might change. Of course, at the time of that last column, we used it to point out that the mistake was in thinking that "give it away and pray" is a business model. It's not. Instead, you have to give people a reason to buy, and "hey, because I want you to" isn't a particularly good one. Instead, the focus should be on adding real value. Again, this is a situation where O'Reilly is pretty good. We were just discussing how one of the "reasons to buy" it offers is the ability to buy into "living books" that keep updating, so your copy isn't out of date. In that case, what they're really selling isn't the content, so much as the convenience and the knowledge that the information will always be the latest, without requiring any additional work or checking. There are lots of ways to compete with piracy that don't involve locking the content down in a customer-unfriendly way.

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This little girl can type 119 wpm. It's not just a skill, it's a hobby. She started playing on the computer at age 4 and spends her weekends typing. Her goal right now? "I'd like to get to at least 200(wpm)."

While this may sound strange, I can understand the allure of the type test — when I was in middle school, I used to procrastinate from studying by taking type tests on my super old Apple machine. It's really not that different from any other addictive game — most of us now associate it with work, but back then I was constantly trying to beat myself in speed and accuracy. By the way, if you're curious to know how fast you're typing, you can take a one-minute typing test here.

[via Mashable]

Providence, RI-based Tellart outfitted ten chairs with GPS trackers. The chairs were left on the curb for people to pick up. After people took the chairs home, the sponsor of this project (Blu Dot) tracked their new owners down down and interviewed them.

From Tellart:

Blu Dot and Mono, a branding consultancy in Minneapolis, approached us andSupermarche to help with a project to celebrate the one-year anniversary of their showroom in SoHo, NYC. They would do an experiment on "curb mining." 25 Real Good Chairs would be placed around New York City. 10 of them would contain concealed GPS tracking technology. Each would be picked up by a random passerby, who in turn would be pursued on foot and on an interactive online map - all the while being filmed for a documentary to premiere at the anniversary celebration.

The Blu Dot Real Good Experiment

Video

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It's been over five years since garage door opener company Chamberlain lost its bizarre DMCA case, which tried to argue that anyone making competing replacement garage door openers was violating the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. If you believed Chamberlain, then it would mean that the DMCA could effectively be used to block out any competition in replacement parts just by using a bit of encryption. The court's ruling was a bit convoluted, basically saying that this simply couldn't be what Congress intended with the DMCA, even if it was sorta what the language of the law actually said. This was a victory, in that it did limit the DMCA against a ridiculous situation, but it was unfortunate in that the ruling didn't address what the law actually said. To get around this, the court did a few different things, including noting that what Skylink did with its competing garage door openers didn't really involve "unauthorized access," which is key to the anti-circumvention clause. As the courts recognized, how could Chamberlain tell homeowners that they couldn't authorize the opening of their own garage door?

Fast forward five years, and most tech/copryight folks haven't thought too much about garage door openers and their relation to the DMCA... until Ars Technica's Nate Anderson moved into a new house, and noticed his garage door opener manual (from Chamberlain, of course). The manual was from 2006... well after Chamberlian had lost its case. And yet... the manual contained clear DMCA-style anti-circumvention language, stating:

NOTICE: If this Security+ garage door opener is operated with a non-rolling code transmitter, the technical measure in the receiver of the garage door opener, which provides security against code-theft devices, will be circumvented. The owner of the copyright in the garage door opener does not authorize the purchaser or supplier of the non-rolling code transmitter to circumvent that technical measure.

What's quite clear is that Chamberlain is trying to legaleze its way around the court rulings against it, by stating in the manual that you are not authorized to get around its little bit of technical trickery. Basically, it sounds like Chamberlain's lawyers saw the loophole in the judges twisted reasoning to get around what the DMCA does state, and have jumped gleefully through that loophole. Of course, the lawyers Anderson questioned doubt that this would hold up in court, but the real question is whether or not this would ever go back to court. Chamberlain may just be hoping that enough people are scared off by the questionable legal language that it doesn't need to file lawsuits, and competing product makers probably don't find it worthwhile to file their own lawsuit either. But, in the meantime, we get to see yet another remnant of what the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause has created.

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Jim K writes in to share this fun-looking project, a DIY handheld projector. Similar to the larger homebrew video projectors we have covered in the past, this one uses the screen from a portable TV screen to make a handheld micro projector. It probably won't nearly as bright or sharp as a commercial one, but it looks like a ton of fun to make, and I can think of all sorts of awesome things to do with a handheld projector that could be stashed in a backpack...

Related:

• Portable laser image projector
• Weekend Project: Alien Projector
• DIY HD home theater projector

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I am still not convinced that we need special laws mandating net neutrality, but I find the arguments from telcos that no one would ever block sites or services to be highly unbelievable. There have been cases of it happening in the past, and there are cases of it happening now. Shocklee points us to the news that a Russian ISP has been blocking websites that the government has dubbed "extremist," even though they include political opposition sites like Garry Kasparov’s Kasparov.ru, Solidarity's Rusolidarnost.ru and the National Bolshevik Party's Nazbol.ru. Combine that with attempts in the UK and Australia to give the government the ability to make up secret lists of sites that should be blocked by ISPs, and you can see why some believe it's important, as a fundamental principle, that ISPs should allow access to any site. US telcos say that they are in the business of encouraging free speech, and they would be crazy to block sites, but what we're seeing around the world suggests that there are times when ISPs do decide to block sites, and it's often due to political pressure from governing parties.

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Despite several sources reporting that post-indefinite-injunction Psystar was closing their doors for good, the company's lawyer is claiming that the company plans on going forward with PC sales, just not pre-loaded with Apple's OS X. Psystar plans on selling systems pre-loaded with "other operating systems," including Windows as well as selling their "Rebel EFI software" that allows consumers to load OS X on generic PCs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A judge in Oklahoma has temporarily blocked on a new law that would post details online about every woman who gets an abortion in the state.

Two hacker collectives in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have joined forces to lease space for a shared workshop.

For the past year, Twin Cities Maker have been meeting at coffee shops and members' homes, slowly gathering funds and members in order to realize their shared dream: to create a hackerspace where members can congregate, work, and share ideas. Simultaneously, a second group of makers calling themselves the Hack Factory of Minnesota were planning the same thing. A couple of weeks ago, the two groups found out about each other and joined forces.

Earlier this month, the two groups toured a light industrial warehouse in southeast Minneapolis, and immediately took a shine to the space. It seemed like a logical fit -- the initial lease was for 1,650 square feet, consisting of a large workspace with a garage door and an enclosed, air conditioned office. Even better, there's the possibility of adding up to 2,850 square feet on the ground floor -- including a near-perfect classroom space -- as well as additional space in the basement.

The following week, Hack Factory signed the lease, and the two groups voted to merge bringing their combined numbers to about 30 members.

So how will the merger work? Which name will be the one that gets used? TCM and HFM have identical missions and philosophies, they want to merge and will merge; they just have to work out the details of merging. TCM has a larger web presence including a forum, wiki, and Facebook group, while HFM has already filed for nonprofit status with the state and is the official lessor of the workspace. One early thought is to call the workspace the Hack Factory and the organization Twin Cities Maker.

See the Twin Cites Maker Flickr group for pictures of the new space.

Interested in getting in on a Twin Cities hackerspace on the ground floor? Visit twincitiesmaker.com today to learn more.

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Browser Pong (via Laughing Squid).

A team of nanobiology students from the University of Osaka made this beautiful fluorescent image of Mario using genetically engineered bacteria. It's one among a whole series of cool microbial art they created in a petri dish by manipulating proteins and pigments.

Team Osaka [via New Scientist]

There was some buzz earlier this year concerning reports that new streaming apps, like Spotify, somehow decreased unauthorized access to music. And yet, a new study from BPI suggests unauthorized access to music continues to grow, despite the rise of authorized services like Spotify. Now, there are some caveats. BPI isn't exactly known for being entirely accurate with data and these results are from an online survey. While you would think that fewer people would admit to unauthorized access in an online survey (people don't like to fess up), counteracting that is the fact that BPI has incentives to suggest the issue of piracy is a big deal, as it's pushing hard to force ISPs to kick people offline for file sharing. Still, what strikes me as interesting is that BPI still keeps insisting that this is a "problem," without any evidence that this is true. The only real "problem" is the failure of the record labels that BPI represents to adjust their business models. If they did that, there wouldn't be much of a problem at all. But, the labels don't want to do that. They want the government to rescue them and to pretend they can keep doing business they way they always did.

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Gizmodo has a piece on their favorite DIY projects from 2009, with the ability for users to vote on their favorites. Not surprisingly, MAKE is heavily represented. Here are three of our projects that they include. Vote for YOUR faves.

Build Your Own DTV Antenna

Jimmies Uglified Camera

Ask MAKE: Surplus TVs from the DTV switch

Most Popular DIY Projects of 2009

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The amazing Pete Friedrichs has posted a cool video on how he used spinning green LEDs and simple electronics to create a modern version of a "magic eye" vacuum tube. He writes:

So-called "magic eye" tubes are display devices, which indicate signal level by the projection of wedge-shaped shadows on a glowing view screen. They were developed in the 1930's for use as tuning indicators in radio receivers, and as alternatives to the then-expensive-to-manufacture meter movements.

Because they haven't been produced in decades, and because they degrade and wear out with use, the supply of functional eye tubes is dwindling. I thought there might be value in coming up with a potential substitute-- something that acted like an eye tube that could replace them in applications like antique radio restoration and general experimentation.

It turns out that convincing eye tube behavior can be simulated with one or more LEDs mounted on a rotating disk. The electronics to drive the LEDs amounts to little more an an op-amp, a transistor, and some timing components.

This video demonstrates the appearance of a real eye tube in operation, and introduces the principles involved in simulating one through electro-mechanical means. The video shows that the display generated by the electro-mechanical equivalent can be fairly convincing.

If you're not familiar with Pete's work, you must check out his website. He's the author of two amazing books, Voice of the Crystal and Instruments of Amplification. I review both of them in the forthcoming issue of MAKE. I've heard raves about these titles for years. After finally getting them and reading them, I know why. Self-published, too!

Simulating Magic Eye Tubes With Spinning LEDs and Simple Electronics

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