On December the seventh 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy unleashed a surprise attack on the United States Naval base stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Described by President Roosevelt as an act “that will live in infamy,” the Japanese killed 2,403, injured 1,178, sank and damaged four battleships, devastated three destroyers, and downed or wrecked close to 350 aircraft. The attack sent emotional shockwaves through the American public and awoke a technological and industrial giant. The United States ended its policy of neutrality and set its sights on defeating Japan (and its axis allies Germany and Italy) to avenge Pearl Harbor. The
Back in 1999 it was easy to view the World Wide Web as a passing fad. Google was a year old, Facebook was about five years down the road, and most people were still using noisy dial-up to get online. But as this video shows, the internet had an early advocate in David Bowie
The 18-year-old interview was recently shared by Paleofuture on the one-year anniversary of the musician’s death. In it, Bowie makes a case for the internet as the new frontier for “the subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic and nihilistic …”
His interviewer, BBC host Jeremy Paxman, isn’t quite convinced. Paxman claims that the internet “is just a tool” and that its potential has been “hugely exaggerated,” making Bowie’s predictions feel even more uncanny. Bowie foretells of the growing role the audience will have in the art: “I really embrace the idea that there’s a new demystification process between the artist and the audience,” he says. “… The interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
The interview also a features a few charming Bowie-isms, like his tongue-in-cheek characterization of the web as “an alien lifeform.” While some of his ideas may have sounded far-out in 1999, they mostly ring true today. “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg,” Bowie said. “I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable.” You can watch the interview in its entirety below.
Decades before The Simpsons predicted a President Trump, an obscure CBS Western from the 1950s called Trackdown featured a man who claimed he could prevent the end of the world by building a wall. The man’s name was Walter Trump, and he shares a number of similarities with the president-elect.
As pointed out by Snopes, in the episode “The End of the World,” which aired on May 8, 1958, the mysterious Trump was a confidence man, decked out in a cultish robe, who arrived in the town of Talpa and, “tells the townspeople that a cosmic explosion will rain fire on the town and that he is the only one that can save them from death.” The wall he wanted to build was designed to keep out certain doom, of course, but his mere presence arouses suspicion from some of the locals.
Trump’s plan never comes to fruition, and he’s eventually brought to justice by the show’s hero, Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman, for grand theft and fraud. YouTube user Marcy Brafman uploaded portions of the episode on November 4, 2016, just four days before the presidential election. You can check it out below to see the bizarre coincidence for yourself:
Scientists at Stanford University have built a super-cheap, super-fast centrifuge out of everyday items. Their inspiration? A simple spinning toy. The team described their invention in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Biophysicist Manu Prakash is on a quest to make scientific and medical equipment cheaper and more accessible for everyone. He’s developed parasite-detecting skin patches and computers that run on drops of water. Last year, he made a splash with the introduction of the Foldoscope—an inexpensive, DIY paper microscope that users can assemble themselves. His goal is to distribute 1 million to schools worldwide by the end of 2017.
For his next trick, Prakash turned his attention to the centrifuge, a machine that spins rapidly to separate blood samples into their component parts. Centrifuging is a basic and crucial element of conducting blood tests like the one for malaria, yet many clinics around the world either cannot afford a machine or don’t have access to the electricity required to power it. “I realized that if we wanted to solve a critical problem like malaria diagnosis,” Prakash said in a statement, “we needed to design a human-powered centrifuge that costs less than a cup of coffee.”
He brought the problem back to his lab and began brainstorming with postdoctoral research fellow Saad Bhamla. They realized that the centrifuge’s primary job is simply to spin—the same job shared by thousands of years of children’s toys. They brought in armloads of old toys and pieces and set to work playing with them.
One evening, Prakash was spinning a simple whirligig device that he’d made from a button and some string. He decided to set up a high-speed camera to see how fast the thing could go. When he checked the tape, he was amazed. The crude setup was powerful enough to get the button spinning 10,000 to 15,000 times per minute.
The next step was rigging the center disk to hold and process samples. After a few weeks of experimentation, Prakash had his prototype: a paper disk loaded with thin tubes of blood.
Not content to let it rest there, he and Bhamla recruited a team of mathematicians and asked them to optimize the new paper machine. “We realized that this is a toy that no one had thought about,” he toldThe Atlantic. “The physics of how it works weren’t understood, and its fundamental limits were completely unknown. So we spent six months thinking about the math, all with the goal of asking how fast it could really go.”
The answer: a staggering 125,000 revolutions per minute—which the team believes is the fastest rotational speed ever recorded for a human-powered object. (“We have submitted an application to Guinness World Records,” they note in the paper.) This “paperfuge,” as they call it, can separate liquid blood from plasma in just two minutes. In 15 minutes, it can extract malaria parasites from a drop of blood.
This exceptional speed is just part of the paperfuge’s appeal. The rest comes in its dirt-cheap construction. The final prototype is made out of waterproof paper, Velcro, drinking straws, and fishing line. It weighs less than 2 grams and can be produced for about 20 cents. And this, Prakash says, is the key: “Frugal science is about democratizing scientific tools to get them out to people around the world.”
