The Air Danshin Systems company of Japan says it offers pneumatic technology to protect buildings in the event of an earthquake. The shaking triggers a stream of air that levitates the house. The diagram below, from the company, shows to some extent how the system works, with blue representing the stream of air. (The Spoon & Tamago blog […]
Month: February 2012
A look at Walter, the sweating manikin
This image shows Walter, the sweating manikin, whose wholesome story is told in the study “New Functions and Applications of Walter, the Sweating Fabric Manikin“: For more detail and context, see this week’s Improbable Research column in the Guardian.
Fish farts, Russian submarines, the Swedish Foreign Minister
Maggie Koerth-Baker of Boing-Boing interviewed several journalists at the AAAS Annual Meeting last week in Vancouver, about what they had learned at the meeting. Here’s me, blabbing on about a new little chapter in the story of how fish farts almost caused a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Sweden, and might cause a new little kerfuffle […]
Yodeling of the Indiana Swiss Amish
Chad Thompson (Associate Professor of Linguistics, Department of English and Linguistics, Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, US) is one of the very, very few academic researchers to have written on the subject of Yodeling of the Indiana Swiss Amish. His paper ‘Yodeling of the Indiana Swiss Amish’ (published in Anthropological Linguistics,Vol. 38, No. 3, […]