Wiwaxum Haustorium

Ancient civilizations of Mexico and Central America. 

By Spinden, Herbert Joseph, 1879-1967

Dead Acacia Trees and Red Dunes of Deadvlei in Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia, Africa, May 2017

Previously, we featured some GIFs of bubbling, fluidized sand (below). Inspired by the same video, Dianna from Physics Girl decided to build her own set-up, discovering along the way that it’s a little tougher than you might think. To work well, you’ll need very fine, dry particles and a good way to uniformly distribute the air so it doesn’t simply bubble up in one spot. And if you accidentally apply too much air pressure, you may get a face full of sand. The final results are very fun, though, and hopefully Dianna’s lessons learned will help any other DIYers interested in trying this experiment at home. For a little more on the physics here and in related topics, check out some of our previous posts on fluidization, soil liquefaction, quicksand, and dam failures. (Video credit: Physics Girl; image credit: R. Cheng, source)

Minimalist chic via kellywearstler

CheekInput

HCI project from Keio University uses sensors to turn your cheek into a touch interface for head mounted displays:

We propose a novel technology called “CheekInput” with a head-mounted display (HMD) that senses touch gestures by detecting skin deformation. We attached multiple photo-reflective sensors onto the bottom front frame of the HMD. Since these sensors measure the distance between the frame and cheeks, our system is able to detect the deformation of a cheek when the skin surface is touched by fingers. Our system uses a Support Vector Machine to determine the gestures: pushing face up and down, left and right. We combined these 4 directional gestures for each cheek to extend 16 possible gestures. To evaluate the accuracy of the gesture detection, we conducted a user study. The results revealed that CheekInput achieved 80.45% recognition accuracy when gestures were made by touching both cheeks with both hands, and 74.58 % when by touching both cheeks with one hand. 

Marbled Orbweaver (Araneus marmoreus), Vaseux Lake Provincial Park, Okanagan Falls, BC, Canada

Female marbled orbweavers are busy laying egg cocoons that will overwinter. Next spring hundreds of immature spiders will emerge from these cocoons and start the cycle all over again.

Seychelles Home to New Species of Caecilian

The Petite Praslin caecilian (Hypogeophis pti) is the world’s newest — and possibly the smallest — caecilian, a type of legless amphibian.

The new species is the seventh caecilian species found in the Seychelles, where the amphibians have been evolving for 64 million years. 

A team of scientists from Seychelles, the United States and the United Kingdom has found a new caecilian, perhaps the smallest species of the legless amphibian on Earth.

“As soon as I saw it I knew it was a new species,” Simon Maddock, a conservation biologist at the University of Wolverhampton, said in a statement. “[It] is a very exciting discovery and I was delighted to be able to formally describe it and present it to the world…”