We often write about the amazing, charming, ridiculous things that 3D printers makes possible: see the fabbed hermit crab shells, the space shuttle made of pureed scallops and cheese, the “pirated” Penrose Triangle. But machines that can make any physical object using only resin powder can also be turned to more nefarious ends. Security blogger Brain Krebs reports that someone has deployed at least one impressively sophisticated ATM skimmer in LA that appears to have been 3D printed. The device fits over the front of a bona fide Chase ATM. Just looking at these babies sends a chill down your spine—this person or persons knew what they were doing. Here’s more from Krebs: (more…)

What’s the News: If two South Korean researchers have their way, the days of needing specialized equipment to test whether someone has strep, the flu, or other common illnesses may soon be numbered. The pair want to check for disease markers in a tiny drop of a bodily fluid by pressing it against a touchscreen, so your diagnosis could come straight from your smart phone. While there’s no app for that yet, the scientists recently finished a proof-of-concept study showing that a touchscreen could differentiate between various concentrations of bacterial DNA—a first step towards diagnosing your disease by spitting on your iPad.

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Corporations don’t have to wait for the SOPA bill to pass to start censoring the Internet, it turns out. Under a ruling just handed down by a federal judge in Nevada, hundreds of websites accused by Chanel of selling counterfeit goods are having their domains confiscated and their names removed from search engine results, with scanty evidence of the accusation’s validity. (more…)

Bionic contact lenses—which would display navigation data, personal emails, or any other sort of info superimposed on the world before your eyes—have long been mainstays of science fiction. Over the past several years, researchers have been working to make the tech real-world ready, striving to find solutions to the energy, size, safety, and image-quality problems that come up when you’re trying to fit a tiny integrated circuit into something transparent that sits on an eyeball.

Now, University of Washington researchers and their Finnish colleagues have made the first functioning bionic lens: a prototype with a single LED pixel, which could be safely worn by rabbits in the lab. (The image at right shows a rabbit wearing an earlier version of the lens, which contained a circuit but no light-emitting components.) Radio frequency energy emitted from a nearby transmitter and picked up by a circular antenna a fifth of an inch in diameter, printed on the lens, powered the electronics. The transmitter supplied adequate energy from three feet away when the lens was sitting in a dish, but had to be less than an inch away when the lens was placed on a rabbit’s eye, since tissues and fluids in the body interfered with reception. Since light from such a lens would be too close for the human eye to focus, the researchers made a separate contact composed of an array of smaller, flatter lenses, which would sit on top of the bionic contact and focus the light.

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An infographic produced by the organizers of American Censorship Day describes one of the arguments against the SOPA bill.

It’s been a busy couple of days in the discussion of free speech in the United States, and if you’re a regular reader of tech blogs, chances are you’ve begun to hear about one of this week’s issues: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. This bill, intended to help stem online piracy and backed by companies like Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner, has set off the alarms of many sites and companies on the internet because it essentially allows the government and private corporations to censor entire sites that they fear are illegally distributing copyrighted material. Many companies—including Google, Twitter, Facebook, AOL, Zynga, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and Ebay, which took out a full-page ad in the NYTimes with a letter to the congressmembers involved—and numerous sites and civil-liberty groups—including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and others—have spoken up against the act. Some sites that would likely be among the blocked, including Tumblr, are self-censoring in protest. A coalition of Internet civil liberty and IP groups declared Wednesday, November 16—the day that hearings began on the SOPA bill—American Censorship Day and are orchestrating a campaign to have people contact their representatives to speak against the bill. They developed this infographic that explains why they are worried about the bill (excerpted above).

The gist of the opponents’ argument is this: While the problem of online piracy is real, the way this law is written, it means that the government may make email companies and internet service providers monitor links you send through email or on social networking sites. It also means that someone from the government or a private corporation can cause a whole site to be removed from Google results and block people from viewing it, as well as preventing online payments from being made to the person who owns the site. It is, essentially, a law that creates a government blacklist, a la the Great Firewall of China.

For more details, check out coverage at The Atlantic Wire, BoingBoing, Ars Technica, Business Insider.

One cable holds the bridge up.

San Francisco has its share of massive earthquakes, but the Bay Bridge, one of the city’s main transit arteries, is not as quake-safe as you’d hope. That’s why, alongside it, the state is building a massive new replacement structure—the largest self-supporting suspension bridge ever built. Jim Giles at New Scientist went to visit the bridge and provides a primer on its engineering:

In a regular suspension bridge, the cables that support the roadway are hung between two or more towers, like a hammock between trees, and anchored at each end by a connection to land. The new bridge is more like a sling. A single cable loops under the roadway, over the tower and beneath the roadway on the other side of the tower. The enormous forces placed on the cable by the road cancel out, leaving a structure that is balanced but not directly supported by a land anchor…

As the [road] segment fell into place it revealed the full length of tower that stands behind it, an elegant structure made up of four concrete pillars. These drop into enormous steel foundations, parts of which were built in Texas and shipped to California via the Panama canal. The pillars are connected by “shear beams”—relatively weak steel components that are designed to break if the towers move. The two roadways, one each for east and westbound traffic, hang from the cables but are not attached directly to the tower. This arrangement means that the four pillars and two roadways will sway when a quake hits, but remain intact even through the strongest shaking that geologists expect the region to experience over the next 1500 years.

Read more at New Scientist.

Image courtesy of Bay Bridge Information Office.

What’s the news: Viking legend has it that sailors could hold up crystal sunstones to the sky to help them find their way. Turns out the legend could be true. In a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers found that a type of crystal called an Icelandic spar commonly found in that country could accurately reveal the position of the sun in cloudy or near-dark conditions. (more…)

Saint Mark’s basilica was where many Venetian polyphonic works had their debut performances, but the reverb presented a puzzle for historians.

Ah, the Renaissance—lots of deep thinkers, gorgeous art, busty maidens, fried dough on a stick (if Ren faires are to be believed), and the liveliest music this side of the Middle Ages. But when you compare the elaborate, up-tempo harmonies of late Renaissance polyphony to the churches where they would have been performed, a serious discrepancy pops up. Giant Renaissance churches like Saint Mark’s basilica and the Redentore, both in Venice, have way too long of a reverberation time for those tunes to sound good. It takes a full 7 seconds for a note to fade after it’s played or sung, and that means that songs, especially fast ones, blend into a giant muddy mess.

A physicist and a music technologist, who presented their work at the American Acoustical Society on Monday, wondered if the churches, when packed full of people and hung with heavy draperies during holy festivals, might have sounded much better than they do today. Working with architectural historians, they calculated the chairs, drapery, and audience members’ ability to absorb sound. With a computer model of the churches, they were able to show that with full-on holy regalia and a crowded audience, the reverberation time was cut in half. They took their analysis even further to see if the small pergoli, or balconies, installed by an architect in Saint Mark’s would have enhanced the experience of a person sitting in the Doge’s throne when a choir was split between them (all the rage in Renaissance Venice). Indeed, they found that with a split choir in a fully decorated church, the reverberation time at the Doge’s throne was reduced to a mere 1.5 or 2 seconds, which is the gold standard for modern concert halls.

To hear the Doge’s stereo system for yourself, click here and scroll to the bottom of the page.

[via ScienceNOW]

Image courtesy of Andreas Tille / Wikimedia Commons

Put ‘er here, R2.

Fans of intergalactic exploration both real and fictional, rejoice: Future NASA missions may incorporate tractor beams, lasers that can pick up objects at a distance. “We’re caught in a tractor beam and it’s pulling us in!” is a long way off, but NASA has just awarded a team of scientists $100,000 to explore three different methods of trapping objects with laser light and reeling them in.

Dust, rather than Corellian light freighters, are the objects in question: the hope is to use tractor beam tech to collect atmospheric particles or grab dust from a planet’s surface without resorting to using a drill, as the Mars rovers have. And indeed, one of the three methods—optical tweezers—has been used by biologists for decades to hold microscopic particles, including viruses and bacteria, in place for experiments.

The challenge will be developing techniques that will work in all the different environments that an exploratory craft might explore. Optical tweezers won’t work in the vacuum of space, for example, but could be useful on a planet with an atmosphere. The other techniques, which use solenoid beams and Bessel beams, could work at a variety of distances and perhaps without an atmosphere—the NASA team will spend the next decade or so exploring how they might be developed and incorporated.

Concept image courtesy Dr. Paul Stysley via NASA

On October 14, security company Symantec got word from a research lab that they’d discovered a piece of malware that looked a lot like Stuxnet, the sophisticated computer virus that made headlines last year after its anonymous designers used it to attack Iran’s nuclear program. This new malware, called Duqu by the researchers who discovered it, shares much of Stuxnet’s code, suggesting that it came from the same people who built the first virus, or at least people who had access to the source code. (more…)

A team of doctors in Glasgow, Scotland, have begun using ultrasound to help heal patients’ broken bones, claiming the technique can reduce recovery time by up to 40 percent with especially bad fractures. Developed in the 1950s by physicians in the same city, ultrasound is widely used in sonograms to produce images of developing fetuses. Sonograms are made by emitting sound waves into the body and recording the reflected patterns. To heal fractures, sound is emitted at a slightly different frequency and stimulates the development and activity of osteoblasts, which lay down new bone.

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As the 2012 presidential race ramps up, campaigns are courting voters not only at the traditional county fairs and town hall meetings, but online—and generating, in the process, an enormous amount of data about who potential voters are and what they want. At CNN.com, Micah Sifry—an expert on the intersection of technology and politics—delves in the Obama team’s extensive efforts to mine and manage the data in a way that could help them better interact with voters and home in on important issues. He writes:

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Unmanned drones like this Predator are now central to US warfare—but they are also vulnerable to cyberattacks.

What’s the News: A computer virus that records the keystrokes of US military operators has infected two classes of American military drones. “We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” a military source told Wired’s Danger Room, which broke the story. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

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The Internet’s cup runneth over with elegies for the Apple cofounder, who died yesterday at 56. People around the world are pouring out their stories of how Jobs, via the company’s products, changed their lives.

Many have a frankly religious tone, like the middle-aged mom who spoke in a breathless voice about the iPhone’s “grace” and the architect Jobs hired in the mid-80s who told how Jobs “put his hand on mine” when teaching him to use a mouse (both were on NPR member station WNYC this morning). Other testimonials focus more on when the teller first encountered an Apple product, back in the days when mice were the big new thing. People are even setting up shrines in Apple stores, a move that strikes some as fitting tribute, others as cultish (“If you needed any more proof that brands are our new gods…” one person tweeted in response to the news). Though the blog “Steve Jobs is God” appears to be defunct, its message is on many lips today, in some form or another. It’s simply astounding how much of a connection many felt to Jobs, whom they see as the architect of a significant portion of their lives.

The best tribute that we’ve seen, though, isn’t part of this sometimes-saccharine thicket. (more…)

Finally! After teasers released in March whetted our appetites, this maker’s dream is now airing: This week National Geographic’s DIY show “How Hard Can It Be?”, the team satisfies your hunger to see Carl Fredricksen’s balloon-propelled house in the flesh—using around 300 technicolor weather balloons and a lightweight cottage that the team was still stapling together just hours before it rose into the sky, to bob along at 10,000 feet. You can’t not root for this spunky bunch (even though this first video ends in a cliffhanger):

Luckily, with a bit of searching on the NatGeo site, you can find the clincher:

When they launched the balloon a few months ago, Wired did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the physics involved here. Though Wired didn’t address this, we suspect that one reason they couldn’t use party balloons is that the pressure from balloons on the outside of the cluster pushing in on the ones in the center would cause them to burst. What do you think?