For me, the characters that stole the show in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex were the excitable, adorable, and occasionally philosophical Tachikoma spider tanks. Now, LEGO modder Peer Kreuger has created a spectacular build which mimics three of the Tachikoma’s primary capabilities: Rolling, walking, and hand waving. His model, instructions for which can be found here, can roll like an RC car but then switch to walking to cover rough terrain. All this while sticking true to the iconic design from the anime. See a video of the little guy in action, after the break.

Hey, remember those clever image combinations that particularly festidious Facebook users put in place during the last major overhaul to the social networking site? Well, because of Timeline, all of those are going to be completely messed up. Thankfully, the new enormous “cover” image at the top of the redesigned user pages has ample opportunities for image shenanigans. If you’re keen to try something like you see above, check out the instructions after the break.

Kyle Bean, the man behind pencil shaving portraits, has come up with another beautifully simple and awesome idea: Harmless weapons. The photos are for an article in CUT Magazine about guerilla gardening and yarn bombing, two similarly harmless, but weapony things. I never thought I’d ever say this, but man, I really want to eat that grenade.

New research from Estonian scientists Inga Karton and Talis Bachmann shows that lying can be somewhat impeded by magnetic fields applied to specific areas of the brain. As crazy as that sounds, it is built upon previous work that showed that part of the brain acts as a moral compass and can be influenced by magnetic fields.

So, first with the caveats: In their research, participants subjected to the magnetic fields could still lie, they were just less likely to do so in a spontaneous situation. In the experiment, 16 subjects were shown colored discs and told that they could either lie or tell the truth about what color they saw. The researchers then applied transcranial magnetic stimulation to the left or right dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes and observed the results.

They found that the magnetic stimulation seemed to sway the response of the participants toward more truth-telling or lying.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign have developed small electronic devices that can be worn on the skin. These temporary tattoos make the person wearing them a part of the device, that can bend, stretch, and move along with the skin. The researchers were hoping to make less obtrusive medical monitors for special needs patients, like premature babies. But the new sensors have proven so successful they could also be used for a variety of other applications.

The idea of making wearable sensors that adhere to the skin seems so easy and useful its surprising no one has developed them before. According to researchers, the major challenge in developing the technology was making the parts of the sensor as flexible and stretchy as skin. To do this, the researchers had to take brittle silicon and make it more bendable by making the sensor incredibly thin. The electronic parts of the sensor, light-emitting diodes, solar cells, transistors, and antennae, were assembled in an S-shape that would allow the circuits to still work when stretched in different directions.

You probably thought that large ships had a stately, dignified birth off the docks and into the water. You’d be wrong. Like teaching a small child to swim, you just throw them over the side and hope for the best.

Reddit commentor DougyM does provide some explanation as to why this dramatic method is actually preferred:

You need to effectively have the entire ships weight distributed evenly along the hull, sliding it in sideways ensures that no one part is under more stress than another. Going forwards down a slope would focus the ships weight on either end of the hull and result in damage up to and including actually crushing the middle of the ship in on itself.

He fails to mention that the throw-the-huge-boat-over-the-edge method has the added benefit of being totally badass.

(via Reddit)

At Research in Motion (RIM)‘s BlackBerry World conference today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the beginning of a new, significant partnership between the two companies. Ballmer said that Microsoft will “invest uniquely” in forthcoming RIM devices by baking in Bing search and location functionality at the operating system level.

From now on, Bing will be the default search engine in the BlackBerry web browser. Users will be able to change this setting, but Bing will likely expect to see a boost in user base from those satisfied with its performance, or just uninteresting in changing the devices settings. Additionally, Bing will be the default location app for new BlackBerries shipped to mobile carriers. This part of the deal has a major caveat, as the mobile carriers can sign separate deals with Google and supplant the Bing support.

Scientists think that they may have an answer for why their simulations show merging pairs of supermassive black holes sometimes result in one of the black holes being suddenly “kicked” away. Though such kicking hasn’t been observed, astronomers have some evidence for huge rogue black holes that may have been ejected from centers of galaxies during one of these kicks. The answer, it seems, might come from the interaction of “tendex” and “vortex” lines.

The trouble is that mapping the warping effects of gravity over space-time is incredibly difficult. Each point on such a map has 10 numbers associated with it, making it difficult to analyze. Instead of numbers, the Cornell team lead by Robert Owen used arrows which they then connected into larger lines, similar to the mapping of magnetic fields. These can be generally organized into two types of lines: “tendex,” which show the stretching/compressing force of gravity, and “vortex” which describes twisting forces.

A new study by Christine Chaffer of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research seems to indicate that the journey from stem cell to specialized cell can also go backwards. Conventional thinking holds that stem cells can change into any specific body cell — liver cell, heart cell, etc., but sometimes, regular cells will imitate their transformable cousins.

Chaffer’s study began with the seemingly mundane observation that some healthy human breast cells were floating in a tube. Normally, healthy cells sink towards the bottom, while stem-cells are known to be free-floating. When Chaffer analyzed these floating cells she found that, among other indicators, an active CD44 gene which marked them being more like stem cells.

Looking at both cells in the body, Chaffer determined that about 1 in 300 cells had these traits. Amazingly, those that had weak expressions of the important CD44 gene produced offspring with stronger expressions of gene. As time progressed, Chaffer observed many cells spontaneously becoming more like stem cells.

Could quantum physics explain the human sense of smell? A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) lends credence to the theory that our sense of smell is based on sensing the vibrations caused by energy transfer at the subatomic level. The basis of the theory is that the structure of molecules is similar to that of balls held together by springs. This means the molecule can vibrate in a way unique to the composition of atoms in the molecule.

When an electron hits a molecule, it loses quanta or discrete packets of energy. The human olfactory system may be wired to interpret the loss of energy on electrons, and thus differently interpret the molecules the electron encountered because of the molecule’s unique vibration.