Category Archives: Technology

It’s the pictures that got small

When televisions first entered the marketplace, directors were faced with a challenge: How to develop a visual language that would translate to a tiny black-and-white screen. They couldn’t just borrow from film: When concentrated down to 3 – 12 inches (or, after World War II, 19 – 20), the compositions, symbols and set dressing of massive silver screen productions reduced to a muddle. The effect has only grown more pronounced in the smash-cut, hyper-kinetic summer blockbusters of today.

It would no doubt strike many movie directors as strange to see us with our heads down, staring at our hands and enjoying their bigger-than-life productions on smaller-than-your palm devices. Nevertheless, people want their movies, and they want them on their iPhones, Androids and other portable devices. Here are some of the best apps available for downloading, collecting, experiencing, sharing and playing games about your favorite movies.

10 Mobile Apps for Film Buffs

I, Robonaut

Robonaut 2 (on left) became the first nonhuman to visit the International Space Station
Robonaut 2 (on left) became the first nonhuman to visit the International Space Station

Space is as hostile as environments come. Astronauts encounter temperatures that swing from 248 F (120 C) to -148 F (-100 C), and that’s just near Earth. The temperature of deep space plummets to -454 F (-270 C). Even the relative comfort of a space station—with its carefully regulated temperature, pressure and mix of gases—offers no escape from the ravages of prolonged exposure to microgravity.

If ever a setting called for robotic assistance, space is that place; but working in place of and, particularly, alongside humans requires a combination of strength, gentleness and dexterity unequaled by robots found anywhere else. Let’s take a look at …

How Robonauts Work

Putting the green in nanomachines

Carbon nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.

How is green nanotechnology being used?

Fearful symmetry: the beauty and power of tessellations

Irregular pentagon tessellation
Irregular pentagon tessellation. Image by R.A. Nonenmacher

We study mathematics for its beauty, its elegance and its capacity to codify the patterns woven into the fabric of the universe. Within its figures and formulas, the secular perceive order and the religious catch distant echoes of the language of creation. Mathematics achieves the sublime; sometimes, as with tessellations, it rises to art.

How tessellations work

Related Article:
Quiz: Tessellate this!