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Amazon got the biggest headlines for its drone delivery plans, but it’s an idea that’s catching on across the shipping industry. At a nautical trade fair in Hamburg this week, the shipping research firm DNV GL revealed designs for a new electric vessel that would ferry cargo with zero crew members — roughly the nautical equivalent of Amazon’s automated delivery drones. Dubbed “ReVolt,” the concept ship is designed for short sea voyages, carrying up to 100 standard TEU containers at a relatively slow 6 knots. But because the ReVolt has no crew, it doesn’t need living quarters or safety equipment, resulting in a much more efficient trip between ports.

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Just in case you should want to do that.

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This is a fascinating tour of the ‘forensics’ of determining the authenticity of very old books.

Wilding obtained digital samples of unquestionably legitimate stamps from the book collection of Federico Cesi, the Accademia dei Lincei founder, and compared them in high-resolution detail. In each stamp, a lynx appeared at the center, framed by two oval borders, a wrap of Latin text (“From the Library of Federico Cesi, Prince and Marquis of Monticelli”), and a third oval border. Wilding then examined the stamp in Lan’s “Sidereus Nuncius.” In the genuine stamps, there was a gap in the innermost oval border just to the left of the lynx’s mouth. In Lan’s copy, the border was continuous. Wilding also checked the inventory of Cesi’s library, and found no listing of a “Sidereus Nuncius.”

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Shawyer’s engine provides thrust by “bouncing microwaves around in a closed chamber.” That’s it. There’s no need for a propellant of any kind like rocket fuel. When filled with resonating microwaves, the conical chamber of the thruster experiences a net thrust toward the wide end. These microwaves can be  generated using electricity, which can be provided by solar energy. In theory, this means that the thruster can work forever, or at least until its hardware fails.

…

Now, American scientists at NASA have given the EmDrive a go, and once again confirmed that it actually works. The test results were presented on July 30 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, and astonishingly enough, they are positive. The team behind the drive still doesn’t know why it works, just that it does.

Toastabags.

Flashlight Grilling Spatula.

Peanut Butter & Jelly Soda. I am not making this up.

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The project will be charted by Oval Films, which also helped to find Richard III’s remains in a car park in Leicester.

It will follow amateur historian Peter Burke, who has written two historical novels on the times of Harold, and claims the king was wounded but survived.

He believes he died 30 years later and was buried near the east wall of the former abbey that dates to the late 11th century.

And if he can get a best-selling book out of it, that’s good too.

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Can interstellar travel be far behind?

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“I discovered that using light at night is bad for people’s health and interferes with their sleep. I felt a moral obligation to do something about it, particularly when I learned it’s the blue component in ordinary white light that is suppressing the production of melatonin. And melatonin not only helps you sleep but is a marvelous material that has a very big influence on health in general; specifically, if you don’t have enough you may develop diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and even a couple kinds of cancer.” [emphasis added]

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Meanwhile, on the Kardashian front….

For-ghetti spaghetti fork.

ButterUp butter knife.

Hugo’s Amazing Tape.

Beer stein for cans.

Leather beer caddy for bikes.

Compact folding bow. This baby can save your life if you’re suddenly cast back into the Middle Ages. Hey, it could totally happen.

Batman branding iron. You know you want one.

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Artificial flavours are more complex and interesting than first appears. Chris Baraniuk discovers a world of sensory trickery – and a curious myth about fake banana.

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What’s next? A “full-scale” house. The castle is large enough to walk around in, but it seems that the builder has bigger plans. Also the next building will likely be built someplace warmer. Why warmer? Concrete sets at only so quick a pace — if you can help it cure, you can probably build more quickly.

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A new survey from human-resources services firm Aon Hewitt found that companies are spending a record share of their payroll on performance-based bonuses, signaling a shift away from longer-term salary increases.

We are all CEOs now.

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Maybe that’s why they talk so funny.

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Many of Her Majesty’s shopping habits are a matter of public record, thanks to the Royal Warrant Holders Association, a prestigious group of 800 or so companies selected as official suppliers to the Royal Household.

If you could afford the best of everything, from whom would you buy it?

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

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The storm of controversy erupted when the Army Corps of Engineers, which managed the land where the bones had been found, learned of the radiocarbon date. The corps immediately claimed authority—officials there would make all decisions related to handling and access—and demanded that all scientific study cease. Floyd Johnson protested, saying that as county coroner he believed he had legal jurisdiction. The dispute escalated, and the bones were sealed in an evidence locker at the sheriff’s office pending a resolution.

“You can count on your fingers the number of ancient, well-preserved skeletons there are” in North America, he told me, remembering his excitement at first hearing from Chatters. Owsley and Dennis Stanford, at that time chairman of the Smithsonian’s anthropology department, decided to pull together a team to study the bones. But corps attorneys showed that federal law did, in fact, give them jurisdiction over the remains. So the corps seized the bones and locked them up at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, often called Battelle for the organization that operates the lab.

Your tax dollars at work.

Owsley and his group were eventually forced to litigate not just against the corps, but also the Department of the Army, the Department of the Interior and a number of individual government officials. As scientists on modest salaries, they could not begin to afford the astronomical legal bills. Schneider and Barran agreed to work for free, with the faint hope that they might, someday, recover their fees. In order to do that they would have to win the case and prove the government had acted in “bad faith”—a nearly impossible hurdle. The lawsuit dragged on for years. “We never expected them to fight so hard,” Owsley says. Schneider says he once counted 93 government attorneys directly involved in the case or cc’ed on documents.

And working hard.

I asked Schneider why the corps so adamantly resisted the scientists. He speculated that the corps was involved in tense negotiations with the tribes over a number of thorny issues, including salmon fishing rights along the Columbia River, the tribes’ demand that the corps remove dams and the ongoing, hundred-billion-dollar cleanup of the vastly polluted Hanford nuclear site. Schneider says that a corps archaeologist told him “they weren’t going to let a bag of old bones get in the way of resolving other issues with the tribes.”

It’s like something out of a bad spy novel.

During the trial, the presiding magistrate judge, John Jelderks, had noted for the record that the corps on multiple occasions misled or deceived the court. He found that the government had indeed acted in “bad faith” and awarded attorney’s fees of $2,379,000 to Schneider and his team.

“At the bare minimum,” Schneider told me, “this lawsuit cost the taxpayers $5 million.”

And these fools want to be in charge of your health care.

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Over the years, I’ve met with several foreign speaking partners. Through conversation, I learn their language — Spanish, Korean, Japanese — and they learn mine — English. Many of them first got serious about their study of that more-or-less-international tongue with the goal of completely eliminating their native accent which, while demonstrably possible, takes so much additional effort as an adult that I’ve always advised them to just spend that time learning another language (or two) instead. Many, of course, come to that conclusion themselves, realizing that English speakers all over the world have created a legitimate culture of speaking English in all kinds of different ways, with all kinds of different accents, whether or not they learned the language from childhood. But it still makes one wonder: how many different accents do people speak it in? And what do they all sound like? Wonder no longer, for we have The Speech Accent Archive, created by Steven H. Weinberger of George Mason University’s Linguistics department, who introduces it in the video above.

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Surgeons in Beijing, China, have successfully implanted an artificial, 3D-printed vertebra replacement in a young boy with bone cancer. They say it is the first time such a procedure has ever been done.

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The small hopping insect Issus coleoptratus uses toothed gears on its joints to precisely synchronize the kicks of its hind legs as it jumps forward.

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A useful map. Contrary to what you would expect, Texas does not allow open carry.

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Project aims to help mating moose move from New Brunswick into Nova Scotia

Which, I gather, is what you do if you’re a mating moose. Who knew?

AirEnergy.

The Chairless Chair.

The Cozy Room.

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Why, the control tower for the Landing Ring, of course, silly.

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Found in the southeastern part of the Mexican state of Campeche, in the heart of the Yucatan peninsula, the cities were hidden in thick vegetation and hardly accessible.

“Aerial photographs helped us in locating the sites,” expedition leader Ivan Sprajc, of the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), said.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Hey — ya work with what ya got.

Waterfall bathroom faucet.

iPhone laser pointer. I am not making this up.

Floppy tube garlic peeler. Can double as an enhanced interrogation device in a pinch. (That’s not on her copy, of course.)

Pile of Poop Emoji Mask. You know who you are.

Chocolate Lego Blocks.

Best Butt Exercises for Women (Android app).

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Grunlan says surgeons would heat a chunk of the polymer in salt water until it becomes pliable, then mold it into the exact shape of the missing bone section. Once in place, the polymer would cool and stiffen. “After the foam is in place, bone cells come in and replace the foam, which is absorbed into the body and naturally excreted,” said Grunlan.

In lab experiments, she and her colleagues coated the PCL with another biodegradable polymer, called polydopamine, that is known to stimulate bone growth. They seeded the polymers with human bone cells, and after a few days saw that the cells were not only multiplying, but producing important bone-forming proteins.

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This man can pick up a 70-pound lump of metal like it’s bag of groceries. But it’s not because he’s Iron Man—he just happens to be wearing a robotic suit that grants him immense strength.

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It looks male from here. But what do I know?

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Jeez, that’s all we need, sticky bioengineers….

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“Investing in Texas was an easy decision,” said CEO Iver Mossberg. “It’s a state that is not only committed to economic growth but also honors and respects the Second Amendment and the firearm freedoms it guarantees for our customers.”

Come on down!

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One of the most interesting emerging treatments for certain types of cancer aims to starve the tumour to death. The strategy involves destroying or blocking the blood vessels that supply a tumour with oxygen and nutrients. Without its lifeblood, the unwanted growth shrivels up and dies.

One way to do this is with drugs called angiogenesis inhibitors which prevent the formation of new blood vessels that tumours rely on for sustenance. But there is another approach as well?—?physically blocking the surrounding blood vessels so that blood can no longer flow into the tumour.

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“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas has said. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

That’s what increasing the minimum wage gets you. Simple economics, so simple that intellectuals can’t grasp it.

The Momentum burger-bot isn’t remotely humanoid. You can forget visions of Futurama’s Bender. It’s more of a burger assembly line. Ingredients are stored in automated containers along the line. Instead of pre-prepared veggies, cheese, and ground beef—the bot chars, slices, dices, and assembles it all fresh.

…

Burger robots may improve consistency and sanitation, and they can knock out a rush like nobody’s business. Momentum’s robot can make a burger in 10 seconds (360/hr). Fast yes, but also superior quality. Because the restaurant is free to spend its savings on better ingredients, it can make gourmet burgers at fast food prices.

…

By replacing human cooks, the machine reduces liability, management duties, and, at just 24 square feet, the overall food preparation footprint. Resources once dedicated to preparation can instead fund better service.

Better burgers through automation.

Beekeeping Starter Kit.

Spray Cake.

Nunchopsticks. Perfect gift for Bruce Lee.

Water-draining soap dish.

Spud bar.

Peg-leg pirate chopsticks.

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Y Combinator-backed biotech company Bikanta wants to find and stop cancer at its source by inserting tiny, fluorescent diamonds inside your body. The brainchild of Dr. Ambika Bumb, who holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from Oxford, these nanodiamonds can detect molecular abnormalities at a much earlier stage, essentially stopping cancer from spreading any further.

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According to a recent Nature article, “air near the bottom of the crater contained unusually high concentrations of methane — up to 9.6% — in tests conducted at the site on 16 July, says Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia. Plekhanov, who led an expedition to the crater, says that air normally contains just 0.000179% methane.”

The scientist said the methane release may be related to Yamal’s unusually hot summers in 2012 and 2013, which were warmer by an average of 5 degrees Celsius. “As temperatures rose, the researchers suggest, permafrost thawed and collapsed, releasing methane that had been trapped in the icy ground,” the report stated.

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Capturing carbon emissions and selling them for oil production could be big business in the U.S. as the country prepares to require power plant owners to cut their emissions.

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A team that includes former Energy secretary Steven Chu says it’s building a lithium anode battery that might give electric vehicles a 300-mile driving range and triple a cellphone’s juice. Stanford professor Yi Cui says it will likely take three to five years, though, to bring the product to market.

Turn Any Regular Lighter Into Powerful Windproof Torch.

Darth Vader Outdoor Wood Stove.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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While most of the documented experiments with tractor-beam technology so far have involved light waves, the team from Dundee used sound waves to manipulate a half-inch triangular prism made of metal and rubber, successfully pulling the target toward the source of the acoustic beam. Half an inch may not sound like much, but it’s a vast improvement on fifty nanometres. The experiment was part of a larger project across four U.K. universities—Bristol, Southampton, Glasgow, and Dundee—and took nine months to complete. The results have been published in Physical Review Letters.

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 How can we get rid of excess CO2? Geologist Juerg Matter of the University of Southampton, U.K. is a principal investigator of the Iceland-based project CarbFix, whose recent results show it has safely stored nearly 170 tons of carbon dioxide underground by reaction with minerals—stashing it in rock so it can’t leak out again. The next step is to go big.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

I have always been fascinated by Stirling engines, and I must confess that (like hydraulic rams) no matter how many times I read the explanations of how they work, I still don’t have a clue.

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Assassin’s Creed has always made it easy to pull off incredible acrobatic moves with little more than a tap of a button, but those video game leaps are nothing compared to seeing real parkour practitioners weave their way through the urban jungle.

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The NS Savannah, which cost $50m, was launched 55 years ago this week. It was to be an ambassador of sorts – the world’s first nuclear-propelled merchant ship and a symbol of safety and faith in the fuel of the future.

I remember the Savannah, and always wondered what happened to it.

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And about fargin’ time, too.

New companies are going around the traditional “front door” of FDA approval, insurers and healthcare institutions by launching ‘Healthcare 2.0’ companies that target consumers and self-insured employers, upending the health sector through the use of innovative digital and social technologies.

Watch that will project time on your wrist.

The Swash machine.

Cordless Ultrasonic Rodent Repeller. Let’s set one up on Capitol Hill….

Chainmail running shoes. I am not making this up.

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At least five times in the past week in Gaza, Israeli tanks equipped with a revolutionary defense system have deflected anti-tank missiles fired at them by Hamas fighters, according to the Israeli army.

The success of the Windbreaker system, as it is called in Israel, augments on the ground the technological achievement in the air of the Iron Dome anti-rocket defense system which Israel credits with neutralizing the intensive rocketing from Gaza of the past two weeks.

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Scientists say they have turned thin air into an “optical fibre” that can transmit and amplify light signals without the need for any cables.

In a proof-of-principle experiment they created an “air waveguide” that could one day be used as an instantaneous optical fibre to any point on earth, or even into space.

The findings, reported in the journal Optica, have applications in long range laser communications, high-resolution topographic mapping, air pollution and climate change research, and could also be used by the military to make laser weapons.