Joel Johnson

Seth Raphael, MIT-trained magician

Seth Raphael is a Portland magician who will be doing a full-blown version of his "technology or magic?" show at the Hollywood Theater this Saturday, July 11th at 7:15PM. This is a warm-up for a performance at the TED conference, so get him before the malarial venture capitalists get to him first. Tickets are $10.

MagicSeth's groundbreaking magic features a psychic website, a card trick done over instant messenger, and a time machine. His performance pushes the boundaries of magic and technology, discarding the silk handkerchiefs of his predecessors and embracing the machines that fill our daily life.

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Steven Leckart

Get This Guy To Finish His Laser-Cut Gingerbread Bridge

Instructables user rstraugh is building a kick-ass model of the Oberbaum Bridge in Berlin out of gingerbread, using an Epilog Laser. So far, the project looks awesome, but he says he probably won't finish it until next Christmas. :(

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Steven Leckart

13,500 Pages of Data Micro-Etched into Nickel

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Steven Leckart

Two years of air quality photos in Beijing

Working with the Asia Society and a photographer in Beijing, my former colleague Michael Zhao has designed an interactive site with an amazing collection of snapshots taken through the same apartment window in Beijing. The images date from March 2009 (as I write) all the way back to March 2007.

You can click through them all, and sort by best/worst air pollution index (API) and air quality grade for each day on the Asia Society project site. Or you can watch everything in reverse timelapse and zoom out to see tiny images of every day on Michael's site.

On my last birthday (Dec. 7), Beijing's air scored a C and the index was a 112, meaning "Generally healthy individuals may also notice some discomfort." The photo above is a 115. The worst day recorded/photographed: December 28, 2007, with a score a 500!

Of course, there's some pretty neat tech wizardry that goes into measuring airborne chemicals. After the jump, check out a quantum cascade laser open path sensor...

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Steven Leckart

Death Star annihilates the Enterprise

Terrorist fist jab at 00:36.

Update: I found this on YouTube randomly searching for bootleg footage from the new film. Turns out the clip was made by none other than Mike Horn, who previously made the Death Star Over San Francisco vid.

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Steven Leckart

Star Trek replicas that actually do something

Why settle for a $20 first-gen phaser that only looks cool, when you can build your own fully-functional Blu-Ray Laser Phaser for just $100?!

[via Instructables]

A collection of other functional replicas after the jump...

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Steven Leckart

Delicious, Cross-Bred Corn -- Now With Lasers!

Mapping desirable genes in a crop like corn used to require farming and, therefore, time. You'd plant a big field with seeds, wait for them to germinate, collect samples, and escort them back to the lab for further analysis. Then scientists started probing seeds before planting. Using dog toenail clippers and eventually larger, metal-blade "chippers," they slice off a chunk of seed, using one little portion for DNA analysis and saving the rest for potential planting. The idea is that if you can decipher up front which seeds contain the most desirable genes, then you can plant only those to see which sprouts lives up to their genetic expectations. From there, you move forward with cross-breeding the best specimens to try manufacturing that perfect, "golden seed."

Neat and pretty efficient, but nothing compared to the next phase: lasers!

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Rob Beschizza

We promise to write more frequently about awesome medical equipment with lasers

From an email sent in by Alexander, a scientist:

Why doesn't Boing Boing Gadgets ever cover the awesome technology used in the biotech research industry?
I mean, flow cytometers shoot LASERS at a moving stream of moving cells (and lines the cells up one cell at a time using hydrodynamic focusing and measures something like 6,000 cells/minute) and get information about them from how the lasers bounce off of the cells! I list them as being for cool scientists only because the cheap ones cost $30,000 and as such only Big Scientists have their own. Everyone else has to share them.

As Joel recently indicated, promoting international understanding of lase as a transitive verb is part of our mission, so we appreciate your thoughts. We promise to cover this bad-ass shit in greater detail, Alexander. Thank you!

Best Regards,
Boing Boing Gadgets

Photo: University of Toronto

Update: Why stop there? – Joel