As the prospect of nuclear weapons testing by nations like North Korea and Iran once again makes headlines, LIFE.com presents rare and (mostly)
unpublished pictures from the Nevada desert by photographer Loomis Dean
shortly after a 1955 atomic bomb test.
These are not "political" pictures. They are, instead, eerily beautiful,
unsettling photographs made at the height of the Cold War, when the
destructive power of any atomic blast was jaw-droppingly huge, but
positively miniscule compared to today's truly terrifying thermonuclear
weapons. In short, these pictures from more than half a century ago serve
as a quiet reminder of just how insane the very notion of nuclear warfare
really is.
[Video Link] "MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith and his team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group … came up with LiquiGlide, a 'super-slippery' coating which makes the insides of the bottle so frictionless that the sludgy goo inside just slides out like water."
[Video Link] It was so great to see Adam Savage at Maker Faire again this year. Thousands of people crammed into the the giant Fiesta Hall for Adam's presentation.
Adam started by talking about his fedora, which is a replica of the one Harrison Ford wore in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. He explained that the hat was made by a guy named Marc Kitter. Unable to find an accurate Indiana Jones fedora, Kitter taught himself millenary, so he could make one for himself.
After Kitter got good at hat making, he started his own company, the Adventurebilt Hat Company, which makes 40 to 50 pure beaver felt fedoras per year for $650 each. They are so good that Harrison Ford wears an Adventurebilt in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
I wonder how many extra orders Kitter got as a result of Adam's talk?
In June 2010 Denver police officer Derrick Saunders was sentenced to 5 days in jail for driving 143 mph while drunk. The manager of safety fired Saunders, but yesterday the Civil Service Commission overturned the decision to fire him, based on "discretion and precedence."
This is not good news for slow-moving McDonald's employees:
Saunders previously had been cleared of pointing a gun at a McDonald's employee in Aurora in 2009. The employee said Saunders, an officer assigned to Denver International Airport, grew impatient when his order wasn’t filled fast enough. He was in the drive-thru with another off-duty officer when he pulled the gun on them on May 2009, according to the McDonald's workers.
Saunders denied pointing the gun and a jury cleared Saunders of felony menacing and weapons charges in April 2010.
Jack Hitt is the author of Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character, and a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and public radio’s This American Life. He wrote the following piece for Boing Boing.
This week, war gamers in the Defense Department have devised an energy-based combat scenario and invited both experts and amateurs to fool around with ideas that will "reduce energy consumption, improve energy efficiency, and diversify its energy supply." So, once again, who's the latest crowd-sourcing enthusiast? The Pentagon.
Maybe other large institutions still mock the idea that crowd-sourcing is something you do to get kids to ride the subway in their underpants (or mock the idea that fossil fuels are peaking), but the Pentagon has been been one of the nation's leaders in turning to amateurs for help in solving intractable problems.
The Pentagon's Grand Challenge is eight years old, but it is arguably the first great amateur contest in this generation that popularized the idea. Rather than turn to the usual defense contractors in the private sector, the research arm of the Pentagon known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created a robotic car race open to the public and with a large cash award. Since then the number of these contests has exploded (NASA has seven of them: The Centennial Challenges, all trying to tap into homebrew thinking to resolve issues around beam power, satellite launching, or moon regolith oxygen extraction in order to jumpstart further space exploration).
And so, most recently, the Pentagon married amateur zeal with online gaming. MMOWGLI (not a Jungle Book protagonist) is one of those notorious Pentagon's acronyms, this time for: Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet. The game was designed by Institute for the Future and built and run by the Naval Postgraduate School.
One the highlights of Maker Faire for me was meeting Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of the Arduino project. He's very friendly and we had a nice time talking about design. I also enjoyed meeting Luisa Castiglioni, his girlfriend. She's a writer for a number of design magazines, including Domus. (Here's an article she wrote for Domus about makers in the Italian design world.)
Massimo brought with him to Maker Faire samples of the new packaging for Arduino's line of products, and they are beautiful. There were designed by Todo studio, which is run by Giorgio Olivero. Massimo was Giorgio's professor at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.
Artist Bruce Lowell recreated Limor Fried's Adafruit workshop in Lego and submitted it to LEGO CUUSOO. I hope it gets the 10,000 votes needed for Lego to manufacture it as a set!
Ladyada's workshop is a place where you explore all the cool things you build and use when you're an engineer! Computers, pick-and-place machine, laser cutter, soldering station and more! In Ladyada's workshop you can run your own open-source hardware electronics company, complete with Mosfet the cat.
I hope this was a clever student's attempt to answer a question that he or she didn't know the answer to. (Via 
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Saunders previously had been cleared of pointing a gun at a McDonald's employee in Aurora in 2009. The employee said Saunders, an officer assigned to Denver International Airport, grew impatient when his order wasn’t filled fast enough. He was in the drive-thru with another off-duty officer when he pulled the gun on them on May 2009, according to the McDonald's workers.
One the highlights of Maker Faire for me was meeting 