J. Carroll House patented this “alarm bedstead” in 1855. It’s driven by an alarm clock so that, at an arranged time, the bed drops into an inclined position, “and whatever is movable upon the same rolls out upon the floor. Thus we shall find ourselves ten minutes after the alarm is sounded deposited upon the carpet, permitted to arise and dress ourselves for the business of the day.”

“Every person will perceive that this alarm bed well deserved a patent,” opined Scientific American. “Any sinner sleeping beyond a certain hour deserves to be tumbled out of the blankets in the manner so successfully accomplished by Mr. House.”

Demonstrating the world's first device that creates a hole in time
We've written previously about the theoretical possibility of "event cloaks"--metamaterial space-time devices that could theoretically conceal an entire event in time from the view of an outsider. Well, while some bright minds were just talking about bending space-time to their whims, a team at Cornell was doing it. And it works. For 110 nanoseconds.

There's a more thorough explanation of this notion in our previous coverage, but briefly this is the idea: basically, you need two time-lenses--lenses that can compress and decompress light in time. This is actually possible to do using an electro-optic modulator (what, you don't have one?). Basically, using two of these modulators you would slow down or compress the light traveling through the first lens, and then set up a second lens downrange from the first that would decompress, or accelerate, the incoming photons from the first lens.

Got that? Refer to this handy gif, courtesy of some blokes working on a similar idea at Imperial College London:

Paul Kinsler, Imperial College London

Think of the photons like steadily flowing traffic on a highway. If you slow the traffic at a point upstream, you create a gap. You can cross the highway through the gap and then accelerate that traffic to catch up to the traffic ahead, closing the gap. To someone further downstream, the gap is not there--to that observer, the gap might as well have never existed because there's no evidence of it.

During that gap, whatever occurs goes unrecorded. But, as we noted above, you'd have to be pretty quick were you to use such a device to pull some kind of shenanigans. The current device the Cornell gents have built creates a 110 nanosecond event gap, and they concede that the best it could achieve is 120 microseconds. But, as KFC notes at Technology Review, rarely is anything final in cutting edge theoretical physics.

Details at Flickr.

[Technology Review]

The well at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight is 200 feet deep, so the residents raise water using an enormous wheel driven by a donkey, a practice that dates to at least 1690.

“While it is not claimed that the same individual donkey has drawn its water all of these years,” wrote a correspondent to American Machinist in 1904, “the claim is made that the duty of drawing water from this famous well descends from father to son, and is never shared outside this one royal family of donkeys.”

“One ass has been known to perform this service at Carisbrooke for fifty years, another for forty, a third for thirty, and a fourth had performed it for ten years at the time of the writer’s last visit,” wrote Caroline Bray in 1876. “The dates are marked down inside the door of the well-house.”

(“The donkey was continuing his labour and looking towards the well when the question was asked, ‘What is he looking at?’ ‘He is looking for the bucket,’ said the man; and, in fact, as soon as the bucket appeared the donkey stopped, and very deliberately walked out of the wheel to the place at which he stood at our entrance, knowing full well that he had done what was desired.”)

In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain describes a remarkable automaton that he encountered at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867:

I watched a silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements, and a living intelligence in his eyes–watched him swimming about as comfortably and as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweler’s shop–watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through all the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it.

The swan still exists, now on display at England’s Barnard Castle. As a music box plays, the life-size creature preens, searches a flowing “stream” of rotating glass rods, spies a fish, and catches and swallows it. No one knows who designed it, but it’s certainly more than two centuries old — it’s described in a 1773 Act of Parliament.

See Watch Your Step and Daddy!

Largest private collection of CPUs has been discovered upon one Russian guy has posted a message on a forum. His message says "here is my humble collection for you" and then listed something more than one thousand of different types of computer processors he collected. There are ones from the old times and as well as modern ones, the lost and seemed never coming back relics of Soviet Russian genuine processors that preceded Intel world dominance and many other interesting findings he had.read more..

Wireless power may still be on the drawing board, but wireless data is here today, and a UK defense contractor has figured out a way to pipe the latter through several inches of steel. Using a pair of piezoelectric transducers on either side of a watertight submarine compartment, BAE's "Through Hull Data Link" sends and receives an acoustic wave capable of 15MHz data rates, enough to transmit video by essentially hammering ever-so-slightly on the walls. BAE impressed submarine commanders by streaming Das Boot right through their three-inch hulls, and while metadrama is obviously the killer app here, the company claims it will also save millions by replacing the worrisome wiring that's physically routed via holes in a submarine's frame. See the company's full US patent application at our more coverage link.UK defense firm pumps data through solid submarine walls originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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