Smallist

Via Coolhunting. More pics at the agency site, sukle.com.

In an industry that measures payload by the pound, it makes sense to keep things tiny. Boeing has just launched a pico satellite, that weighs about a kilogram. Called Cubesat Testbed 1, the vehicle is capable of determining its attitude by sensing the earth’s magnetic field and the sun, and adjusting it with something called a magnetic torque coil. It also has an antenna, rechargable lithium ion batteries, and two redundant radios. Or one redundant radio, really. I suppose the first one is non-redundant.

But wait, there’s more! According to Wikipedia, seven different Cubesats were launched on the same Dnepr rocket. Cubesat is a design specification, not a specific vehicle. Among the other mini-borgs was part of the “Multi-application survivable tether” program, designed to test applications of space ropes. Some day, they’ll enable spacecraft to use all sorts of acrobatics to boost orbits, swing payloads higher, even propel a spacecraft using the Earth’s magnetic field.

When I first read the Boeing press release, I immediately imagined a spherical vehicle,sort of a miniature Sputnik. But since there’s no pressurized compartment, and no need for streamlining, a cube makes perfect sense from a design standpoint. So much for tiny flying saucers.

Sure, you can build scale models with a bazillion legos, like this penguin and fish. It’s basically a giant lego bitmap in 3d; a diagonal becomes a jagged series of square bricks.

But Chris Deck has a different vision for lego miniatures: He makes ‘em small:

Just more proof that constraints can make art better. Chris pretty much sticks to Star Wars, (I especially like his Cloud City) but there are other “microscale” Lego artists.

This is all via MetaFilter.

In Disneyland, the trains will now run on biodiesel. (via) Of course, they’re steam engines — so I always assumed they were running on half-sized lumps of coal. But you can heat steam with anything, and prior to this conversion it was just regular petroleum-derived diesel. Maybe Eurodisney will go nuclear.

Incidentally, the Disneyland railroad is a modern example of a narrow gauge railroad. Narrow gauge predates the locomotive, and was typically used for industrial purposes. It’s faster and cheaper to build, since it can make tighter turns and requires smaller tunnels. Today, they’re often tourist attractions, in the US, Wales, and throughout the world.

In Budapest, the narrow gauge Children’s Railway (above) is run by children. Adults actually conduct the trains, but children operate the switches and signals, take tickets, et cetera.

And those Disneyland trains? Uncle Walt bought them from a line in the Yucatan region of Mexico. Before they burned either diesel or biodiesel, they burned wood.

Peat bog swimmer Paedocypris is the world’s smallest fish, and the smallest vertebrate too. Today, the Natural History Museum of London figured out who its closest relatives are. (Zsa Zsa’s husband wasn’t on the list, rimshot) Most of the cousins live in peat bogs too. The thing doesn’t even have a skull — the brain just protrudes from its head like the aliens in Invaders from Mars.

Second in line as smallest fish is the male of a small deep sea angler, Photocorynus spiniceps. The female gets to a respectable 50 mm, making the 6 mm male look like a parasite. I hope she has a good personality, because she is extraordinarily homely.

“Heartlander” is a caterpillar-like robot designed to walk on the surface of the heart. It’s 2cm long, and holds onto the heart by suckers attached to a vacuum line. It can be used to install pacemaker leads, inject drugs, or attach other medical devices. While current minimally invasive techniques can work by accessing the interior of the heart through veins and arteries, the exterior is typically hard to work with because the chest cavity is tight, and the heart is beating.

Video and more information can be found at the project website.

Am I nuts? I’m seriously thinking of replacing my luxurious, full sized keyboard with this eensy one. The biggest loss will be the number keypad, but I can see there’s a notebook-style FN key. There’s a few similar models, but very few reviews. I think the target audience is techies running rack systems; these things fit into a toolkit, and since they’re wired, you can get into a system’s BIOS (or whatever they use now). Try that with bluetooth.

Another alternative would be the FrogPad, designed for one-handed typing (yeah, yeah, get the chuckles out of your system). But I’m a coder, and it’s hard enough to hit all the brackets and slashes with a regular keyboard. A chorded keyboard would drive me nuts.

Via Apartment Therapy, a recommendation of this book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. It’s the story of Frances Glessner Lee, a crime scene investigator who recreated crime scenes in a dollhouse to teach detectives the art of observation. An SF Chronicle story on Lee and the book here. And another, older article with pics here.

Sorry mom and pop. Home Depot is creating smaller stores, to get around zoning difficulties, and to fit into the available nooks and crannies of smaller neighborhoods. They may be more profitable than the big stores, since they’ll be dropping lumber, an item requiring lots of square footage and producing little profit.

The oil and car companies may have killed the electric car, but these guys are bringing it back to life, old school. They’re taking a forklift motor, 8 batteries, and a geo metro, and it’s working. You can see their first test drive here.

See also evconvert.com. And this is via autobloggreen.