Smallist

Starting today, the New York Times is an inch smaller.

At a town called Orchomenos, ancient greek pottery and statuettes have been found. And the best part? They’re miniature! You know how in Goonies, Mikey feels a bond with One-Eyed Willy over their love of intricate booby traps? Yeah, I’m feelin’ that.

The pottery is dated to the 5th through 3rd centuries BC, which puts it smack dab in the golden Age of Athens, from Pericles to Plato. It’s said to be offerings to the Three Graces, popular fertility goddesses at the time. I guess the Greeks didn’t feel that super sizing the offering would bring them more fertility. Or maybe they were just scared of getting stuck with a fat baby.

If you’re sick of broadsheets and ink, keep an eye on Hearst’s pilot e-paper program with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. They’re going to use the Philips color e-paper technology, which uses E-Ink, which Hearst owns interest in. Makes sense! No word on what the device will look like, but it sounds interesting.

Via Slashdot.

Scientists can now create a micro-tornado — half the width of a human hair — within a small ice dome. The process is the same as that which creates the real thing, rapidly rising heated air. Liquid at the surface, laced with polystyrene nanospheres for some reason, evaporates and meets the cool air from the igloo roof. Presto, after 191 hours of observation, an eensy weensy twister.

No word on whether they can kill miniature witches. Ha!

Would you cross the Atlantic on this thing? I dunno, it seems to lack bathrooms. But Sun21 has just completed an Atlantic crossing on pure solar power. And not that tawdry second-hand “wind” stuff, they did it with good old fashioned pv panels. Looks like they ran at about 4 knots throughout the trip. That’s not quite enough to jet ski, but it’s a pretty decent clip, on par with a sailboat.

We’ve discussed another, similar cruiser before, the form of the DSe Hybrid, pictured below. But the DSe hasn’t been built yet — it’s currently in scale model form only.

Earlier this year, The US Defense department issued a warning that Canadian coins might have miniature spy devices on them. It turned out to be spectacularly untrue. The Poppy coins were designed as a remembrance of Canadian war dead, and is the world’s first colored circulation coin. It has a protective coating on the red color to keep it from rubbing off.

But this didn’t stop American military contractors from putting it under the microscope:

“It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source,” wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. “Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.”

You can’t make this stuff up. Via Metafilter.

The first ballots cast in the French elections belonged to residents of St. Pierre and Miquelon, two tiny islands off the coast of Eastern Canada. The windswept, foggy isles are part of France through and through — they even take the Euro. Their biggest claims to fame are cod, fog, and making a mint during Prohibition, when the isles were used as a storage base for Canadian liquor. A local bar on the island claims to have Al Capone’s hat.

They were pro-Vichy during WWII, and Canada briefly considered an invasion. But in December of 1941, De Gaulle took the island for free France, without a shot, with the strange hybrid submarine cruiser, the Surcouf. Also in tow for the occasion were three corvettes and a New York Times reporter who was kidnapped and smuggled onto the sub after asking questions about the invasion. War is hell.

Today, the islands make their money from fishing, tourism, and aid from the French government, which pours $25 million in aid to the 5,000 inhabitants yearly. But while this might make you or me lazy, it looks as though the residents plan to sponsor a Drive to France contest. This will be a surprise to Google maps; they won’t even let you swim.

For more images, take in the Saint Piere and Miquelon pool’s slideshow at flickr. And Wikipedia’s history page is pretty nifty too.

How many times have you been running PCR DNA replication in an expensive lab machine, and thought, “there has to be a better way!” It’s not the most attractive thing in the world, but Texas A&M researchers have created a miniature DNA replicator that runs on DNA batteries, and will dupe your DNA in 20 minutes.

In the new device, created by graduate student Nitin Agrawal, a centimetre-wide loop of tubing wraps in a vertical ring around a set of three metal rods. The rods, together the size of an AA battery, are kept at three different temperatures. With this set-up, the parts of the tube closest to each block are heated differently.

Unfortunately, similar equipment is not available for preparing the sample in the first place, so your hopes of running your genome on a camping trip will have to wait. But modern science marches on.

Designed for the developing world, the KVA MATx Portable Light is a flexible, solar-powered LED light. It charges in 5 hours over the day, and then provides 4 hours of 160-lumen light. It can be rolled up or folded, and weighs less than 8 ounces. By comparison, a standard 40 watt incandescent puts out about 480 lumens — so it’s not going to light up the whole yurt, but it’s better than an itty-bitty booklight.

Via the IHT’s Socially Responsible Design coverage, via Metafilter, where, predictably, they’re arguing whether the OLPC is sufficiently socially responsible to be included.

Using flexible instruments and a camera, doctors can now take your appendix out from your mouth. You should see what they’re planning for your tonsils.

Via Neatorama.