Chico State’s Mechatronics Department is cranking out some pretty wild shit. Here are a couple of videos to check out.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zkKqeAk4uo&feature=channel_page

The MRCR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5H5Dz-PAPs&feature=channel

Chico State’s Mechatronics Department is cranking out some pretty wild shit. Check out these videos of some of their robots which are currently in heavy use in Iraq and other highly classified war theaters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zkKqeAk4uo&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5H5Dz-PAPs&feature=channel

NASA’s Spirit rover has captured a photograph of what some are claiming is an alien skull on Mars. Someone page Richard Hoagland:

An oddly shaped space boulder appears to show eye sockets and a nose leading to speculation it might be a Martian skull.

Internet forums are full of chatter about the picture, taken by a panoramic NASA camera known as Spirit.

One alien-spotter speculated: “The skull is 15 cm with binocular eyes 5 cm apart. The cranial capacity is approximately 1400 cc.

“There appears to be a narrow pointed small mouth, so this creature most likely is a carnivore.”

Another joked: “The coronal ridge shows ample structure to support the musculature of antennae, although none are visible in this view.

“The nose area is broad and blunted as you would expect to see in a cold and windy landscape. Is he decapitated or is he buried up to his neck?”

One of the neat things about editing the Syntheis Weekly is that I get a first-had crack at the action before the paper even hits the streets. Last Friday I was proofing Mad Bob Howard’s column, and he referenced a fellow “outsider artist” (aside: something about the term “outsider art” or “outsider artist” makes me cringe, and therefore, encase it in quotes like some sort of literary specimin) by the name of Jonathan Troxler.

Easter is one of those bizarre holidays – quasi-religious, quasi-pagan, entirely alcoholic these days. It has really become a post-modern event. Thanks to Johnathan Troxler’s terrific and terrifying paintings I will never get the image of the crucified Easter Bunny out of my head. That and the three stooges strumming the guitar in a manger for baby Jesus and Santa Claus. This is Troxler’s older work – to me it doesn’t point to any particular warp or hiccup in his character – instead it asks of us a simple and direct question: What kind of sick freaks are we?

Three Stooges as the Three Wise Men, with Baby Jesus and Santa in the Manger? Sounds like my kind of religous art! Unfortunately I couldn’t find that particular image on any of Troxler’s sites, but I did manage to uncover a few other precious religous art specimens. Enjoy.

When I saw the headline “Horse Stem Cell Technique to Be Used in Humans” I was really hoping for some crazy ass shit involving horse cells being injected into humans to make them stronger, faster, better (perhaps even hung, like a horse). However, the reality is far less sensational:

A stem-cell repair technique that has already been used to fix hundreds of injured race horses is to be tested for the first time in people with damaged Achilles tendons.

Privately owned British biotech firm MedCell Bioscience Ltd said on Wednesday it would start clinical tests within 12 months and planned to run a larger confirmatory study at several European hospitals in 2011. Patients will receive injections containing millions of their own stem cells, which have been extracted and multiplied up in a laboratory, and can regenerate new tissue to repair damaged regions.

More than 1,500 race horses have been treated using the same process and follow-up data suggests a 50 percent reduction in re-injury over a three year period, compared with conventional treatment.

*Extra credit for anyone who got the Kool Keith reference.

According to this Wired article, patterns found in the formation of amino acids in meteorites, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and simulations of primordial Earth all follow the same basic laws, implicating something of a universal structure for the formation of life:

“This may implicate a universal structure of the first genetic codes anywhere,” said astrophysicist Ralph Pudritz of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

There are exactly 20 standard amino acids — complex molecules that combine to form proteins, which in turn compose the nucleic acids from which the simplest self-replicating structures are built.

Ten were synthesized in the famous 1953 Miller-Urey experiments, which modeled conditions believed to exist in Earth’s early atmosphere and volcano-heated pools. Those 10 amino acids have also been found in meteorites, prompting debate over their role in sparking life on Earth and, perhaps, elsewhere.

Pudritz’s analysis, co-authored with McMaster University biophysicist Paul Higgs and published Monday on arXiv, doesn’t settle the former debate, but it does suggest that basic amino acids are even more common than thought, requiring little more than a relatively warm meteorite of sufficient size to form. And that’s just the start.

If the observed patterns of amino acid formation — simple acids require low levels of energy to coalesce, and complex acids need more energy — indeed follow thermodynamic laws, then the basic narrative of life’s emergence should be universal.

“Thermodynamics is fundamental,” said Pudritz. “It must hold through all points of the universe. If you can show there are certain frequencies that fall in a natural way like this, there is an implied universality. It has to be tested, but it seems to make a lot of sense.”