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From a friend …

Universcale is a cool Nikon web app. Based on a scale ranging from the unmeasurable world of femtometres (1 quadrillionth of a metre) to the largest size we can measure (13.7 light years, the size of the universe), it enables us to look at the sizes of things, from galaxies to items of daily life to atomic particles. The entire universe is put into into proportion, and we are able to view from a single perspective selected entities living in it. Being set up against a scale allows to comparatively grasp their size and fathom their and our place within this world of measurement.

All the items mentioned on that scale live on sections that are based on the measurement we like to apply to them, e.g. light years, kilometers, centimeters or femtometres - all up 9 segments. They have names like the mysterious “The Great Primordial” of femtometres, the factual “Limits of the Naked Eye” of nanometres, the almost poetic “A Realistic Grandeur” of kilometres or the descriptive “The extremities of Space” for the largest macro scale we know. And the experience is not just graphical - all segments and elements relating to the scale are explained when clicking on them.

It really is quite amazing to zoom all the way out into stars and galaxies, starting from small atomic particles, and realising that every time you go a magnitude higher, everything you saw before, from the flea to Mount Everest, is contained in this tiny little grid in the lower-left side of the screen.

Crave believes that the “Carl Sagan should be narrating this” planetarium music helps; I’m not so sure because it stopped when I started clicking on things. But that’s not really a downer. As Will Greenwald says on Crave: “If you have a few minutes and want to feel really, really small (or really, really large, or really, really disoriented), check out Universcale. It will eat up your afternoon and enlighten you as to the true size and scope of the cosmos. Not bad for a Flash app.”

Another piece of trivia … last year, junk food manufacturer Heinz, on parental demand brought back to supermarket shelves what seems to have been an old childhood favourite with a large number of parents: Alphabetti Spaghetti. Originally, the product was on sale for 60 years until Heinz decided to scrap the snack in 1990; the resurrection was part of a £3.5m revamp of Heinz’s spaghetti range.

I wonder whether some scientists are part of the same parental generation, trying to outdo Heinz on a particle scale - notice the similarity between the two images on the right side of this post . I mentioned already a few posts earlier that Xerox researchers unveiled a new microfont technology called MicroText as another weapon against counterfeiters. There’s nothing new about microprint though; a lot of banknotes use strings of letters and numbers in what appears to be lines to the naked eye. Nevertheless: the new Xerox fonts are only one hundredth of an inch tall, which will make them appear pretty inconspicuously on all kinds of paper documents. The software creating the fonts though will only work on room-size commercial printers; the average home or small business laser or inkjet printer can’t align the ink dots within each letter in an ultra-precise way - yet .

But that’s not the end yet of font-miniaturisation. Professor Thomas G. Mason and chemistry graduate student Carlos J. Hernandez from the UCLA’s Californian NanoSystem’s Institute designed and mass-produced billions of fluorescent microscale LithoParticles in the shapes of all 26 letters of the alphabet. The letters are just microns wide and made of solid polymeric materials dispersed in a liquid solution looking like an “alphabet soup” (again: remember Heinz’ Aphabetti Spaghetti ). To create words, “laser tweezers” are used, like in the example below in which graduate student James Wilking picked up the letters ‘U, C, L, A’ and moved them in order. These LithParticle letters are certainly too small to be seen with the unaided eye, but they can be detected clearly with an optical microscope where they apparently stand out in high fidelity. It’ll be interesting to see what application they will find in science and technology. The research was supposed to be published March 29 in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, where it should be illustrated on the cover.

Texas Instrument’s new pico-projector DLP chip hopes to revolutionize viewing video on your phone. It can be fitted at the bottom of the cellphone. Measuring a mere 3.3cm, the Pico comes with a trio of lasers, a DLP chip that is capable of delivering widescreen TV images in DVD-quality images, and a power supply. It might make for a fatter handset (below shown is only a prototype), but in terms of style (and maybe also technology - I didn’t really look at the details), I’d prefer Microvision/Fraunhofer combo (see my earlier post).

Via Geekend: Take a strangely catchy 1980s synth-pop soundtrack, mix in some stock footage of assorted weirdness, and ice it with a giant university-mascot style Centipede costume (that kidnaps a genuinely terrified teen playing an Atari 5200 console), and you’ve got a vaguely surreal TV commercial for the ages.

And if you think this is weird or funny (depending on your sense of humour), check out the Club Centipede sequel.