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Triumph is developing its first electric motorcycle
British motorcycle manufacturer Triumph has announced a new program that'll help speed up its development of electric motorbikes. The project, working title TE-1, aims to develop an electric motorcycle powertrain in just two years, and it's got some pretty heavyweight partners involved to help it achieve this goal.
Breaking: chicken came before the (chicken) egg
Don't ask us why British researchers are spending their time trying to solve the age-old "who came first" conundrum, but apparently solve it they have done. Lab dwellers from the universities of Sheffield and Warwick share the distinction of identifying the particular effects of a particular protein -- ovocleidin-17, found only in chickens' ovaries -- on the development of the egg's shell. It would seem that without OC-17 converting calcium carbonate into calcite crystals, one couldn't have an eggshell, meaning that the chicken and its special protein powers had to have developed first. How the world's going to react to having one of its favorite clichés wrestled away has yet to be determined. Update: Seems like we didn't make it clear enough that these findings relate specifically to chicken eggs. We're well aware that dragons dinosaurs have plenty of prior art on chickens when it comes to laying shelled embryo chambers.
Artist uses GPS to map things the old-fashioned way: walking around
Back in the day, our homeboys Magellan, Lewis, Clark, Rand, and McNally didn't have anything better to do than walk around, look at stuff, and make some maps. Then along came people like Google, hell-bent on semi-automating via satellite what used to be a really down-to-earth task. In 2010, mapmaker and artist Jeremy Wood has found a way to get his kicks via satellite and pedestrianism. His latest project Traverse Me is a simple enough idea: walk around in the defined area with a GPS unit and end up with a 1:1 scale map of where he walked. Wood traversed the University of Warwick (avoiding paths and roads when possible) over 17 days and ended up with a plot of a very human-looking 238 miles. While they certainly aren't very useful for getting from point A to point B, Wood's maps unveil a weird new kind of topography. They don't particularly want to make us visit the University of Warwick, but we certainly wouldn't mind hanging prints of some of these bad boys on our living room walls.
Researchers unwarping smudged fingerprints in record time
Gurus at the University of Warwick have developed a system that "identifies partial, distorted, scratched, smudged, or otherwise warped fingerprints in just a few seconds." The process is garnering attention thanks to its ability to spit out results in the blink of an eye after it "unwarps any fingerprint that has been distorted and creates a clear, digital representation that can then be mapped onto an image space of all other prints held on a database." Reportedly, researchers have already established the Warwick Warp spinoff company to bring the technology to market, and they're looking in the commercial access control, financial transaction authorization and possibly even ID card / border control segments for opportunities.[Via Wired]
