I looove DIY projects, and this one’s a doozy. Techli’s got the inside scoop on a Chicago science-artist’s system for not only creating remote-controlled cockroaches, but using a Twitter feed to control it:

[Brittany] Ransom set up the twitter account @TweetRoach and designated the hashtags #TweetRoachRight to coax the cockroach to turn right and #TweetRoachLeft to coax the cockroach [...]

Click to embiggen

Here’s the key component of a crystal oscillator – which is to say, the slightly fancier version of a pendulum that keeps time inside an electronic timepiece.

Found on Wikimedia Commons.

Extreme Tech gets right to the point of a new technology – a mechanical pencil that can draw functional electronic circuits:

With MIT’s carbon nanotube pencil, the lead is formed by compressing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT), until you have a substance that looks and behaves very similarly to graphite. The difference, though, is that drawing with MIT’s pencil actually [...]

TechCrunch is captivated by one of the six finalists at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup in Sydney – a Ukranian team of student whizzes who have invented a pair of sign-language gloves that can translate your gestures into words:

Using gloves fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers (as well as some solar cells to increase battery life) [...]

Graphene, as we all now know, is the latest strange form of carbon to wow material scientists with its unusual properties. Well, New Scientist shows that graphene is even stranger than we thought, turning regular old electricity into ultra-focused plasmons:

When light hits some materials in just the right way, ripples of electrons called plasmons appear on the surface. These [...]

Wired takes a leap into the cephashionable world of cephalopod textiles to give a sneak peak at next season’s color-changing squid-muscle shirts:

“We have taken inspiration from nature’s designs and exploited the same methods to turn our artificial muscles into striking visual effects,” said lead author of the study Jonathan Rossiter [of the University of Bristol].

First up, Rossiter and [...]

SONG: “Back into flow.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “What it’s like to wear a brain-stimulating ‘thinking cap’”, BoingBoing, 4 Mar 2012, as used in the post “Slipping on the thinking cap”… and “Zap your brain into the flow: Fast track to pure focus”, New Scientist, 6 Feb [...]

Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow waxes enthusiastic about the process of zapping your brain into a creative “flow” state:

The “thinking cap” is something like the tasp of science fiction, and the experimental evidence for it as a learning enhancement tool is pretty good thus far — and the experimental subjects report that the experience feels wonderful ([Science writer [...]

The brain-zapping process broken down, in an Informed Consent video:

And you can always try making your own device….