Last year I helped organized TEDxCambridge and starting this week we’ll be releasing a few of the amazing talks held during that event.

“Neuroscientist Don Katz uses experiments with rats to shed light on where taste preferences come from and, when it comes to food, why we like what we like.”
via YouTube

Amazing! Just a reminder in how breath-taking and beautiful nature is. I still need to watch the documentary movie Oceans as well which I posted about 2 years ago.

“In 2008, Sandra Critelli shot this excellent photo of Golden Rays off the Mexican coast:

She said: “It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.

“It’s hard to say exactly how many there were but in the range of a few thousand.

“We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface too.

Golden Rays grow up to seven feet across and migrate within the Caribbean.”

Photo Link and Article Link via reddit (via Neatorama)

These are beautiful, sustainable, optimizes entirety of wood, and very unique. I love how some of the curves follow the eyes of the wood and grain direction. Who knew you could get flooring like this!

Bolefloor is the world’s first industrial-scale manufactured hardwood flooring with naturally curved lengths that follow a tree’s natural growth. Bolefloor takes its name from bole, the trunk of a tree.

Bolefloor technology combines wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/CAM developments and innovative optimization algorithms for placement software developed by a Finnish engineering automation company and three software companies in cooperation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology.

Bolefloor scanners’ natural-edge visual identification technology evaluates “imperfections” such as knots and sapwood near the edges or ends so that floors are both beautiful and durable.

Our process manages and tracks each board from its raw-lumber stage through final installation. And every board is cut using the finest in Homag woodworking machinery.

Several pictures from their gallery after the jump!

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Wow! This just made my jaws drop!(while thinking up 50 ideas) Autonomous flying helicopters that detect a ping pong ball and juggle it quite a few times. Watch the video to understand. Can I actually play ping pong with a robot finally? Will there be flying little robots to go fetch the hit ball back to me down the road? haha, this is awesome!

via youtube video
“Ball juggling experiments in the ETH Flying Machine Arena
By Mark Müller, Sergei Lupashin and Raffaello D’Andrea
http://www.flyingmachinearena.org
IDSC, ETH Zürich, Switzerland”

Also be sure to see the piano playing one.

This is very smart. I want some. High end materials, a shelf built from the boxes you transport then in, and you can customize them in a bunch of formats… this just might beat out my desire for the typical IKEA bookshelf though cost a bit more… It would be nice in different colors, or at least just the white portion… I dig the end grains showing.. black, green, and some vibrant colors would be nice!

BrickBox is a modular bookcase composed of stackable boxes used to transport and store. Brilliant? I would say so!”
via swissmiss

Photographer Stephan Tillmans project “Luminant Point Arrays” captures the flicker of CRT monitor screens right when you turn it off. The results are rather beautiful or perhaps nostalgic. Great series.

LUMINANT POINT ARRAYS
“The Luminant Point Arrays show tube televisions in the moment they are swithed off. The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light. The pictures refuse external reference and broach the issue of the difference between abstraction and concretion in photography. The breakdown of the television picture discribes the breakdown of the reference. The product is self-referential photography.”

See the images after the jump.

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Duane Keiser originated the phenomenon known as “painting a day“.
Keiser recently posted on his blog a short time-lapse video called Peel where he paints the process in peeling apart a tangerine, repainting over the the same painting where the past vanishes just like in real life. He’s also auctioning his final piece which at the moment of the post is at $225.

I’ve seen paintings repainted over, but too paint over purposefully and retain the history through video is a great  addition  and a great story! If this was done digitally, a buyer could go through each stroke forwards and backwards, but to make it something non-digital retains a history and mystery which at times can be more valuable than information.