Posts Tagged ‘machine tools’
“As you sow, so shall you reap”*…
The circle of life, via Nothing Here (@nothinghere_but).
* Galatians 6:7
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As we watch what goes around come around, we might send very carefully-crafted birthday greetings to Jacques de Vaucanson; he was born on this date in 1709. A mechanical genius, de Vaucanson invented a number of machine tools still in use (e.g., the slide rest lathe) and created the first automated loom (the inspiration for Jacquard). But he is better remembered as the creator of extraordinary automata. Among his most famous creations: The Flute Player (with hands gloved in skin) and The Tambourine Player, life-sized mechanical figures that played their instruments impressively. But his masterpiece was The Digesting Duck; remarkably complex (it had 400 moving parts in each wing alone), it could flap its wings, drink water, eat grain– and defecate.
Sans…le canard de Vaucanson vous n’auriez rien qui fit ressouvenir de la gloire de la France. (Without…the duck of Vaucanson, you will have nothing to remind you of the glory of France)
– Voltaire
“Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines”*…
… they do, however, run more terrestrial risks. The weasel above (a stone marten) hopped over a substation fence at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and was electrocuted by an 18,000 volt transformer (an incident that knocked out power at the facility). Lest its notoriety fade, the once-weasel is about to go on display at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum.
The stone marten is the latest dead animal to go on display at the museum. It joins a sparrow that was shot after it sabotaged a world record attempt by knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonalds McFlurry pot, and a catfish that fell victim to a group of men in the Netherlands who developed a tradition for drinking vast amounts of beer and swallowing fish from their aquarium. The catfish turned out to be armored, and on being swallowed raised its spines. The defense did not save the fish, but it put the 28-year-old man who tried to swallow it in intensive care for a week…
The tale is preserved in full at: “Totally stuffed: Cern’s electrocuted weasel to go on display.”
* Steven Wright
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As we hold the pose, we might spare a thought for David Wilkinson; he died on this date in 1852. A mechanical engineer and machinist, Wilkinson (no known relation to your correspondent) played a key role in the development of machine tools in the U.S. (initially in the textile industry): he invented the metal lathe and process for cutting screws.
“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”*…
The blue-green marbling of fungus that makes Blue (or as purists might have it, Bleu) Cheese blue is a delight to some, but a horror to others. Now Roquefort-refusers have a new reason to demur…
Until pretty recently, a big chunk of fungal species were thought to reproduce without sex–until people really started to look. It turns out, there’s a lot more sex going on in the fungal world (on the down-low) than people thought. And that includes fungi that are used to make delicious blue cheese. Jeanne Ropars and colleagues in France, the home of Roquefort cheese, looked at the genomes of the mold species used in this particular cheese to see what kind of funny business was going on in their snack of choice. They found much more diversity than could be explained by asexual reproduction. And even more telling, the genes used by fungi to find mating partners have been kept intact and functional by evolution, meaning there’s probably some sex going on…
So far, no one has actually seen this mold having sex. But it could be. It could be doing it right now. Who knows what kind of awesome super-cheese could be evolving, right under your nose?
Read the full story at Molecular Love (and Other Facts of Life); and find the research paper to which it refers here.
* G.K. Chesterton (though this news could be just what it takes to attract poets into the mold… er, fold.)
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As we put away the saltines, we might send inventive birthday greetings to David Wilkinson; he was born on this date in 1771. A mechanical engineer and machinist, Wilkinson (no known relation to your correspondent) played a key role in the development of machine tools in the U.S. (initially in the textile industry): he invented the lathe and process for cutting screws.
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