How Do Squid React To Being Shocked To The Beat Of Cypris Hill?

August 25, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 55 Comments

Well, they probably get annoyed.

Cephalopods have a nifty trick where they can change color by altering the size and shape of chromataphors, or “colored cell thingy blobs”. Like most cells, these chromataphors react to electricity in different ways. Mainly, expanding and contracting.

The folks at Backyard Brains, a group that does neuroscience at home, have decided to run an experiment where they pump the signal from Cypris Hill’s song Insane in the membrane right into the nerve on a fin of a squid to see how the chromatophrs react. Not surprisingly, they pulse to the beat.

Just because it isn’t a surprise, doesn’t mean its not fun to watch.

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The Dark Pi Rises

August 25, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

Ever wonder how an aerospace engineer would build a telepresence rover? Well, if [algorythmic] can be used as our reference, he’d cram a Raspberry Pi AND an Arduino into an RC truck frame. The arduino is being used for motor control while the Raspberry pi is doing the communicating back and forth to the base. He’s using a ps3 controller as his interface and has slightly modified his PS3 eye for better night viewing.

Before you start shouting that using the raspberry pi AND the arduino is massive overkill, let us remind you that people don’t necessarily go buy/build all the parts for each project with a long-term goal in mind. He could have had both sitting there and realized that he didn’t need to add parts to either of them.

With the Raspberry Pi at the helm, this opens up all kinds of possibilities for adding features to make this an autonomous vehicle. Looking around his blog a little bit, it seems he’s done some visual recognition as well as voice control in the past. This could be interesting!