Killer Coaster

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“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasant, elegant and ritualistic. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once sad that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”

Julijonas Urbonas via Neatorama

Space Shuttle Discovery Flight Deck | 360 Degree View

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Detail

Click here for an amazing 360 degree view of the Space Shuttle Discovery's flight deck during decommissioning in the Orbiter Processing Facility

Thanks, Rick

Memristor | Human Blood Used To Make Electronic Component

Photo: An image of a circuit with 17 memristors captured by an atomic force microscope

R. Stanley Williams/HP Labs

A team of engineers in India have created a physical model of a memristor using human blood. From io9:

... A memristor is a more sophisticated version of a resistor. The first syllable of its name comes from the word 'memory'. Instead of resisting at the same level each time, a memristor resists at a different level each time, depending on the last voltage that was applied to it.

Circuits with a memristor can adapt and change each time a new voltage is applied to them. They can be used in logic circuits and signal processing. Other memristors have been invented - the first one in 2008 - but none before have been, literally, a combination of human and electronic parts. The new memristor's inventors have tested it, successfully, both with tubes full of stationary blood and tubes of flowing blood. Both memristors have the ability to remember the last applied voltage for five minutes.

The singularity draws ever closer ...

Inderscience Publishers: Human blood liquid memristor