Posts Tagged ‘TOOLS’
Video: Plucky Fish Swims Far Away to Find Proper Tool For Eating Dinner
The orange-dotted tuskfish, a species of wrasse, is the second type of wrasse documented using tools in the past few months. A blackspot tuskfish was caught on camera earlier this year; now the first video has been .
The fish digs around in the sand to find a choice clam, picks it up, then swims for a while until it finds a good rock. It proceeds to throw the clam against said rock to open it. This is a fish, remember — not the type of creature you might expect to see using tools. , elephants, , sure — but a fish?
“It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it's a pretty big deal,” said , professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who shot the video.
The fact that this behavior has been seen in other fish indicates it may not be a , but a deep-seated behavioral trait in wrasses — and maybe other fishes, too.
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Inside the Factory: How a Chef’s Knife Is Made
PopSci goes to Germany to witness the cutting edge of manufacturing
The raw material comes into the factory on huge spools of sheet steel, each sheet the thickness of a knife. The steel is cut into individual blanks, destined to become individual knives. About three weeks elapse between when a blank comes off the spool and when it emerges, a finished knife, at the other end.
In my breathless tour of the factory, I watched as a giant press cut and stacked the blanks, which are made of the company's secret blend of stainless "special formula steel." The blank is transported to another building, where the first of the factory's 90-odd industrial robot arms takes it in hand.
In the classic design, the knife has a thickening where the blade meets the handle (aka the bolster). This is formed first, by heating the middle of the blank, and then pressing the metal's two ends together so the molten middle bulges and widens, in a process that my contact specifies is called upset forging. Next, a drop forge shapes the bolster, before the blank is quickly cropped into the rough shape of the knife it's going to be.
After that, it proceeds through a series of cooling, supercooling, and heat-tempering steps that give it its corrosion resistance and toughness. This is one of the benefits of the special steel, I'm told -- it heats and cools in very predictable ways, allowing the factory to use more precise temperatures rather than temperature ranges.
After the tempering, any distortions or warpings that the heat has created in the blade are hammered out by a highly skilled human, who picks up and eyes each knife, one at a time, and flattens any that need flattening with precise strokes of a little hammer.
The knife passes into the hands of another series of robots, which use grinding wheels to narrow down the thickish blank into the tapered contour of a blade. Only roughly, though -- the fine grinding and sharpening, as well as putting on the handles, is left to the factory's humans, who wear puffy gray overalls and exude the confidence that comes with being extremely good at your job, and quite possibly coming from a line of knifemakers generations old. Wooden handles are glued onto the tang of the knife and then riveted in place; plastic handles are simply melted on by heating the tang and inserting it in a ready handle. The edges of the handles are smoothed by robots.
Finally the knife is cleaned and passes onward to the scrutiny of the quality assurance women. If it has no flaws -- there's a big photo-book of possible flaws -- it gets packed up and winds up in someone's kitchen.
Check out the of pictures from the knifemaking process.
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IFTTT Launches, Letting Normal People Program "If This, Then That" Tools
IFTTT primarily works with social networking sites, including ones that make you wonder if "social networking" actually means anything at all. That ranges from the obvious (Facebook, Twitter) to the niche (ZooTool, Posterous) to the useful (Craigslist, Google Calendar), with some basics like Weather and RSS Feed thrown in. It also works with your phone, so you can add SMS texting and even phone calls to the mix. You can create your own IFTTT command from a list, or customize what's already there, or you can simply browse through the previously created IFTTTs, which the site calls "Recipes."
IFTTT is now available to everyone, instead of the private invite-only beta it was running before. It's a pretty great tool--my own tests worked flawlessly, and the breadth of services is pretty impressive. There are restrictions, yes, and real nerdly types may scoff, but it's actually a lot more flexible than it appears and, more importantly, it's not the least bit threatening to set up. Check it out .
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To Explain the Broadcast Spectrum, FCC Unveils Cool Interactive Tools
The agency may also open up parts of the spectrum for private experimentation
The tools on the FCC's provide access to information about the current spectrum allocations by frequency, type of use, and user. Study enabled by this dashboard can help us to better understand how portions of the spectrum are used and in what areas experimentation and innovation are possible.
The Spectrum Band Browser provides a color-coded breakdown of the current spectrum allocation scheme. Moving the mouse over a portion of the spectrum gives key details on the type of use.
If you find you like this spectrum chart so much that you would like to have a copy of your very own, the full chart is available for download . Regrettably, the Government Printing Office no longer carries this poster, so you will have to make your own printing arrangements if you'd like to have this on your wall, as I do.
The Spectrum Dashboard also provides two tools for researching license holders and the portions of the spectrum to which they have been given access. Pictured above is a screen shot of the Map tool, which reveals license holders by county. Searching by both the legally registered and common brand name of the license holder is also supported.
The spectrum availability map by county provides a visualization of the amount of the licensed bands not currently allocated to license holders. For most of us at the present time, it is somewhere right around none.
If you find yourself interested in the details of the frequency bands, don't miss the "Search by FCC License Categories" tool. This is a search interface for detailed information about each of the allocated bands in the radio spectrum.
Radio-wave tinkerers may find something else to like. According to a recent , "The plan will advise that some of the spectrum become unlicensed, so it can serve as a test bed for new technologies."
While there are already parts of the spectrum available for public usage, both through the portions allocated for amateur radio and the portions allocated for unlicensed operation, the FCC broadband plan acknowledges the benefits and innovations that have resulted from federal support of research and development and specifically addresses the issue of expanding the parts of the spectrum that are made available for research and experimentation. In of the plan, it states "Allowing research organizations such as universities greater flexibility to temporarily use fallow spectrum can promote more efficient and innovative communications systems."