clock
dr. dolittle | July 10, 2014A recent article published in the American Journal of Physiology reviewed how the brain regulates feeding behaviors. Humans are not the only species to eat food in spurts we like to call meals. Research suggests that this behavior may actually aid survival as it reduces exposure time to the environment and makes responding to fluctuations in the availability of food a bit easier to deal with. Dr. Marise Parent and colleagues at Georgia State University wanted to find out how your body determines when to initiate eating as well as how long the interval between meals should be.
Factors that…
dr. dolittle | June 6, 2013 Blackbird image from: Ernie Janes/naturepl.com
A recent study has provided some evidence supporting the hypothesis that light and noise pollution alters the biological clocks of birds living in cities (compared to birds living in rural areas).
Dr. Dominoni (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Germany) and colleagues used radio-pulse transmitters attached to European blackbirds (Turdus merula) living in Munich, Germany (city) and those living in a forest nearby to track the animal's activity levels. They found that blackbirds living in the city showed significantly increased activity an…
sciencepunk | June 1, 2011Sometimes you wake up and you think of a really good idea and then after a couple of hours trying to find out how QR patterns are encoded you remember to Google your idea and find someone's already done it.
But I don't mind. Check out this sweet QR code clock by QR Planet.
In case you're wondering, a QR code is simply a two-dimensional barcode. It's a way of packing a lot of machine-readable data into a small space. QR patterns can encode URLs, text, phone numbers, and contact details. You can scan them with your cameraphone if you have the right software - there's plenty of free…
sciencepunk | September 2, 2010I have a love of innovative clocks and this is no exception.
The catena wall clock was designed by Andreas Dober for anthologie quartett. Yours for just $2,338.
sciencepunk | July 27, 2010Dezeen Magazine has the drop on this superb clock that shows the time in every time zone, using just one hand.
The clock is called Bent Hands and is designed by Giha Woo and Shingoeun.
Via Neatorama
esiegel | February 12, 2010However time may be measured at the Naval Observatory, the clock seems to tick slowly here when Congress is out of town. -Richard Corrigan
The following is the mostly true (but somewhat fictionalized) story of the first clocks in the Americas. In the 17th Century, the finest clockmakers in the world were Dutch, going back to the time of Christiaan Huygens.
Image: A Dutch Longcase clock, courtesy of The Museum of the Dutch Clock.
Huygens determined that if you allowed a pendulum to swing just a little bit, the period of its swing could be used to keep time to incredible accuracy. By the mid-…
bioephemera | June 23, 2009
Clocky sounds like R2D2 and looks kind of like an ATV's single-axled, pastel cub. In other words, it's really, really cute. Which is why when Clocky wakes you with its piercing warbles, crashes to your floor and rolls under your bed, you won't want to smash its little display with your fist. At least, we hope not! Click through for more details.
Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed. When the snooze bar is pressed, Clocky rolls off the table and finds a hiding spot, a new one every day. Clocky began as a class project. After graduating, Gauri Nanda turned Clocky…
esiegel | April 1, 2008There's a graduate student that I'm sort-of mentoring/working with at Arizona, named Xiaoying Xu (hi Xiao!). She's bright and curious, and she asks some very good questions. She asked me one yesterday that's pretty tough to wrap your head around:
How do I explain to someone why light doesn't age?
Well, here on Earth, time progresses at a certain speed. That is, if I measure how many seconds tick by as the Earth revolves once around the Sun, I'll get 31,556,926 seconds. (31,558,150 if I'm measuring a sidereal year.)
But let's say in the course of that year, I put you on a rocket ship, and…