The Friday Post #5: Fine Robots, Charles Darwin, Prostheses, Fancy Trains and one wonderful Blog

Beautiful commuter trains, robotics, creating a prosthetic ear by hand, the lifework of Charles Darwin, light sculptors Pika Pika, and one all-purpose blog are what make up this Friday Post.

• A free digital archive of the collected works of scientist Charles Darwin have been made available online, courtesy of the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Library which owns the collection, made up of 20,000 items in nearly 90,000 images. View it at Darwin Online. Also see a brief article from Reuters News dated Apr 17 2008 about this new digital archive.

• From the excellent blog Pink Tentacle, a post about some pretty fancy traincars from Kobe, Japan decorated by IKEA… beautiful but entirely unsuitable for New York: http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/04/ikea-decks-out-kobe-train

• A very impressive Robot. The appealing scripted talents of a next generation Mobile Dexterous Social Robot, described as “approximately the size of a 3-year old child” is shown in the video below. The MDS Robot was designed and built by scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab – Personal Robots Group, University of Massachusetts-Amherst Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics, Xitome Design and Meka Robotics.

Video: Courtesy of YouTube / MIT – copyright 2008 – all rights reserved

Also see MIT’s Personal Robots Group page for more about this project.

• On the WordPress blog Revealed, the blogger (Janet Chao) illustrates the multi-step process involved in the creation of a durable human Ear Prosthesis which is very much a work of art. She is working towards a Masters degree in Biomedical Visualization at University of Illinois.

• Don’t you love to watch PikaPika Videos?!

Video: Courtesy of YouTube / pikapika – copyright 2007 – all rights reserved

• Finally… for sheer delight and a big “WOW” factor, bookmark the blog DarkRoastedBlend. For example, check out the World’s Wildest Rollercoasters link or a series on World’s Most Dangerous Roads. If you are scared of heights – beware!