Wetless water

The New York Times Magazine has compiled a list of great ideas from 2004 (registration required). Here are a few of my favourites:

Concrete you can see through:
"Losonczi, a 28-year-old from Csongrad, Hungary, is the inventor of LiTraCon (shorthand for 'light-transmitting concrete'), which is made by adding glass or plastic fibers to the usual blend of gravel, sand, cement and water. A LiTraCon wall, though sturdy, is as translucent as an oilskin lampshade. Shadows seep through from one side to the other, even if the slab is of prison-grade thickness."

Eyeball jewellery:
"Here's how it works. An ophthalmologist anesthetizes your eye, then makes a microscopic incision in the conjunctiva, the eye's transparent outer membrane. The doctor drops a tiny piece of jewelry (called JewelEye) into the incision, and the procedure is over."

Listening for cancer:
"When a cell turns cancerous, its internal machinery alters: it might divide more rapidly, and its walls could take a new shape. Those changes, Gimzewski surmises, would produce distinctive rates of
vibration and thus distinctive noises. He has already measured the acoustics of some cells going through death cycles. When he measured an inert yeast cell, its lack of movement produced a dead-sounding hiss. And when he immersed a bunch of yeast in alcohol, the cells emitted a creepy 'screaming' sound as they suddenly perished."

Underwear for animated people:
"When Pixar animators were creating this year's hit movie 'The Incredibles', they noticed a certain limpness in the movements of a key character, the diminutive fashion diva Edna Mode. Her skirt appeared to sag and crumple as she walked. The animators could have taken the trouble to iron out the glitches frame by frame. But they devised a more clever solution: the studio fitted Edna with a virtual petticoat. While her underwear is never actually seen onscreen, it nonetheless helps keep her clothing in place. Welcome to the world of invisible animation."

More great ideas from the New York Times (Registration required)

Other links today:
+ Online shopping is growing 26 times faster than on the High Street, and nearly 50% of the population make their purchases through the net. Quel surpris!

+ The libraries of five of the world's most important academic institutions (including Stanford, Harvard and Oxford) are to be digitised by Google and made available for search and reading online. This is very exciting news.

+ The world's tallest road bridge is higher than the Eiffel Tower, at more than 300 metres.

+ The question "did IBM cheat?" in the chess match between computer Deep Blue and chess master Garry Kasparov is the focus of new documentary Game Over: Kasparov And The Machine. But the more interesting questions for Wired that the documentary leaves unanswered are: "Can a machine improve upon the human brain's most complex activities? Is Deep Blue a sign of real advance toward artificial intelligence? Does Deep Blue's success shed any light on what makes a human a human?"