Origami Human Figure

The da Vinci robot has proven to be an endless source of amusement to surgeons everywhere; in Japan, it folds origami cranes, at the state of Washington's Swedish Medical Center, it flies paper airplanes and gives manicures. It's a battle of the hospitals—who can make their pr ...more

Last week's social engineering phone calls were a blast. We made some friends, and even some enemies. We scored cheap food for some buddies, made some phone bills disappear, and even got a few people some free pizzas. So overall, it was a very successful night. In light of its ...more

Hardware hacks are something I feel we don't get enough of at Null Byte, so today I figured I would introduce a fun one. I've always been a curious hardware hacker. Taking things apart and learning how their internals work has always been a part of my nature. Quite some years ...more

Does size matter? When it comes to optical illusions, it does. The size of a human brain's visual cortex determines how he or she sees the world, meaning not everybody observes optical illusions in the same way. Via io9, Dr. D. Samuel Schwarzkopf, a researcher at University C ...more

Sounds like an anomaly, right? When I was a kid folding frogs, my mother gave me origami paper that was most certainly dry. But the works below by Vietnamese-American artist Giang Dinh were folded with one *wet* piece of paper. It's a technique called "Wet-Folding", invented b ...more

Microcontrollers are great. You can do anything from water your garden to catch wildlife trash diggers in the act—and on the cheap. I prefer to use the Arduino microcontroller because of the large and helpful community built around the website. Though it is my favorite, there ...more

WonderHowTo is made up niche communities called Worlds. If you've yet to join one (or create your own), get a taste below of what's going on in the community. Check in every Wednesday for a roundup of new activities and projects. This week: Create a redstone calculator in Min ...more

It's Monday, which means once again, it's time to highlight some of the most recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. I also thought we'd take a look at building a sliceform model of a hyperbolic paraboloid. Rachel Mansur put up two posts on her Modula ...more

It's Monday, which means once again, it's time to highlight some of the recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. In this post, we'll also make a flexagon, which is a type of transformable object. Rachel Mansur of Giveaway Tuesdays posted several pictur ...more

Modular origami is a technique that can be used to build some pretty interesting and impressive models of mathematical objects. In modular origami, you combine multiple units folded from single pieces of paper into more complicated forms. The Sonobe unit is a simple example un ...more

Carol Platt was caught in the middle of the economic downturn with no backup plan. Searching for a stable job in an unstable economy proved to be difficult without a college degree. Her work history and past successes were overlooked. It had always been a dream of hers to comp ...more

The whole world seems better when you’ve had a full night’s sleep, and if you don’t believe me, you’re JUST FRIGGIN’ WRONG. Studies show that getting enough sleep during nighttime hours can make you less irritable, help you lose weight, and reduce your risk of cancer and other ...more

It’s hard to know where to start talking about a book like 2666. That’s partly because, in some ways, it’s actually five books. Published posthumously, the book begins with “A Note from the Author’s Heirs” explaining that, before his death, Bolano stipulated the book be publis ...more

It's once again Monday, which means it's time to highlight some of the most recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. Since two of these posts were on polyhedral versions of M.C. Escher's tessellations, I thought we'd take a look at building a simple tes ...more

It's another Monday, which means it's once again time to highlight some of the recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. Additionally, I thought we'd take a look at the process of stellation and make some stellated polyhedra out of paper.Rachel Mansur of ...more

RESPECT - What It Means (in the picture above are my parents, both of whom I respect and cherish dearly) http://dictionary.reference.com/ defines RESPECT in 19 different ways. However, for the purpose of this article, we are going to focus on just 3 - 3. esteem for or a s ...more

Minecraft is unique among computer games in that some users have created such breathtaking works of beauty and ingenuity that it challenges the very idea that Minecraft is even a game at all, but suggests that it is instead a tool for artistic expression much like Photoshop. ...more

If you're like me, you were disappointed when NASA cut their human space flight program. No longer could children and adults in dead-end jobs dream of someday walking on the surface of the Moon or drinking floating globules of water through a straw. Homo sapiens as a species a ...more

Hangouts are one of the most fun features in Google+. As long as you have a webcam and a microphone, you can "hangout" with up to 10 of your buddies on Google+ and do just about anything. Of course, sometimes it can get kind of awkward when you are hanging out and you don't re ...more

If you've run out of time for all of our more time-consuming Halloween costume ideas, here are some places on the web for free, downloadable paper masks. There must be at least 100 options among these links to satisfy your last-minute costume needs! Just download, print, and c ...more

For as long as I've loved SCRABBLE, I can't believe I've never come across this before. "CRAZIEST" - A short story by Liz Dubelman about words and numbers as a religion (think Pi), about SCRABBLE being the oracle, about her quest for the "triple-triple". This spoke words to m ...more

Math Craft admin Cory Poole posted instructions on How to Make a Cube, Octahedron & Icosahedron from Sonobe Units, plus some great complex models in his article, How to Make a Truncated Icosahedron, Pentakis Dodecahedron & More. These models use the standard sonobe unit and a ...more

Find Your Base Material The base material for your doll can be anything 100% naturally made. Traditionally, sticks and twigs are used. Some people prefer to use corn husks, braided grass or similar items. The choice is yours, the only "rule" is that it be made of 100% natural ...more

Disengagement report numbers for self-driving car testing in 2016 on public roads in California were just released, and the biggest point we can make about them is that Waymo is very far ahead of their competitors in almost every metric. The California Autonomous Vehicles Tes ...more

A 2D film can show you something, but a 3D film in virtual reality can make you feel it. If done right, you'll feel immersed in a new world that surrounds you. If done wrong, you'll get nauseous and uncomfortable. SilVR Thread, a 360-degree VR video company, figured out a few ...more

Social engineering makes headlines because human behavior is often the weakest link of even well-defended targets. Automated social engineering tools can help reclusive hackers touch these techniques, but the study of how to hack human interactions in person is often ignored. ...more

Forget the rise of the machines. Tardigrades are set to outlive everything — even the bots. When the last echo of a whisper in a cell phone has long dissipated into space, the water bears will still be hanging out. In Hollywood, there is a never-ending march of movies set in ...more

The evolution of our infection-fighting systems may have something to teach modern scientists. That's what a group from the University of Granada in Spain found when they studied a protein that's been around for over four billion years. Their work, by senior author José Sánche ...more

Artist Frank Bölter created a life-sized origami boat to sail up the Elbe. The boat cost £110 to construct back in '97 (today's conversion rate would put that at $175). The boat is 30 feet long, and weighs 55 pounds. It took 2 hours to construct, using a 170 square meter sheet ...more

More redneck fun. Bob Moravitz plus family and friends have created an 8 hour event of propelling vehicles off cliffs. Held yearly, admission is free but donations are encouraged (to cover insurance costs). "“The idea was inspired last year by boredom and a strong desire to d ...more

Yesterday was simple paper airplane replica of an F16 Fighting Falcon. Today, something other worldly. Vincent Floderer has mad originality creating origami figures. This Frenchman is widely regarded as the master of a form called Crumpling. Sea urchins, coral, mushrooms. The ...more

Creativity is one of our most unique features. We can dream up gods and demons and give them form through drawing. We can even take a two-dimensional surface and bring our ideas to life in three dimensions. It only takes a little training for our giant imaginations to blossom ...more

Apple remains shrouded in mystery while continuing to sweep up small companies ahead of a rumored augmented reality headset launch. On Friday, Apple confirmed the acquisition of a UK-based firm called iKinema, which specializes in 3D motion captures of human figures. Don't M ...more

Augmented reality has an incredible way of integrating things into our world that we can typically only see in movies like ghosts in a haunted house or Sharknados. However, a new experiment made with Apple's ARKit has changed the game in realistic augmented reality characters. ...more

I have never been the most artistic person in the world, but never overlook a great piece of work when I see one. With George Lucas selling the Star Wars franchise to Disney for more money than I could make in ten lifetimes, it's safe to say the franchise has a lot of fans. S ...more

Most DIY freaks do-it-themselves because they love it. Because they're curious, creative, and like to take the long road (or figure out an ingenious short cut). In the case of Chewang Norphel (aka the Ice Man), the need to do-it-himself was a little more dire: the survival of ...more

Black Mirror, Netflix's technology-horror anthology, never fails to provide thought-provoking entertainment centered around emerging and futuristic technologies, and the third season's second episode, "Playtest," delves deep into the worlds of mixed, augmented, and virtual rea ...more

Hackers often rely on lazy system admins and unpatched vulnerabilities to get access to a host. Keeping intruders off of our machines requires us to update daily, only run the services we need, and read the code, among other things, but we can still make mistakes. Luckily for ...more

One of the most popular usages of modern-day smartphones is listening to music. It doesn't matter if you download or stream your tunes, you are part of a massive group of users who do exactly the same. While statistics are a bit foggy on how many smartphones users download mus ...more

Many wonder how driverless cars will ever be able to navigate through any driving condition imaginable — but the point is self-taught machines, in theory, have the innate ability to adapt to chaotic and extreme driving conditions in ways far superior to what humans are capable ...more

A new study published on April 12 in Medscape gives us an update on the Hantavirus genus of pathogens, which spread viruses via rodents that can cause fatal diseases in humans, such as hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS). Hantaviruses are an underreported risk for people, esp ...more

The year was 1947. Scientists had isolated a virus from a pyrexial rhesus monkey in Uganda and named it after the forest where the monkey lived — Zika. Then, a little more than a year ago, in the fall of 2015, health officials in Brazil reported a sharp increase in the number ...more

In 4.74 seconds, I can barely bend over to tie my shoes, and somehow this guy managed to crush the human world record for solving the Rubik's Cube in that time exactly. Update: Rubik's Cube World Record Gets Beaten... Again. New Record Is 4.737 Seconds! Video: . Mats Valk, a ...more

Most augmented/mixed reality hardware still exists in the development stage, whether that's one of the more robust headsets or a high-powered smartphone. Most everything else isn't widely used or monetized. Snapchat, however, snuck in under the radar and created the foundation ...more

It always looks different when it's not about you. The Internet is our world's Alterego. Those many bits don't really make sense unless we want them to be valuable, to mean something. Our rush to the future is too fast to keep up with. Denying technology is ignorance, isolat ...more

We've all been there. Channel surfing lazily whilst reclining on the sofa—then all of a sudden, the remote stops working. Out of frustration, you hold the remote up higher, press the buttons harder, or maybe a even give it a good smack hoping that will fix it. Right around thi ...more

Security researcher Samy Kamkar, best known for his MySpace Worm, and most recently for his online calculator that can help you crack any Master Lock combination, is at it again. This time he's figured out how to break into security doors that have a motion-sensing egress syst ...more

Real suffering is sitting through a thirty-second ad to watch a fifteen-second video, or watching your favorite music video in three-second fragments. Real suffering is this: “An error occurred, please try again later.” If you’re a modern human and multitask with multiple tabs ...more

As the demand for realistic volumetric video for AR experiences begins to grow (along with the available facilities and services for capturing it), researchers at Google have figured out how to improve upon the format. The team has devised a system, called "The Relightables," ...more