These Amazing Wings Will Make You Want to Fly #WearableWednesday #wearabletech #cosplay #robotics #art

Have you ever seen a portfolio of wings? These beauties by Alexis Noriega @TheCrookedFeather copy real birds and also delve into the fantasy varieties, all with mechanical engineering. Some use a pulley system while others work with pneumatics and electronics. She has a community of followers on Patreon and has even created a Frameworks kit so others can start designing their own wings. People often ask how you can turn making into a job, and I believe Alexis is well on her way. Along with her tutorials and talks on Patreon, she also does some incredible commissions. One set of wings that is especially inventive is her da Vinci Steampunk—somebody call the Smithsonian!

As a costume designer, Alexis knows how to work with texture, yet allow for movement and durability. She also knows how to paint feathers and layer them to give a realistic appearance since she has her own pet birds, including an attention grabber named “Coconut”. Her passion for winged beings has created niche maker work that is attracting cosplayers, models, costume makers and fantasy lovers. By sharing her construction techniques she has created a community of makers that is also helping to invent the next set of wings. If wings seems too ambitious for your next project, have a little fun with cosplay with our learning guide for an Animatronic Tail. You can add an animal trait to any costume with a simple servo, and have fun learning about electronics at the same time. Make sure you send us a video of your creation!

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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

These Amazing Wings Will Make You Want to Fly #WearableWednesday #wearabletech #cosplay #robotics #art

Have you ever seen a portfolio of wings? These beauties by Alexis Noriega @TheCrookedFeather copy real birds and also delve into the fantasy varieties, all with mechanical engineering. Some use a pulley system while others work with pneumatics and electronics. She has a community of followers on Patreon and has even created a Frameworks kit so others can start designing their own wings. People often ask how you can turn making into a job, and I believe Alexis is well on her way. Along with her tutorials and talks on Patreon, she also does some incredible commissions. One set of wings that is especially inventive is her da Vinci Steampunk—somebody call the Smithsonian!

As a costume designer, Alexis knows how to work with texture, yet allow for movement and durability. She also knows how to paint feathers and layer them to give a realistic appearance since she has her own pet birds, including an attention grabber named “Coconut”. Her passion for winged beings has created niche maker work that is attracting cosplayers, models, costume makers and fantasy lovers. By sharing her construction techniques she has created a community of makers that is also helping to invent the next set of wings. If wings seems too ambitious for your next project, have a little fun with cosplay with our learning guide for an Animatronic Tail. You can add an animal trait to any costume with a simple servo, and have fun learning about electronics at the same time. Make sure you send us a video of your creation!

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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

These Amazing Wings Will Make You Want to Fly #WearableWednesday #wearabletech #cosplay #robotics #art

Have you ever seen a portfolio of wings? These beauties by Alexis Noriega @TheCrookedFeather copy real birds and also delve into the fantasy varieties, all with mechanical engineering. Some use a pulley system while others work with pneumatics and electronics. She has a community of followers on Patreon and has even created a Frameworks kit so others can start designing their own wings. People often ask how you can turn making into a job, and I believe Alexis is well on her way. Along with her tutorials and talks on Patreon, she also does some incredible commissions. One set of wings that is especially inventive is her da Vinci Steampunk—somebody call the Smithsonian!

As a costume designer, Alexis knows how to work with texture, yet allow for movement and durability. She also knows how to paint feathers and layer them to give a realistic appearance since she has her own pet birds, including an attention grabber named “Coconut”. Her passion for winged beings has created niche maker work that is attracting cosplayers, models, costume makers and fantasy lovers. By sharing her construction techniques she has created a community of makers that is also helping to invent the next set of wings. If wings seems too ambitious for your next project, have a little fun with cosplay with our learning guide for an Animatronic Tail. You can add an animal trait to any costume with a simple servo, and have fun learning about electronics at the same time. Make sure you send us a video of your creation!

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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

How Cosmologists Determined That the Universe Is Expanding Faster Than Anyone Thought

via MOTHERBOARD

A team of astronomers from the Space Telescope Institute and John Hopkins University led by Nobel laureate Adam Reiss has confirmed data that the universe is expanding significantly faster than previously thought.

As detailed in a forthcoming paper for The Astrophysical Journal, Reiss and his colleagues used four years’ worth of data from the Hubble Space Telescope to determine that the universe is expanding about 9 percent faster than other leading measurements predicted—a wild mismatch in a field as precise as cosmology.

The data used to reach this conclusion is the most accurate measurement of the expansion of the universe since it was discovered to be expanding nearly a century ago.

The results raise profound questions about what could be causing the mismatch between predictions about the acceleration of the expanding universe, and may lead to fundamental insights about the nature of dark energy.

“The community is really grappling with understanding the meaning of this discrepancy,” Reiss, who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering that the universe expands at an accelerating rate in 1998, said in a statement.

Read and learn more!

 

Girls Who Code at Fashion Week #WearableWednesday #GirlsWhoCode

Clothing designer PH5 teamed up with Girls Who Code for a collaboration at New York Fashion Week. Both organizations hope to shake off one dimensional labels.

Via New York Times:

It was impossible to tell just by looking, but among the models at the presentation on Thursday were several nonprofessionals, including two alumnae of the Girls Who Code program, which aims to close the gender gap in technology through education.

Mijia Zhang, the creative director of PH5, and Wei Lin, the company’s founder, have been working with Girls Who Code to design a sweater with a special code on it. “As a brand, we have some influence, and we really want to bring a good influence to people,” Ms. Zhang said.

Most of the clothing that PH5 produces is made with a computer: Ms. Zhang works with programmers to code various stitches based on her vision, and a machine creates the pieces from there. “With knitwear you have to constantly program,” she said. “I think that’s something people aren’t aware of. You can be into computers and work in the fashion industry.”

…

At the PH5 presentation, Reshma Saujani, the founder and chief executive of the Girls Who Code program, was there to support its alumnae. “One of the things we tell our girls is we have to change the image of what a coder looks like and the industries where coders are most prominent,” Ms. Saujani said. “When you think of coding, you don’t necessarily think of knitwear.”

As a society, Ms. Saujani said, “we’ve told our girls that they’re not multidimensional. They’re either nerds or not nerds. We’ve taught our girls to hate math and science even if they love it.” She listed examples, like a girls’ T-shirt produced by Forever 21 with “Allergic to Algebra” printed on it and an “I’m Too Pretty to Do Homework” tee that J.C. Penney targeted at girls.

“You can be supersmart and have your hair done to the nines,” Ms. Saujani said. “We have to stop putting girls into boxes and see them for who they are.”

Read more.

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Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Time Travel Tuesday #timetravel a look back at the Adafruit, maker, science, technology and engineering world

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1748 – Swedish physician and naturalist Anders Sparrman is born.

He sailed for the Cape of Good Hope in January 1772 to take up a post as a tutor. When James Cook arrived there later in the year at the start of his second voyage, Sparrman was taken on as assistant naturalist to Johann and Georg Forster. After the voyage he returned to Cape Town in July 1775 and practiced medicine, earning enough to finance a journey into the interior. He was guided by Daniel Ferdinand Immelman, the young frontiersman who had previously guided the Swedish botanist Carl Peter Thunberg. Daniel and Sparrman reached the Great Fish River and returned in April 1776.

In 1776 Sparrman returned to Sweden, where he had been awarded an honorary doctorate in his absence. He was also elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1777. He was appointed keeper of the natural historical collections of the Academy of Sciences in 1780, Professor of natural history and pharmacology in 1781 and assessor of the Collegium Medicum in 1790. In 1787 he took part in an expedition to West Africa, but this was not successful.

Read more

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1869 – Alice Hamilton, American scientist and first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard University, is born.

Hamilton began her long career in public health and workplace safety in 1910, when Illinois governor Charles S. Deneen appointed her as a medical investor to the newly-formed Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases. Hamilton lead the commission’s investigations, which focused on industrial poisons such as lead and other toxins. She also authored the “Illinois Survey,” the commission’s report that documented its findings of industrial processes that exposed workers to lead poisoning and other illnesses. The commission’s efforts resulted in the passage of the first workers’ compensation laws in Illinois in 1911, in Indiana in 1915, and occupational disease laws in other states. The new laws required employers to take safety precautions to protect workers.

Read more

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1902 – American author John Steinbeck is born.

Steinbeck began to write a series of “California novels” and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. He also wrote an article series called The Harvest Gypsies for the San Francisco News about the plight of the migrant worker.

Of Mice and Men was a drama about the dreams of two migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was critically acclaimed[18] and Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a “little masterpiece”. Its stage production was a hit, starring Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as George’s companion, the mentally childlike, but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was “perfect” and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck wrote two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright).

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2014 – Adafruit publishes our Adafruit 1-Wire Thermocouple Amplifier – MAX31850K Learn Guide.

Thermocouples are very sensitive, requiring a good amplifier with a cold-compensation reference. So far we’ve carried the very nice MAX31855 which is an SPI interface thermocouple amplifier. The ‘855 is great but if you have a lot of thermocouples to measure it isn’t terribly easy to use. That’s why we are also carrying the new ‘850 model from Maxim – it’s a “1-Wire” thermocouple amp which can have any number of breakouts on a single shared I/O line.

Read more

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2014 – International Polar Bear Day is first celebrated.

International Polar Bear Day is organized by Polar Bears International to raise awareness about the impact of global warming and reduced sea ice on polar bear populations.The day encourages people to find ways to reduce their carbon output, such as by turning down their thermostat or driving less. The day has also been used to encourage the installation of energy efficient insulation in houses.

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Warhammer 40K Armor That’s Ready for a Fight

Kinpatsu Cosplay has been hard at work on her biggest armor cosplay yet: a Sisters of Battle set of armor from Warhammer 40K. Known as the Adepta Sororitas, the all female division is split into squads led by Sister Superiors. Kinpatsu based her costume on a design from Ted Beargeon and crafted it for the Magic International Cosplay Masters at the Monaco Anime Game International Conferences. She used EVA foam for the structure and layers and used Worbla for some of the details.

Admire the details in the below photos and stay tuned to Kinpatsu’s Patreon page for more about this costume.

See more of the costume on Kinpatsu’s Facebook page.

via Reddit