In Case You Missed It… Assorted Oddities from Around the Web

The University of Michigan Watches Star Trek

Don't Miss Sarah Jones's Essay On Kristi Noem Titled Predatory Is The Point On The Daily.

On Tuesday, Christoph Ellison, Assistant Professor at the U-M’s Center for Nano-optics, demonstrated the department’s latest breakthrough, a spray that renders objects it’s applied to transparent. Ellison hesitates to call the treated objects’ state as “invisibility” as “certain distortions of the light make them roughly visible”. He prefers the term, “cloaking”.

The U-M Engineering Department also posted a video the same day highlighting a successful experiment in teleportation. Xavier Vlad, who heads the Center for Advanced Material Irradiation (CAMI), inadvertently teleported a key whose material he’d been investigating after it and others broke off in their locks. As modest as his professional cohort in the Nano-optics division, Vlad defers calling the process “teleportation”. Key to the technology is an “ionic blender”.

CERN Boldly Goes Where No Other Nuclear Research Organizations have Gone Before

Europe’s CERN had a more modest Tuesday announcement. In a one-sentence, 18-second video, the nuclear research organization’s Fabiola Gianotti announced that all CERN web-pages would hereafter be written in the typeface, Comic Sans. An accompanying detailed press release describes the move as resulting from “weeks of deliberation by CERN management and top web designers about how best to update the image of the laboratory” on its 60th anniversary year.

The release also notes another facet of the branding initiative will be re-shaping CERN’s Large Hadron Collider into a triangle. The 17-mile circumference, underground particle accelerator is currently circular.

Amazon Drones Come Home

Film, TV, and entertainment industry trade outlet Variety announced on Tuesday that Amazon’s much-anticipated set-top box would take the form of an indoor drone. The device is described as capable of wirelessly streaming films, TV shows, and video games while hovering mid-air in “living-room airspace”. The airborne platform – a natural outgrowth of the online marketer’s proposed delivery drone – was first considered when Amazon execs realized that set-tops were already cluttered with competing devices.

The FAA has yet to comment on the announcement.

In case you missed it… Tuesday was April Fools Day.