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Each week Tom Whitwell of
Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that’s coming out, as
well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

Music lessons at my old school consisted of a few shakers, a piano, and an old guy talking about Mozart. In France,
things are very different. This awesome-looking psychedelic synth is the reason why there are so many cool French
electronic musicians. It’s the latest version of

Le Cybersongosse, a series
of synths developed at the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges. They’ve been used to teach
French kids about recording technology and synthesis since 1973. This one is a hardware control surface connected to a
G5 running MAX/MSP, the musical programming language developed in Paris at the IRCAM research institute, and now used
by techno musicians like Aphex Twin. For basic lessons, kids use just the controller with a microphone. More advanced
lessons are taught with a touch tablet and a monitor. When I first mentioned the Cybersongosse on Music Thing, the
response was immediate and unanimous: “Never mind the French kids, where can I buy one?”

[Via Engadget]

For just $3300, even you can have a 16-point buck mounted on your wall and lighted by fluorescent tubes to showcase to friends and visitors alike your true hunting prowess. While it might not make the most feasible story, “I bagged his ghost” is probably your best bet here. Formed from hand-molded resin, this might make the perfect addition to any dim and currently normal corner in your loft.

Catalog Page [gnr8news]

[Via Gizmodo]

There are plenty of reasons to hate our government, from low quality cheese handouts to an embarrassing lack of prisoner-fueled gladiatorial events, but at least they have no problem telling scientists to stop sucking the creme filling from grants and start building robot arms.

Darpa, the funds-holding financier of many military project, has put
out a challenge to modern prostheticists to build a fake arm with,
“enough finesse to pick up a raisin or to write in longhand. It needs
to be sensitive enough for the wearer to demonstration to do day-to-day
tasks in the dark. And the limb will have to be strong enough to lift
60 pounds at a time.”

REPLACEMENT ARM, GOOD AS NEW [DefenseTech]

[Via Gizmodo]

Clive Thompson says: In a story in the current issue of Cell,
scientists report that they can control fruit-flies remotely — by
shooting lasers at their neurons. Cool enough, but then they tore the
heads off a few flies, and found they were still able to stimulate the
remaining neurons — and even induce them to fly. That’s right:
Remote-controlled headless zombie flies. Do not miss the video of the headless flies in action, which looks like a freaky outtake from The Ring.
Link

[Via BoingBoing]

These
programmed materials change shape when struck by light at certain
wavelengths and return to their original shapes when exposed to light
of specific different wavelengths.

The discovery, to be reported in the April 14 issue of Nature,
could have potential applications in a variety of fields, including
minimally invasive surgery. Imagine, for example, a “string” of plastic
that a doctor could thread into the body through a tiny incision. When
activated by light via a fiber-optic probe, that slender string might
change into a corkscrew-shaped stent for keeping blood vessels open.

Link

[Via BoingBoing]