There's a wonderful kerfuffle going on right now around this photo. It's a self portrait, taken by a macaque monkey in Indonesia, shortly after the monkey nipped the camera of nature photographer David Slater (evidently the monkey accidentally snapped the shots while looking at its reflection in the lens). By itself the pictures are charming, but then the question arose, who owns the copyright to the photos?

The company that distributes Slater's work, Cater News Agency, wasted no time in claiming the copyright. But not so fast! The website TechDirt posted an essay pointing out that by default the photographer of a picture holds the original copy. Which in this case would be the monkey. But in many nation's copyright laws (including the US) it specifically that copyright applies only to works made by humans. So maybe no one holds the copyright.

Of course, Cater News Agency is adamantly against that point of view, photo agency's business model being based on strong copyright enforcement.

Art Info has all of the details.

Every year scientists discover something like 15,000 new species. Among those discovered last year are a new species of bacteria found clinging to the railing of the Titanic, a six-foot long fruit eating lizard found in a forest in the Philippines, and the Brazilian mushroom pictured here that glows with a bright greenish light.

The International Institute for Species Exploration has a photo gallery of the top ten new species of the year.

The Robot Film Festival is the brainchild of roboticist Heather Knight (who also has one of the coolest website names ever, Marilyn Monrobot dot com). The festival (which will be held July 16th & 17th in New York City) is still looking for submissions. Got a bot that dreams of being the next Clark Gable (or better yet, the first Calculon)? Submit a film! The films should be between 1 and 8 minutes long, and should feature a robot as one of the main characters or as a framing devices of the narrative.

You don't need to use a real robot, but you'll need to be able to attend the event with, or as, your robot if you want to take part in the Festival's red carpet award ceremony, known as the Botskers.

Here's a brief bit of data visualization goodness for you all. Jim Blackhurst works for the company that makes the video game Just Cause 2 and his job gives him access to tons of (anonymized) data about the game. He took the three-dimensional coordinates marking where in the game more than nine million players died, and (with some help from the Processing programming language) used the data to create a haunting video showing the locations of all the carnage. Here's the video on You Tube. And if you want all of the geeky details on how the video was made, Blackhurst explains the whole process.

Thanks to Infovore for the tip.

While it's true that heart pacemakers have saved or improved millions of lives (not to mention qualifying millions of people for cyborg status) they do have downsides. High among them is the fact that pacemaker batteries eventually run down, requiring a surgical procedure to remove the old pacemaker and replace it with a fully charged one.

But what if the body itself could provide the electrical power the pacemaker needs? That's the novel approach being taken by a team at the University of Bern in Switzerland. They're developing a mini electric turbine that can be embedded in a major artery. As blood rushes past it turns the turbine generating more than enough electrical energy to keep the pacemaker fully charged. (In case you want the work details, a beating human produces between 1 and 1.5 watts of hydraulic power. The turbine only needs about a milliwatt to operate. It'll generate 800 micro-watts of electricity, and the pacemaker only uses about 10 micro-watts. (Which I guess leaves 790 micro-watts for our Matrix machine overlords)).

There are still details to be worked out (the biggest being making sure that clots don't form in the turbine) but it's a cool idea. Hell, I'd be up for a turbine in my thoracic artery just for the steam-punk cred of it. Details about the turbine here.

Man, do roads in Boston suck. I swear there are streets when it seems new potholes form in front of you as you drive, like some sort of cruel video game come to life. The city wages a constant war against fixing the potholes, but even just finding them all is a huge task.

To help with that, the city of Boston has rolled out an Android phone app called Street Bump. The app automatically records GPS and accelerator information and sends it on to the city. The idea is that if enough phones record sudden jolts at the same spot there's a good chance there's a pothole there.

Unfortunately, so far the results are mixed, and the data isn't doing a good enough job finding potholes. But they're not ready to give up yet. Boston's offering a prize of US$25,000 to the person who can use the existing data and do a better job predicting where in the cities the potholes are. If you'd like to try, here are the official rules.

There may be no one who's thought more deeply, and from more different perspectives, about technology than Kevin Kelly.He's a founder of Wired, written books on everything from the history of technology to emergent complexity.

Kelly's written a practical set of rules for negotiating the ever changing technological landscape. Among his guidelines:

You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliticting help, and helping others with what you learn

Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. To evaluate don't think, try.

Read the full list here.

Photo "Learning" by Jenny Lee Silver made available under a Creative Commons license. Original and details here. Thanks!

It would have been easy to just arrange the names in alphabetical order. But the designers wanted the names arranged by affinity... so friends would be listed together, as would co-workers, colleagues, etc. Families of the victims submitted nearly 2,000 different requests for names to be placed next to other names.

The task of arranging the names fell to designer and vizualization expert Jer Thorp. There's an article on how he did it on fastcompany.com.

It's well known that George Lucas used a a number of central themes from mythology when he created Star Wars.

But what if he had taken a different tack? What if he turned to...wait for it...French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre? The results might have been a little like this series of Star Wars clips. The sub-titles are all direct quotes from Sartre's works. Enjoy!

Thanks facilegestures.

Here's a bit of beauty for your weekend. This lovely little video shows the step-by-step process of making an ultra high end hourglass. If you have US$28,500 you can pick one up from Marc Newson. If not, spend a tranquil three minutes watching one of these masterpieces taking shape.

Funding for the day to day operation of the telescopes comes...or came... from the University of California via grants from the National Science Foundation and the state of California. But now those grants have been slashed to a tiny fraction of the US$2.5 million dollars needed to run the array each year. As a result, UC has had no choice but to shut down operations.

Here's an article on the shutdown from New Scientist.

You may have missed this, but for a little while earlier this year one of the most expensive science books in the world was a little known work called "The Making of a Fly" by Peter Lawrence. At least that's what a couple of book sellers on Amazon.com thought. It turns out both of these sellers have automatic systems in place that notice the price competitors have quoted for a book, and then adjust their price accordingly. In the case of "The Making of a Fly" two sellers were trapped in a feedback loop where each one set their prices based on the other's price. This process ran unchecked for who knows how many days before the book (which had an original list price of US$70) reached the insane level of over two million (US) dollars.

Evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen credits a postdoc in his lab with first noticing this craziness, and bringing it to his attention. Eisen tracked the climb in price day by day and he's written up a fascinating blog post analyzing the automated algorithms at work here.

Lessons to be drawn from this innocent run amuck process in light of the huge tangle of automated stock trading systems running right now all around the world is left as an exercise for the reader.

If you're moving goods through the narrow and bike-friendly streets of Copenhagen, using a cargo bicycle is a great way to go. If those goods are human sperm cells for Copenhagen's fertility clinics, than what could be cooler than having a bike that looks like a giant sperm cell? Answer: NOTHING!

The bike is called the 'Sperm Bullitt'. The "head" of the bike is designed to safely hold donor samples in their cryogenic flasks. Will we ever see these on the streets of US cities? Probably not, since if there are two things that go against the American mindset it's 1) increased use of the bicycle, and 2) having to think more about semen.

BTW, thanks to Treehugger for originally posting about this.

If you're making a move that takes place entirely inside of a computer, the computer displays better kick all kinds of ass. For TRON: Legacy digital designer Joshua Nimoy got the call to come up with everything from hacker computer screens to world maps to 3-D virtual hearts.

Nimoy's written a great blog post detailing some of the techniques he used. Among other things he recorded himself using emacs, and built software tools that would let the movie's visual artists generate custom shaped fireworks.

DISCLOSURE: I work at the Walt Disney Company, the company that made TRON:Legacy (but I work in the division that does internet stuff and games, not the part that does movies or videos).

The Low-tech Magazine blog is singing the praises of my all-time favorite mode of transportation, the funicular. Funiculars (also known as cable trains, inclined railways, inclined planes, or cliff railways) are surprisingly energy efficient. And of course they're just totally cool to ride.

The blog post gives special attention to water powered cable trains...ones that move by filling a tank on the uphill train with water until it weighs enough to slide down the track, pulling the other car uphill in the process. It's wonderfully clever and low-tech.

Here's a global list of funiculars.