Links for 2010-10-27

“The simple gripper is made of a bag of coffee grounds and a vacuum, though other grains such as couscous and sand also work, says study coauthor Eric Brown of the University of Chicago. To pick something up, the bag of loose grounds first melds around the object. Then, as a vacuum sucks air out of the spaces between grains, the gripper stiffens, packing itself into a hard vice molded to the outline of the object. Reducing the bag’s starting volume by just a teeny amount — less than 1 percent of the total — was enough to make the gripper latch on, the team found.”

To me, it looks like skeptics spend a large part of their efforts “preaching to the choir” or trying to change the minds of people who are just never going to change their minds. I see little evidence of the UK skeptic movement targeting that group of people who are still in the process of deciding what to believe and how to think about the world: children.