Using a Nokia N8 smartphone and a CellScope, the team behind the Wallace & Gromit series has made the world’s smallest stop-motion animation film.

Follow 0.35-inch-tall Dot as she runs through an obstacle course made of British currency, rides a bumblebee and stitches her way out of trouble. The music is catchy too.

Animators at the UK studio Aardman used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too small to manipulate or bend like they would other stop-motion animation characters. The figurine’s tiny features stretched the limit of the printer — any smaller and it would be hard to make distinct limbs. Each one was hand-painted by artists looking through a microscope.

Directors Ed Patterson and Will Studd attached a CellScope (winner of a PopSci Best of What's New award in 2008) to a Nokia N8 12-megapixel camera to film Dot’s struggle in her microscopic world. They said Nokia commissioned them to make the film in celebration of CellScope’s potential to improve medicine in the developing world.

CellScope is the brainchild of Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineer at the University of California-Berkeley, who combined a cellphone camera with a 50x magnification microscope.

Watch Dot's adventure below.

Posted via Nuno Luciano

After the failure of Google Waves and Buzz, the web keep talking about Google+, the search giant’s new social initiative and answer to Facebook.

Since Google+ has been out to a small number of people that had some time to assess Google’s social network, Mashable questioned a circle where it hits a home run and where it strikes out.

We’ve already written a review about Google+, but we were curious about what early Google+ users thought about it. So we decided to ask a circle on Google+ about what they believe is good and bad about Google+. And they delivered: we got more than 100 responses about the pros and cons of Google’s new social layer.

Let’s be clear: Google+ is in its infancy, and many of the things they mentioned are part of future releases or bugs that Google intends to fix. Still, the conversation we’ll provide a look into where Google’s social networking is succeeding and where it comes up short against its competitors.

Read here some of the pros and cons of Google+, according to its users.

Interesting Mashable Take: "Google is smart to integrate Google+ into every part of its empire — it creates engagement and reinforces that Google intends to be social. It needs to provide assurances that private emails and private search remain private, though. How to do that may be one of its toughest challenges."

Posted via Nuno Luciano

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

Transcript:

... when I first started telling people -- when I was a teenager -- that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same kind of, sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" (Laughter) Like that, you know.

The answer, the short answer to all those questions is, "Yes." Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many many more things besides that people can't even guess at.

(...) is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. You know, and what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know?

(...) creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work, you know. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.

And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that -- because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know -- I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.

(...) I have to, sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. And, as I've been looking over the last year for models for how to do that I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people, sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity.

You can find and translate the full interactive transcript here !

As the "High Priestess of Health", Jane Ellen Brody said "Turn your midlife crisis to your own advantage by making it a time for renewal of your body and mind, rather than stand by helplessly and watch them decline."

Check also the Wayseer Manifesto by author Garret John LoPorto – which aims to unite those of us who stand outside the mainstream into a powerful, creative movement.

Have Fun Creating ^_^/

Posted via Nuno Luciano