Brilliant Staircase Design Stores Extra Energy to Make It Easier to Climb Later. Do you deliberately avoid visiting friends who live in multi story buildings without an elevator No one would fault youhaving to climb even just a single flight of stairs is like being forced to workout against your will. As the stairs compress on your descent, the engineers have calculated they save around 26 percent of the energy you normally use to brace yourself as each foot makes. Voyager 1 and 2 both carry a special trinket known as The Golden Record. The 12inch, goldplated copper phonograph records contains a variety of sounds and music. GameTrailers is your destination to see official trailers first. Powered by IGN, you can expect to see worldfirst exclusive gameplay and the hottest new tra. Ever notice how Christopher Nolans movies Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige feel like an anxiety attack Well, maybe thats overstating things a bit. But. The classic US stereotype of attempted Iranian ideological indoctrination via chants of Death to America and such has been old hat for quite some time. As noted. But thanks to engineers at Georgia Tech and Emory University, stairs might one day do all the hard work for you. In a paper published today in the journal PLOS ONE, that team details their energy recycling stairs, which store energy when you descend, and then release it to make the ascent easier on the way back up. You probably dont stop to think about it while you race down a flight of stairs, but your body expends a considerable amount of energy in the process to prevent you from falling. Its usually wasted energy, but these energy recycling stairs take advantage of those forces using a spring loaded mechanism that compresses each step and locks it down as you descend. This leaves every step charged with potential energy once youve hit the bottom. When you go to climb back up, pressure sensors on each tread release the locking mechanism on the step below it, turning that stored potential energy into kinetic energy that helps lift a climbers leg as the spring powered step raises again. As the stairs compress on your descent, the engineers have calculated they save around 2. And on the way back up, the energy recycling stairs make it around 3. Hidef Quality Berserk The Golden Age Arc 3 Descent BookThe stairs unique mechanisms can be retrofitted to existing steps, so the technology isnt only for new buildings, necessarily. And installing them would be cheaper, and require less space, than an escalator or elevator. Theres no word on when this technology will be commercialized, but anyone living in an elevator less building will certainly be hoping its as soon as possible. Georgia Tech via New Atlas. The Uncanny Sound Illusion That Creates Suspense in Christopher Nolans Movies. Ever notice how Christopher Nolans movies Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige feel like an anxiety attack Well, maybe thats overstating things a bit. But the director does have a knack for creating an unnerving degree of tension. Turns out hes using a little bit of musical magic to do it. Film Noir Download Open Season: Scared Silly here. The magic is actually a science based audio illusion called a Shepard tone. Named after psychologist Roger Shepard, a pioneer in our understanding of spatial relation, the effect sounds like an infinitely ascending or descending scale. The tones are constantly moving upwards or downwards, but they never seem to reach a pinnacle or nadir. This is accomplished by stacking scales on top of each othertypically one treble scale, one midrange, and one basswith an octave in between, then playing them in a continuous loop. A Shepard tone is sometimes referred to as the barber pole of sound. You can even see the similarity, when you hear it and look at the spectrum view of a Shepard tone. Dont listen to this too long, or you might lose your mind Anyways, Christopher Nolan just loves this. With longtime collaborator Hans Zimmer, the acclaimed director has used a Shepard tone in almost every one of his films in the last decade. He even writes his scripts to match the effect. In a recent interview, Nolan explained how he used Shepard tones in his newest film, Dunkirk The screenplay had been written according to musical principals. Theres an audio illusion, if you will, in music called a Shepard tone and with my composer David Julyan on The Prestige we explored that and based a lot of the score around that. And its an illusion where theres a continuing ascension of tone. Its a corkscrew effect. Its always going up and up and up but it never goes outside of its range. And I wrote the script according to that principle. I interwove the three timelines in such a way that theres a continual feeling of intensity. Increasing intensity. So I wanted to build the music on similar mathematical principals. Knowing this, you gain a deeper understanding of films like Interstellar, Inception, and The Prestige. It also explains why these films seem somehow inconclusive. A Shepards tone creates a conflict that cant be resolved, just like Nolans plots. Digg, Business Insider.