UniqueDaily.com

“Topflight boffins in America have well and truly gasted the world’s flabber by building a sort of miniaturized live arena version of Pac-Man, in which players guide minuscule single-celled organisms to gobble up little balls. The game, dubbed PAC-mecium (the organisms which chase around gobbling balls are paramecia) is the brainchild of Stanford uni bioengineering prof Ingmar Riedel-Kruse. “We hope that by playing games involving biology of a scale too small to see with the naked eye, people will realize how amazing these processes are and they’ll get curious and want to know more,” he says. Riedel-Kruse and his Stanford colleagues set up the tiny, living Pac-Man game by placing paramecia in a small fluid chamber, which is viewed through a microscope by a camera – which then relays images to the video game screen. The player controls the paramecium using a normal game controller which is hooked up to equipment that “controls the polarity of a mild electrical field applied across the fluid chamber, which influences the direction the paramecia move”. Score is kept by a computer tracking the paramecia on the video.” w/ photo

“The House of Cards Table is a piece of furniture that addresses topics such as lightness and instability, but with sense of humor which is a mark of the work by Brazilian designer-architect Mauricio Arruda. The idea of his latest design, apparently simple, has lived for years in his imagination until today! The game house of cards is part of most people’s imagination and its image is so familiar that it is impossible to believe that there is someone who would not identify it.” w/ photos