Category Archives: Technology

Dot is Wallace & Gromit’s little sister

Talk about tiny, Dot is only a third of an inch tall!

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

They made it to help celebrate the invention of the CellScope, a tiny hand-held microscope invented by a scientist at the University of California-Berkeley. It allows doctors to view and record things like ear aches and sore throats. It is basically a 50x magnification lens on a cellphone camera. (You can read more about it here.)

The animators also used a 3D printer to make 50 different versions of Dot, because she is too small to 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 version of Dot was hand-painted by artists looking through a microscope.

Nikola Tesla – genius and inventor

The elements on Google

Tom Lehrer is a singer-songwriter and mathematician who became well-known in the 1950s and 60s for writing off-the-wall smart songs. This little animation uses one of his well-known songs in which he sings the names of the elements on the periodic table. The tune is the “Major-General’s Song” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera, Pirates of Penzance. Screen shots from Google illustrate the song, making it fun to watch, and at the same time, showing how useful Google is as a research tool.