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Mike Simpson shows off his Civil War-era cuckoo clock at the National Archives at Atlanta in Morrow. He plans to bring the clock to "Civil War Treasures in Your Nation's Attic, " an "Antiques Roadshow"-like event that will be filmed April 16 at the National Archives at Atlanta. From Access Atlanta : Michael Simpson has a clock. It was made by the American Cuckoo Clock Co. of Philadelphia. With its fluted columns, the rosewood clock is reminiscent of a Greek temple. At its peak is a small door, no larger than a playing card, that pops open to reveal a tiny wooden bird, light blue with a dappled white breast. The clock has been in his family for more than a century. It was a gift to Aaron Simpson, who was barely more than a child when he joined a New Hampshire regiment as its drummer boy. He went off to war, came back and was presented with a handsome clock from his father, no doubt relieved that the youngster made it through the conflict intact.   Unlike ...

A show about a clock factory! ...also, check out the water clock!

[via Make ]

Here's an interesting piece from io9 : Cuckoos don't bother building their own nests - they just lay eggs that perfectly mimic those of other birds and take over their nests. But other birds are wising up, evolving some seriously impressive tricks to spot the cuckoo eggs.  Cuckoos are what's known as brood parasites, meaning they hide their eggs in the nests of other species. To avoid detection, the cuckoos have evolved so that their eggs replicate those of their preferred targets. If the host bird doesn't notice the strange egg in its nest, the newly hatched cuckoo will actually take all the nest for itself, taking the other eggs on its back and dropping them out of the nest.   To avoid this nasty fate for their offspring, the other birds have evolved a few nifty ways to spot the fakes, which we're only now beginning to fully understand. One of the most intriguing finds is that birds have an extra color-sensitive cell in their retinas, which makes them far more s...

The clock tower seems to be modeled after the Prague Clock. [via Automaton Blog ]

We've had The Invention of Hugo Cabret on our reading list for a while now. Good news is that Martin Scorcese is working on a movie adaptation! It's a story about a mechanical automaton, and a loose narrative on the life of Georges Méliès. [via io9 ]

From Space.com : The massive earthquake that struck northeast Japan Friday (March 11) has shortened the length Earth's day by a fraction and shifted how the planet's mass is distributed. A new analysis of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan has found that the intense temblor has accelerated Earth's spin, shortening the length of the 24-hour day by 1.8 microseconds, according to geophysicist Richard Gross at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Gross refined his estimates of the Japan quake's impact – which previously suggested a 1.6-microsecond shortening of the day – based on new data on how much the fault that triggered the earthquake slipped to redistribute the planet's mass. A microsecond is a millionth of a second. "By changing the distribution of the Earth's mass, the Japanese earthquake should have caused the Earth to rotate a bit faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds," Gross told SPACE.com in a...