This is very cool. Arthur Benjamin is a “mathemagician”. In this unusual video he races a team of people with calculators to figure out 3-digit squares in his head, and performs a massive mental calculation. Here’s how he does it.

Authorities in a remote Russian region at the centre of dozens of reports of UFO sightings have started work on a £3 million centre to attract alien spotters.

From a distance, the large red aluminum contraption parked on the frozen shore of Lake Superior here looks like a small houseboat perched on skis. Up closer, as schoolchildren pile in with their backpacks and iPods, it becomes clear that the mystery vehicle, with two large fans on the back, is something else entirely.

The loss or misplacement of credit cards is a common worry. No one wants a thief to find it and go on a spending spree. You may not have to worry about it much longer, thanks to this new product in development. It’s a collaboration by Swiss company AXSionics and Siemens.

Ever since US Internet usage became widespread, marketers have been tracking online usage to see if Web time was coming at the expense of TV time.
Now, IDC has found that Internet is the medium on which US online users spend the most time–32.7 hours per week, almost twice as much as they spend watching television. […]

 
They were certainly creative geniuses. But what was the common trait in Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton? Well, both had “autism”.

The Scan-It is a toy airport metal-detector to help your kids train to be productive members of the panopticon police state.

I.B.M. scientists have measured the force needed to nudge one atom.
About one-130-millionth of an ounce of force pushes a cobalt atom across a smooth, flat piece of platinum.
Pushing the same atom along a copper surface is easier, just one-1,600-millionth of an ounce of force.
The scientists report these minuscule findings in Friday’s issue of the journal […]

This house is more of a sculpture than a dwelling. Taking cues from a Nautilus shell, the house is put together using ferrocement construction, a technique involving a frame of steel-reinforced chicken wire with a special two-inch-thick composite of concrete spread over it, resulting in a structure that’s earthquake-proof and maintenance-free. More photos after the […]

A 999-meter-long scarlet wedding dress is displayed in a shopping mall in Dalian, Northeast China’s Liaoning Province, February 21, 2008. The hand-knitted dress features 2,008 pieces of jade, 29 golden phoenixes and 880 peonies that took dressmakers three months to finish. More photos after the jump.

Over the past decade, the leisure activity most closely associated with corporate success in America has been in a kind of recession.
The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods […]