Staying above the Arctic Circle seems, well, cold. But up in the far north of Scandinavia, Lapland to be precise, cold-looking accommodations have become a hit. Ice hotels have recently gained popularity, scattered across the wintry north and boasting everything from a bar to beds made out of ice. For those travelers who want just [...]

“Could I have some artwork with that cappuccino?” Not exactly something you hear at Starbucks a lot, but if this coffee-printer technology goes mainstream, who knows? Wait, a coffee printer? Yep, Oleskiy Pikalo woke up one day with a hankerin’ for some fancy designs on his latte, so he bought a used Philips 8155 x-y [...]

Somebody, give them a napkin please!
 

The BBC is reporting on a grisly trade behind the booming business for replacement body parts in medical procedures. Many unscrupulous “dealers” procure body parts from anyone willing to deal them — e.g., undertakers, medics — and will process them for resale inside legitimate companies. Apparently a fully processed cadaver can fetch up to $250,000.

A new superconducting material fabricated by a Canadian-German team has been fabricated out of a silicon-hydrogen compound and does not require cooling.
Instead of super-cooling the material, as is necessary for conventional superconductors, the new material is instead super-compressed. The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that [...]

People who got old, stale blood during surgery were 30 percent more likely to die than people who got fresh blood, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
Two weeks seemed the be the cutoff, with older blood causing more complications, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Robots are fluent in their native language of 1 and 0 absolutes but struggle to grasp the nuances and imprecise nature of human language. While scientists are making slow, incremental progress in their quest to create a robot that responds to speech, gestures and body language, a more straightforward method of communication may help robots [...]

Hi-tech mobile phones and leisurely baths are well-known passions of the Japanese – and apparently they’re not mutually exclusive.
A survey released yesterday showed that 41.2 percent of people in the country have at least once taken their mobile phones to the bathtub to make calls, type e-mails, listen to music or play games.

For over 40 years, one of the longest running television shows in history opens with a slow camera zoom on an hour glass ticking away your daily wasted hour of mind numbing melodrama. The voice over is one of the most famous lines ever written for mass media; “Like sands through the hourglass, so are [...]

 
Arthur C. Clark, science fiction author and most famously known for his work on “2001: A Space Odyssey” and his early forecast of communication satellites, died Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka at the age of 90.
Clark wrote nearly 100 books in his lifetime dealing mostly with the future of science and the idea that the [...]

 
Seth Godin:   I posted an internship yesterday. The idea was to combine the “you pay to come” model of summer camp with the “we pay you to do low level work” of an internship to create a learning experience for students that was, split the difference, free. I felt like a free program would [...]

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Younger US consumers are reading the print versions of newspapers less and less, according to a comScore study conducted during the Summer of 2007.
Old habits die hard. Respondents ages 65 and over were almost three times more likely than the average respondent to be heavy print newspaper readers. In contrast, those ages 18 to 24 [...]

Since the Bear Stearns crisis first hit the news, we have been trying to find more information about what was taking place behind the scenes. This piece by John Mauldin puts it into perspective on a level that most everyone can understand. While this doesn’t give the blow by blow details, it does give some [...]

 
The English cabinetmaker Thomas Saint received the first patent for a sewing machine in 1790.  Elias Howe, credited as the inventor of the sewing machine, designed and patented his creation in 1846. Howe was employed at a machine shop in Boston and was trying to support his family. A friend helped him financially while he [...]