Competition will range from community groups, to corporate teams, to int’l teams
On Tuesday evening the Longmont City Council gave the green light to DaVinci Quest CEO Karl Dakin to proceed with the 2010 Smarter, Safer, Greener House Competition where teams from around the world will compete to retrofit existing homes to maximum efficiency. DaVinci Quest [...]

 Electrolux Silence Amplified iPod Vacuum
Just when you think that the industry has done with vacuum cleaners everything it could, Electrolux shocks you again, launching vacuum cleaner + iPod device. The cleaner, based on UltraSilencer which is the most silent vacuum cleaner ever made, will, according to laboratory tests, improve the cleaning performance, reduce the stress [...]

Money can buy you happiness – especially if you are paid by the hour
Researchers found that being paid by the hour had a greater impact on your wellbeing than getting a salary as you feel a greater connection between effort and reward.
 

Online radio rapidly growing
One third of the population chooses to listen to the radio on the internet rather than on a traditional receiver.  Figures show that the trend for accessing stations online is rapidly growing in popularity with 17.4million listeners doing so this month.
 

Urban forest
You may remember MAD Architects from their equally mad designs, such as this star-shaped floating city. Now they’ve got the wobbly-looking, 1,250-foot-high Urban Forest for Chongqing, China that does away with the traditional walled skyscraper for one that’s a series of terraces. (Pics)
 

The fact that the streets aren’t exactly swarming with Segways seven years after they went on sale hasn’t stopped some major players taking tentative steps (or wheels) into the personal mobility arena with their own device prototypes. As we’ve seen previously Toyota is working on the Winglet, while Honda recently displayed its U3-X experimental vehicle [...]

Gizmodo has a fun flow chart that you can use to determine whether your iPhone usage when you’re together with your significant other is passable or totally inappropriate. I don’t have an iPhone, but I just did a quick assessment of my boyfriend, and concluded that most of the time I should be telling him [...]

Is this a  face only a door lock could love?

Security technology has been really moving forward lately for both home and commercial use. A prime example of this is the Face Recognition Door lock. While this is designed more for the commercial market, it could be adapted to home use fairly easily.The enticingly named Model [...]

Picks of destiny?

More than three decades ago, Scott Weaver began building a model of San Francisco out of 100,000 toothpicks. He began the fragile project at the age of fifteen, which has survived four homes, an earthquake, and a destructive dog. In The San Francisco Gate, Janny Hu writes:
“Rolling Through the Bay” is 9 feet [...]

A rose by any other name?

A Swedish sexual rights group unilaterally proclaimed a new English term for what it considers one of the most misunderstood parts of the female anatomy. “The mythical status of the hymen has caused far too much harm for far too long,” the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU) said in [...]