No More Worries Parents, The Internet Is Good For Teens

Good news for worried parents: All those hours their teenagers spend socializing on the internet
are not a bad thing, according to a new study by the MacArthur Foundation.

“It may look as though kids are wasting a lot of time hanging out with new media, whether it’s on a social-networking site or sending instant messages,” said Mizuko Ito, lead researcher on the study, ‘Living and Learning With New Media’. “But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.”

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 Scotsman Beverage System

 OK, I don’t believe in magic, but I’m not quite sure what I’m seeing here. This new device from Scotsman Beverage Systems fills glasses from the bottom up. How? I have no idea! It drops the ice in from the top, then the soda or the beer or whatever somehow enters from the bottom of the glass. Apparently, it’s fast and makes serving loads of drinks at once very easy. It’s also good at blowing my mind.

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Suspension Cables Shot By A Rocket

A big head-scratcher when building a suspension bridge is how to get those suspension cables from one end of the divide to the other. In the past, helicopters and boats have been employed for this purpose - even kites - but Chinese engineers constructing the Siduhe Grand Bridge had another idea: rockets.

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Home Chare

For the disabled or the infirm, there are a large number of expensive pieces of equipment to help you get around and live your day to day life. There’s the wheelchair, the stair climber and the sick bed, all of which involve moving from one to the other. The Home Chare, however, combines all three, removing the need to be lifted from one apparatus to another.

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Banning fast food advertisements from children’s television programs would reduce the number of overweight children in the U.S. by 18 percent and decrease the number of overweight teens by 14 percent, economists have estimated in a new study.

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Boom Bench 

We have earlier introduced you to the best multimedia chairs that audiophiles would love to sit on. Now, we have a bench for them. German designer Michael Schoner of NL Architects has ingeniously designed a bench that plays music from mobile phones via Bluetooth.

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While we are pretty busy talking about space tourism and flying cars, Finnair, which is celebrating its 85th birthday, is envisioning the future of flying. What might flying be like then in 85 years? I have no idea, but the ingenious folks at Finnair seem to have an answer to the question. They have conceptualized five future aircrafts for the year 2093, which boast streamlined exteriors and entertainment-rich interiors. The best part is that all the aircrafts are eco-friendly and materials used in the making are 100 percent recyclable. Let’s take a quick look at the conceptualized aircrafts of 2093.

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 New bulbs are called Plumen

Now that we’re moving on from traditional lightbulbs to more eco-friendly designs, designers have much more freedom with what they do with light. Design house Hulger is tackling light bulbs as their next big object, using the twisting tubes as pieces of functional art that you won’t want to hide behind a shade.

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The Gold Souk in the Mall of Dubai

The Mall of Dubai is grandiose and beautiful, but you better have a good pair of walking shoes on when you get there. Only about 30% of the shops are now open, but more will be opening soon. Here area few inside photos of this mega shopping experience. (Pics)

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 “The glass was even colder than I expected”

Thomas Frey: Dubai is known for its strange and unusual features, but there’s something extraordinarily mesmerizing about seeing a restaurant made out of ice in the middle of a hot desert. The Chill Out restaurant is located in the center of the Time Square Mall in Dubai. Nearly everything inside is made out of ice, and the food is amazingly good. (Pics)

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Amazing Billboard

Check out this creative marketing campaign for Sony’s PSP gaming console. Have you seen one in your neighborhood? I’m guessing no, since this is actually a concept for a PSP campaign made by a fan.

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Playing Video Games Wastes A Lot Of Power

A report by the Natural Resources Defense Council titled “Lowering the Cost of Play: Improving Energy Efficiency of Video Game Consoles” reveals that video game consoles across America collectively suck up “an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours per year - roughly equal to the annual electricity use of the city of San Diego.” So what’s the solution here - never game again?

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 Searaser

We’re stoked about that wave farm off the coast of Portugal, and now along comes another innovation that could top that: Searaser, a buoy-like device attached to the sea floor that uses wave power to pump water 650 feet uphill. When the energy is needed, that same water flows through a downhill pipe, powering a hydroelectric generator. This picture shows a small prototype, but its inventors say Searaser in its full-sized form could supply power to 470 houses.

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 A patient’s collapsed lung, at right, is seen prior to a windpipe transplant which used tissue grown from the patient’s own stem cells.

Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs. “This technique has great promise,” said Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. That operation used both donor and recipient tissue. Only a handful of windpipe, or trachea, transplants have ever been done.

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Miss having the companionship of a furry friend, but don’t have the life circumstances that allow you to have one of your own?

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The feeder is based on a Professional Grade Fully Adjustable Full Face Face Shield. These cost $20, are built sturdily with an excellent Hi-Impact and very clear face shield. But they only come in blue. We put several coats of red Krylon on the head piece after we drill some holes for attaching the upper holder for the miniaturized feeding tube.

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 October snow in London

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

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Eco Tourism At Its Best

When you consider visiting or moving to a place, wouldn’t it be great to know where the environmentally-friendly places are? The revolutionary Green Map System allows just that with its ecomaps. The maps will let you know where to shop green, recycle, and where the green spaces are, among the resources it helps you uncover. Since its beginning in 1995, over 450 Green maps of cities, towns and villages have been published by hand-picked mapmakers in 50 countries.

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Holy Crap! This is a big problem.

Did you know?

2.5 billion people do not have somewhere safe, private or hygienic to go to the toilet.

One gram of faeces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts and 100 parasite eggs.

The simple act of washing hands with soap and water after going to the toilet can reduce diarrhoeal diseases by over 40%.

Safe disposal of children’s faeces leads to a reduction of nearly 40% in childhood diarrhoea.

19 November is World Toilet Day - a day to celebrate the humble, yet vitally important, toilet and to raise awareness of the global sanitation crisis.

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It’s a Bob, Bob, Bob world out there.

Propaganda posters may or may not have served their purpose for the Soviet Union, but they sure have inspired artists in other parts of the world! The form has been co-opted and remixed with pop culture icons for laughs.

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Another Reason To Eat Your Veggies

Researchers have found that eating broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables may reduce a smoker’s risk of developing lung cancer.

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For The Medical Professional Who Has Everything

Giant Microbes are some of the most unique stuffed critters around. How else can you give your friends herpes, gonorrhea and chicken pox without having some major explaining to do.

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Nothing Like A iPod Accessory That Will Traumatize Your Kids For Life

I’ve been thinking on it for awhile and I just can’t think of anything more disturbing then this Spongebob Squarepants iPod dock. Mostly the problem is that you remove his large eyeballs and watch them roll around on the table in time with whatever music you play.

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And You Thought That The Internet Couldn’t Get Any More Confusing

This is what the future looked like in the ’60s. Sit through a short ad for faltering phone service Sprint, and suddenly you’re thrust into widget land. The Now page shows you a huge dashboard displaying data of all types - some useful, some goofy, and most just plain fun - making you feel like you’re connected to a world where people are stuck in elevators, videos are playing, and the number of habitable planets we know about stays right at 1.

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Roomba Eat Your Heart Out

A buildup of snow can be dangerous for large, flat-roofed structures like super markets and office buildings. All of that snow is usually removed by freezing hands and snow shovels, but, if designer Michal Glogowski’s dreams ever come true, a robot would do it instead.

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How would you react if technology allowed you to see things which had previously been invisible? What hides in those teeth inside the mouth is something we cannot see, and therefore, dentist remains the only alternative to detect the tartar and cavity in there.

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Tail-wrist-II

Paraplegics and the elderly often face problems with their joints and muscle movements. When stuck to bed owing to their illness, patients tend to develop contraction of muscles that could be irreversible, and regular range of motion exercises through physiotherapy is the only alternative left. There are a few muscle and joint extractors available to assist, but Tail-wrist-II seems to be a novel makeover in the category. Developed by Hideyuki Tsukakoshi, assistant professor of Mechanical Control Systems at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Tail-wrist-II is designed to prevent contraction of muscles and joints.

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Table Tap By Arnout Visser 

Dutch designer Arnout Visser has come out with a glass carafe concept called Table tap, taken the inspiration from science and laboratories.

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Living in a luxury treehouse certainly brings out the child in you again. Now, the New Zealand Yellow Pages are building a restaurant that is 10 meters up on a redwood tree. A dinner at this tree-restaurant will be a totally fascinating experience.  (more…)

 Fujitsu Wraparound View System

Wraparound view is the ability to have a 360 degree real-time view of things surrounding you. This system has now come to vehicles which has just been announced by Fujitsu.

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