A new study estimates that people with a gun are 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun.
In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in [...]

Little People With a Great Big Idea!
A community of dwarves has set up its own village to escape discrimination from normal sized people.
Everyone in the mountain commune in Kunming, southern China, must be under 4ft 3ins tall and they run their own police force and fire brigade from their 120 residents.

Behold the incredible inspiring carvings of Takashi Itoh.

Anybody can carve a pumpkin. In fact a couple companies have devolved templates and tools for the carver handicapped among to produce astounding results. However Takashi Itoh’s original watermelon carvings put most of them to shame!  Takashi says it only took him three weeks to become skilled at it, but he has been [...]

Who are you gonna call…Ghostbusters!
FORT PIERCE — A team of paranormal investigators dimmed the lights at the Sunrise Theatre on Saturday night to see if any lingering spirits refuse to let the curtain fall on their stay at the 86-year-old downtown institution.

Calm down, it’s not actually blood. It’s just an energy drink made to look like blood, and it’s served in an IV bag:
The fruit punch flavor packs 4 hours of energy along with iron, protein, and electrolytes. Not only does Blood Energy Potion have a similar nutritional makeup to real blood, but it has the [...]

Cyborg beetles are plain creepy
DARPA shows off its remote-controlled cyborg beetles

Sometimes you have to think that maybe a pig is mans best friend
When a hobby-store owner in Cincinnati sliced off his fingertip in 2005 while showing a customer why the motor on his model plane was dangerous, he went to the emergency room without the missing tip. He couldn’t find it anywhere. The doctor bandaged [...]

Replica of the Ark of the Covenant in the Royal Arch Room of the George Washington Masonic National Memorial.
When you hear the words “Ark of the Covenant” what comes to mind? For some, Steven Spielberg’s film “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” provides the most vivid pop-culture reference to this mysterious sacred [...]

Go Go Gadget Satellite!

R.U. Sirius interviewed Randa Milliron, CEO of Interorbital Systems, “a ‘rocket and spacecraft manufacturing company’ that locates itself at the Mojave Airport and Spaceport in Mojave, California. They recently announced that they were offering to send people’s personal satellites into low-earth orbit on a NEPTUNE 30 rocket for the low low low [...]

A new view on pool

Playing pool (or billiards if you prefer) is such a great game. Where else can expert players show off their physical strength, skill, and finesse, all on the confines of a felt covered slate table? And speaking of pool – although they all come in many different styles and sizes, once you own one, unfortunately it [...]

Talk about computer viruses! Sculptor Forrest McCluer took salvaged 30 old PCs from the landfill and turned them into sculptures of viruses (the biological kind). This one above is inspired by the T4 Bacteriophage:
The “T9 Track Virus” is another version of the T4 Bacteriophage. It consists of PC power supply cables, CD-ROMs, sections of 9-track [...]

[process2a: Dodecahedron]
The folks over at Vague Terrain have spent some time reprocessing  the power of  Platonic Solids.
“In this project we explore three-dimensional subdivision algorithms. These have traditionally been used in computer graphics to produce smooth, rounded forms from coarse polygons. By modifying and expanding these established algorithms to include additional weights, one can generate forms with [...]

Job Voyager is a set of interactive charts showing changing occupations reported to the US Census Bureau from 1850-2000. It was made by Jeffrey Heer of the University of California at Berkeley from data collected by the University of Minnesota’s Population Center using the visualization software Flare. You can use the feature to examine the [...]

Spy toy gadget maker Brando has this “Magic GIANT 12-Surface IQ Pentagon – Fantastic Edition” for $49.90.

The FANTASTIC SIZE and COMPLEX IQ Cube!! The GIANT 12 surfaces IQ Pentagon! You may never face this complicated one! Your home cannot miss this one. You may not solve it, you can just disassemble it and try it [...]

The site SpaceInvading brings us four architechtural wonders of today.  This one is the “Habitable Polyhedron” and it has a unique function.

The project, meant for a family house back yard in the suburbs, aimed at designing a small park or opened area where the young parents and their newborn child would enjoy a independent space [...]

Energy consumption from a new perspective

Sweden’s Energy Aware Clock hangs on the wall and depicts a permanent visualization of your energy use. Every hour, it chimes to remind you to feel guilty about the size of your residence.

Yummy Nationalism

These flags made out of food were created to promote the Sydney International Food Festival. Each national flag is illustrated with food associated with that country: Greece has black olives, India features curry, South Korea has kimbap, etc. Can you figure out which country is represented by the flag pictured above? (Pics)

 
Space time continuum may be the stuff of Star Trek, but it’s not mere fiction to Holly Branigan. The Edinburgh University psychologist can actually “see” time:
“I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.
“I found out when I attended a talk in the [...]

The world faces a compounding series of crises driven by human activity, which existing governments and institutions are increasingly powerless to cope with, a group of eminent environmental scientists and economists has warned.  In today’s issue of the leading international journal Science, the researchers say that nations alone are unable to resolve the sorts of [...]

Have we reached magnetic polarity escape velocity yet?

Scientists have long speculated about the existence of magnetic materials that have only one pole, instead of both negative and postive poles. Claudio Castelnovo of the University of Oxford thinks that his team has found evidence of the existence of these monopoles in certain rare-materials known as “spin ices”:
At [...]

The New “Sinless” Search Engine

Muslims will be able to surf the internet without the fear of accidentally encountering what their relegion views as sinful material after a Dutch company launched the world’s first Islamic search engine.
The ImHalal service works like any other search facility until potentially illicit words are entered, when it rates the search [...]

The downside to online relationships
Notice to my friends: I love you all dearly.
But I don’t give a hoot that you are “having a busy Monday,” your child “took 30 minutes to brush his teeth,” your dog “just ate an ant trap” or you want to “save the piglets.” And I really, really don’t care which [...]

A life-sized installation by Austrian artist Ronald Kodritsch is standing on the edge of a building cornice in central Vienna
A small crowd of people wonder if the smart businessman clutching a briefcase will jump off the edge of a four-storey building in central Vienna — but he won’t. He can’t.
 

A camera on board India’s maiden unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 has recorded images of the landing site of US spacecraft Apollo 15, a scientist said on Wednesday, rubbishing conspiracy theories that the fourth US mission to land on the moon four decades back was a hoax.