Get your own town today!
Had it with life in the big city? The traffic, crowds, and high rent got you down? Then may we suggest you consider investing in the town of Scenic, South Dakota? And by “invest” we mean “buy the whole darn town for $800,000.”
Continue reading… “Own your own town in South Dakota for only $800k”
“Any industry that mislays 25-30% of its product in the process
of delivering it might reasonably be thought to have a problem.”
Between the water treatment plant and the tap in your kitchen, a lot can happen to water. Old pipes sometimes have slow leaks that are hard to detect, and sometimes there are bigger leaks that can waste a lot of potable water in a short time. According to a World Bank report published a few years ago, these leaks cost at least $14 billion a year.
Continue reading… “Slashing water waste with smart software could save billions of dollars”
OK Go has done some neat stuff in the past 13 years, but this new music video makes “Here It Goes Again” look like amateur hour.
The guys that brought you music videos with Rube Goldbergs and trained dogs, OK Go has released a new music video that uses a glass stage and a whole bunch of unitards to create what can only be described as a human kaleidescope. A look behind the scenes shows how one glass pane captured all of the images which were then combined to create effects like a cascade of bodies or florid designs…
Continue reading… “OK Go’s new music video is high-tech and awesome. Typical.”
A great way to torture young and old alike.
The Wrongulator is a gag calculator that gives incorrect answers to calculations. I’m fascinated by the idea — I wonder if they’ve just got a standard calculator controller in there, and then a secondary system that scrambles the results, or whether it’s a pseudorandom number generator, or what. You’d want it to produce plausible outcomes (5 x 5 = 30; not 5 x 5 = 324527) but who knows if the manufacturer paid attention to this…
Continue reading… “Wrongulator: a gag calculator that gives the wrong answers”
To keep robes and towels from checking out, a small but growing number of hotels are starting to use new radio frequency chips to keep track of their inventory.
The RFID technology — which stands for radio frequency identification and requires an installed chip that can be read by an electronic reader — has been used by various industries for several years to organize product storage and tally shipments…
Continue reading… “Hotels use RFID chips to keep linens from travelling to new destinations”
Could social media save you from a natural disaster?
Facebook and Twitter are helping to improve and speed up responses to natural disasters and health emergencies by involving members of the public, it has been claimed.
Social media allowed an ”unprecedented” two-way exchange of information between the public and those given the task of preparing for and responding to major events such as earthquakes, floods and infection pandemics, said researchers…
Do you want your baby name to be part of the popular crowd?
Oliver and Olivia are the most popular baby names in England and Wales for the second year running, it was revealed today.
Jack held on to second place in the boys’ name category after slipping from the top spot last year after a 14-year reign.
Sophie jumped three places up the rankings, making it the second most popular name for girls, according to figures published today by the Office for National Statistics on first names given to babies born in 2010…
Continue reading… “Oliver and Olivia most popular baby names in 2010”
Agave can be a fuel?
It fuels your party, your buzz and your hangover the next day, but believe it or not tequila may soon be fueling your car. That’s because the agave plant extract used to make liquor can also be used to make an ethanol like alcohol which can serve as vehicle fuel, won’t interfere with food crops, and can even be grown in the desert…
Someday, our cars may hit the bottle more often than we do, but at least it won’t be hitting our wallets very hard.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Should dogs be on birth control too?
Both the ASPCA and Humane Society strongly encourage pet owners to spay and neuter their furry friends to prevent overpopulation (and a dearth of homeless puppies, sad face). It shouldn’t really be a surprise, then, that there is a less invasive option in the works. But let’s face it, it’s kind of a crazy idea, right? Not so, according to a group of scientists in Arizona…
Continue reading… “New birth control pill… for dogs”
Doctors will be utilizing special nano-tattoos for heath markers in the near future.
One day, in the not so distant future because it’s actually being used in a testing environment today, people will use invisible nano-tattoos to give doctors an instant snapshot of their body’s inner workings.
The prototype, developed by Heather Clark of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Northeastern University, consists of a special nanoparticle solution injected into the skin…
Continue reading… “Tattoo body modification gets futuristically functional”
Future past predictions don’t always look as expected.
Historic LOLs has a collection of German prints from around a hundred years ago illustrating predictions for the year 2000. In this one, we’re supposed to be able to walk on water, with the help of balloons and a waterwheel…
Continue reading… “German Futurist Predictions”
Yummy!
Bake cookies in a car? You betcha! In Amarillo, the temperatures have soared to over 100 degrees, and about 200 degrees in a closed car. Brittany Nunn of the Amarillo Globe-News baked chocolate chip cookies in her car. They took quite a while to bake, but the car smelled wonderful afterward…
Continue reading… “Hot enough to….”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.
