Optimus Prime sent me to inform you that we have arrived.
Chinese artist Kefeng Zhu and his team of artists use heavy metal as their medium, and the results are pretty darn neat. His unofficial Transformers theme park is calledMr. Iron Robot, and it’s a big hit with kids from throughout the Zhejiang Province and beyond…
Continue reading… “Scrap metal transformers theme park opens in China”
Don’t ya just wanna cuddle em?
Imagine a tyrannosaur weighing one and a half tons, completely covered in soft, downy plumage. Even its tail is fluffy with feathers. Though we’ve known for a while that many dinosaurs were covered in feathers, a group of Chinese researchers have now provided direct evidence that gigantic, deadly tyrannosaurs might have looked a bit like wuffly birds. Three nearly complete, well-preserved fossils give us a glimpse of tyrannosaurs the way we’ve never seen them before…
Continue reading… “Hard evidence that giant tyrannosaurs were cute”
Vanilla is a hot commodity at the moment.
At our current rate of consumption, we’re driving vanilla prices sky-high. The price for a kilo of the brown stuff has jumped from $25 to $40 in a single day, which means your summer ice creams might be an even more expensive treat than usual.
Virtually all of the world’s vanilla supplies are grown in Madagascar, Mexico and India. But in the last year, Mexico’s yield has dropped by a staggering 90 per cent, reports Management Today. In fact, India’s yields are struggling too, leaving Madagascar as pretty much the sole source…
Continue reading… “A worldwide vanilla shortage is making ice cream a luxury”
It was ONLY 10 million cards…
In the last few days, news has been filtering out that Visa and MasterCard data was compromised by persons unknown. The card issuers have sent private alerts to banks indicating a data breach occurred between January 21, 2012 and February 25, 2012 and official announcements have since been made. After the news broke, payment processor Global Payments Inc. was identified as the compromised party, and we’re now learning that the data theft seems to be extensive.
Will all coins go away now?
Finally, after years of talking, the Canadian government killed the penny in its recent budget. Finance Minister Flaherty was clearly thinking of decluttering and interior design, noting “Pennies take up too much space on our dressers at home.”
There is also a real green side to this; the weight of all those pennies adds up, as does the cost and footprint of shipping them.
Continue reading… “Canada kills the Penny”
Google Earth strikes again!
It looks like simple mounds of earth from ground level, but when archaeologist Robert Benfer looked at Google Earth images of Peru, he discovered that they look like orcas, condors, and even a duck.
Archaeological evidence at the sites pegged the mounds at more than 4,000 years old – making them the oldest animal-shaped structures made by man…
Continue reading… “Oldest man-made animal structures found by Google Earth”
Don’t take away the iPad!
At five years-old, it’s no fun getting interrupted while you’re focused on something. As a parent, I compensate for that by employing a series of intricately planned measures to guide my son from whatever he happens to be doing towards whatever it is that I want him to do instead.
The extremity of these measures depends entirely what’s being interrupted. If he’s playing outside with his sister, the steps I take are fairly mundane. I give him a few, gentle time checks (“five minutes until dinner” … “3 minutes until dinner” …), and then offer something enticing enough to make putting down the ball seem like less of an intrusion (“Tonight’s chicken has both teri and yaki on it!”).
If I need to transition my son from building a cardboard village with grandma to going to bed for the night, I need to combine my time checks with some subtle threats and an Obi Wan Kenobi-like response to his three hundred or so repetitions of some variation of, “No. I don’t want to. But you said. Why are you doing this to me?”
The techniques are all pretty simple and effective. Until it’s time to get him to put down the iPad.
Continue reading… “Screen rage is the new temper-tantrum”
New colors found utilizing lasers and ion cascades.
True, the pink is a lie. But a UC Santa Barbara research team has honestly just generated eleven new hues using lasers and ion cascades.
The team created the new colors by aiming a pair of lasers—one high-frequency, the other low-frequency—at a slab of semiconductor material, a gallium arsenide nanostructure. The high-frequency beam separates an electron from its host atom, generating what’s known as an exciton (a bonded pair consisting of a negatively-charged electron and a positively-charged host). The powerful, low frequency wave then accelerates the freed electron, which goes crashing into the electron-less atom in front of it. Since the electron has extra energy from the acceleration when it recombines with the host atom in front of it, that energy is radiated as light. Previously unseen frequencies of light…
Continue reading… “Physicists add 11 colors to the rainbow by tearing apart atoms”
What if oil company executives were only allowed to drink fracked water?
Toxic fracking chemicals that leached into the ground making you sick? Why that’s bad press for the oil industry!
That’s why they came up with this ingenious (in an evil way) to deal with the problem: “gag” doctors from telling their patients what is making them sick. See, problem solved!
Artist rendering of the Giant Magellan Telescope
Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), the world’s largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade. The GMT will help astronomers probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy – mysterious forms of matter and energy that allow galaxies to form while the expansion of the Universe accelerates…
This cylinder which hides contents and makes them invisible to magnetic fields.
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona researchers, in collaboration with an experimental group from the Academy of Sciences of Slovakia, have created a cylinder which hides contents and makes them invisible to magnetic fields. The device was built using superconductor and ferromagnetic materials available on the market…
Continue reading… “Cylinder hides contents and makes them invisible to magnetic fields”
Crowdfunding is closer to reality!
Well, this just in from a dispatch on Capitol Hill: The Senate has passed legislation that will essentially legalize crowdfunding in startups by practically anyone, even your mom. U.S. Senators Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Oreg.), and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) collectively introduced the “CROWDFUND Act” (S. 2190) earlier this month, which adds measures to the House of Rep’s now well-known JOBS Act to ensure that companies would be able to use SEC-approved crowdfunding platforms to raise money from “small-dollar investors.”
Continue reading… “Senate Passes Crowdfunding Bill 73-26 (With Protections)”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.