Congratulations to the winners of the 2011 Nebula Awards, especially to Jo Walton, who won for her magnificent novel, Among Others. Here they are…
Stylish Sun Shade Is the Easiest Way To Harness Solar Power For Your Home
Solar wins again.
If you like the idea of getting free energy from the sun, but don’t want to deal with the complications of installing a solar array on your roof, Umbrosa has created a lovely backyard sun shade that does double-duty—turning those rays into electricity.
As umbrellas go the Eclipse’s design is striking, but it isn’t really an umbrella at all…
Continue reading… “Stylish Sun Shade Is the Easiest Way To Harness Solar Power For Your Home”
How deadly charcoal is bought and sold in an African market
Charcoal for sale in an African market.
Xipamanine is a sprawling, labyrinthine marketplace in the heart of Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. On the street outside, tinny music blares and a bustling throng mills around. Inside, a series of winding corridors leads you through a maze of colorful booths that boast a wide variety of wares: shoes, stereo equipment, coconuts, toys, tomatoes, rugs, seeds, nuts, goats, and charcoal. Lots of charcoal.
You can buy it wholesale, in a gigantic sack with a month’s worth of cooking fuel, for about $20. An entire open air section of the market is dedicated to storing these bags; they’re stacked in imposing dust-covered piles….
Continue reading… “How deadly charcoal is bought and sold in an African market”
White House hires a new cybersecurity boss
Will the internet be in better hands now?
Cybersecurity and the government have been a volitile combination lately, with proposed bills like SOPA, PIPA, and the still-up-in-the-air CISPA at the center of on-and-off internet outrage. So it’s kind of a big deal when the White House replaces its chief of cybersecurity affairs.
Last week, longtime chief Howard Schmidt stepped down…
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Inventing Our Next Great Scarcities
Futurist Thomas Frey: Scarcity is defined as an economic condition that arises when people have far greater wants than the available resources. Most often we think about the limited supplies of natural resources, but it includes far more than that.
SpaceX set to launch first commercial rocket to ISS
Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, stands in front of a Falcon 9 rocket at SpaceX’s launch site.
A Falcon 9 rocket will lift-off from Cape Canaveral, Florida tomorrow night. The craft will rendezvous in low-Earth orbit with the International Space Station (ISS) a few days after it has been launched.
Continue reading… “SpaceX set to launch first commercial rocket to ISS”
Pinterest joins the billionaires club with $100 million funding from Rakuten
Pinterest deal values the company at around $1.5 billion.
It seems that every hot startup needs to reach a billion dollar valuation to be taken seriously after the surprising purchase of Instagram by Facebook. It only seems inevitable that the popular image pinboard site, Pinterest would skyrocket in value.
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Did Yahoo kill Flickr?
Flickr’s tag line used to read “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.”
Flickr was something that had never been done before on the internet and it changed the shape of the internet as we know it today. But along came Yahoo who bought Flickr and “murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.”
How one man wiped out $90,000 in student loans in 7 months
Economists are increasingly worried that young Americans will spend years buried under student debt.
Joe Mihalic was determined not to be one of the many young Americans that economists are increasingly worried about that will spend the coming years buried under student debt.
Continue reading… “How one man wiped out $90,000 in student loans in 7 months”
Top 10 Photos of the Week
Janet tried and tried, but she was never able to grow gills.
Quote of the Day – “Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.” – Jerry Seinfeld
Awesome book sculptures
Is this the future of books?
Sure, the best thing you can do with an average book is read it, but when it comes to out dated textbooks and the Twilight series, book art is also a good solution. Over on WebUrbanist you can check out 31 fantastic examples of book sculptures that show just how much variety there can be in this fascinating medium…
What you need to know about what’s inside those breasts
Breasts are getting bigger and arriving earlier. They’re also attracting chemicals and environmental toxins, which are getting passed along in breast milk.
Writer Florence Williams read a research study about toxins found in human breast milk when she was nursing her second child. After reading the study she decided to test her own breast milk and shipped a sample to a lab in Germany.
Continue reading… “What you need to know about what’s inside those breasts”
