Facebook added a new feature that has the potential to save lives. On Tuesday, Facebook announced the arrival of a new tool that will allow people to share their status as an organ donor on their timelines.
Continue reading… “Facebook adds organ donor status to Timeline”
How does power get from there to here?
Electricity is generated at power plants. You know that already. But to really understand how it gets to your house—and why you can count on it getting there reliably—you have to understand that our electric system is more complicated than it looks. The electric grid isn’t just about you and your connection to a power plant. There are lots of thing that have to happen behind the scenes to make sure your refrigerator stays cold and your lights turn on…
Forty-eight percent of the time, drivers either neglect to use their signals when changing lanes or fail to turn the signals off.
A new study finds a more serious problem than distracted driving that’s responsible for as many as 2 million accidents annually.
Continue reading… “Turn signal neglect causes 2 million accidents annually: Study”
Every hour a baby is born in the United States with symptoms of withdrawal from opiates.
During the last decade the U.S. has seen a sharp increase in the number of pregnant women addicted to opiate drugs and the number of babies born experiencing withdrawal symptoms as the fastest growing abuse of prescription drugs has hit hospital maternity wards across the country.
Continue reading… “More babies born addicted to prescription painkillers”
Function words – those unassuming “filler” words like the, this, though, I, an, there, and, that – are mightier than you think. For one, they’re a very good predictor of sex and love.
Yes, sex and love. Now that I’ve got your attention, on to the story of how analyzing the patterns of the use of these words in speech between two strangers in a speed dating scenario can be a very good predictor of who will get the date…
The Pebble
The Pebble has raised $7 million from nearly 50,000 strangers in a matter of weeks. That’s the power of a growing trend toward crowd funding, as demonstrated by the most successful Kickstarter campaign yet.
Continue reading… “The Pebble raises $7 million in Kickstarter’s most successful campaign ever”
iPavement
A Spanish tech company has developed a new piece of “street technology” known as iPavement. iPavement are sidewalk paving stones that double as WiFi hotspots.
Continue reading… “iPavement puts WiFi hotspots into the sidewalk”
New research indicates that large wind farms can cause local temperature increases.
New research finds that wind farms actually warm up the surface of the land underneath them during the night, according to new research. It’s a phenomena that could put a damper on efforts to expand wind energy as a green energy solution.
For every additional pound of passenger weight, the United States uses up another 39 million gallons of fuel each year.
Obesity raises health costs as we all know with more frequent visits to the hospital, more prescription drugs, and a greater risk for developing diseases like diabetes. What is less known are the economic costs of obesity. What are increased costs obesity puts on the public infrastructure, the GDP or on the federal deficit?
Continue reading… “Americans waste more than a billion gallons of gas every year because of obesity”
Sondra Eklund, a knitter, mathematician, and YA librarian, designed and crafted this sweater. It shows, in colors, the prime factorization of every number between 2 and 100…
One billion dollars neatly stacked.
With all the chatter about Billion dollar valuations — like Instagram, Evernote, Splunk — combined with recent S1 filings and IPOs, the topic of tech company valuation is coming to the forefront of people’s minds. Specifically related to the software industry, the growing number of SaaS IPO candidates of late is signaling an important shift in the way that enterprise software is built and sold. It also indicates that the subscription business model is here to stay. What does this shift towards a subscription economy means for startups, investors and the IPO landscape?
First of all – get Instagram out of your mind. The price it sold for is not relevant to us mere mortals who are building B2B software businesses. For all good, non-bubble reasons, SaaS companies need tens of millions in revenue, high growth, and solid business fundamentals. What you may notice though, is that revenue may be lower than what we’ve become accustomed to during the last few years of IPO drought…
Continue reading… “How much revenue does it take to be a $1B public company?”
Meet Steve Schutz. Some might say he’s very dedicated to his work. But others would call him downright crazy. You see Steve works in an insectarium, a place where mosquitos are born and raised. And to ensure its residents are well-fed and propagate, he serves up his bare arm once a week for dinner.
As a result, after a feeding the 50 red welts on his lower arm barely even register as a slight tingle since Steve has built up an immunity to the mosquito’s saliva…