Say hello to your dream house if you have ever wanted to live inside the retro-futuristic world of a Jules Verne novel. This $1.75 million New York apartment is packed with giant gears, blimps, and a working porthole.(Pics)
Continue reading… “A steampunk loft with a retro-futuristic look”
A geiger counter is placed in front of sunflowers in full bloom in Fukushima.
Burning strips of paper swirled into the hot summer sky as they carry the names of the dead above a temple in Fukushima where thousands of sunflowers have been planted to help fight the omnipresent radiation.
Continue reading… “Fukushima grows sunflowers to clean up radiation contamination”
Did you know about using Control-F?
Dan Russell, one of Google’s anthropologists, conducted a largeish survey of user behavior and discovered that 90 percent of American Internet users don’t know that crtl-F will let them search documents including Web pages. I recently discovered that a smart and technologically literate friend had never heard of alt-tab for application switching; alt-tab being my single most used key combo!
It strikes me that we could probable come up with a list of ten (or even three) things you could teach to the people around you the next time you sit down to help them with a technology problem, “three things every technology user should know.”
Continue reading… “90 percent of US net users don’t know about ‘crtl-F’”
Trecking down the Amazon on your computer thanks to Google.
Google has teamed up with Amazon for a new project. Well, not Amazon, as in the company that sells the Kindle. No, we’re talking about the great, untamed wilderness of the Amazon rainforest. In a partnership with the Sustainable Amazon Foundation, Google aims to use its Street View technology to raise awareness of the world’s largest rainforest and its important ecosystems.
To do this, Google is mapping the byways of the Amazon River…
Continue reading… “Google Street View is using canoes and tricycles to map the Amazon”
Male maturity age has shifted again.
Boys are maturing physically earlier than ever before. The age of sexual maturity has been decreasing by about 2.5 months each decade at least since the middle of the 18th century. Joshua Goldstein, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock (MPIDR), has used mortality data to demonstrate this trend, which until now was difficult to decipher. What had already been established for girls now seems to also be true for boys: the time period during which young people are sexually mature but socially not yet considered adults is expanding…
Continue reading… “Boys reach sexual maturity younger and younger”
A new library approach from Canada.
For centuries the public library has been a great source of knowledge through books. Now one library in Canada is opening up the scope of how you acquire knowledge at the library; by offering up skilled people. Why read a history book when you can talk to a historian?
Continue reading… “Canadian library will Loan out people as well as books”
Would you believe this could be the new look of solar power?
7th grader Aidan Dwyer was walking in the woods during the winter, and looking up, he noticed something about the bare branches above him. They didn’t appear to be growing randomly. So he took some measurements of the angles of the branches, crunched some numbers, and wouldn’t you know it, he found that the ubiquitous Fibonacci Sequence was behind it all. He suspected there was a reason behind this. That trees were using this pattern to gather more light.
So he did an experiment. Using the same number of solar cells, he built two working models. One was a traditional, flat array will all of the panels on a single plane. The other used the Fibonacci Sequence to create the same spiraled pattern he observed in the trees. The results? The little man himself reports…
Continue reading… “Genius 13-Year-Old has a solar power breakthrough”
In the U.S. there is one vehicle for every 1.3 people.
Worldwide, the number of vehicles in operation surpassed the 1 billion-unit mark in 2010 for the first time ever.
Continue reading… “World vehicle population surpasses 1 billion mark”
Virtual boarding agent
Virtual boarding agents could be the next “upgrade” at airports wherever you go. If you are at Orly airport in Paris, France, then do keep a lookout for these virtual boarding agents that have a perpetual smile on them, and best of all is, they won’t head off for unusually long toilet breaks or head a strike.
Continue reading… “Paris airport gets virtual boarding agents”
How cool is your partner?
Having a stressed-out partner may affect your life expectancy, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Glasgow found that birds who were paired off with anxious partners were at a high risk of dying young.
Continue reading… “Having a stressed-out partner may affect your life expectancy”
Alpha Centauri or bust.
Darpa, the government agency that helped invent the Internet, now wants to do the same for travel to the stars.
Continue reading… “Darpa seeks plan to send humans to the stars”
Alligator fat meets nearly all of the official standards for high-quality biodiesel.
Alligators, in addition to being a novelty food, could also provide a feedstock for biodiesel. The alligator meat industry disposes of about 15 million pounds of alligator fat in landfills every year. Scientists discover the that oil can be extracted from the fat and used to make a high-quality biodiesel.
Continue reading… “Alligator fat could be a new source of biodiesel”