BiPod
Burt Rutan, a general aviation design legend, may have announced his retirement, but he’s continuing his innovative work. Rutan expanded on his latest work: a hybrid-powered flying car, at a forum presented on July 27th.
A third of gamers use real world money to buy virtual goods
Visa-owned PlaySpan with research firm VGMarket have released a new study on how and what gamers are spending on virtual goods. Nearly one-third of the general gamer population has used real world money (as opposed to virtual currency) to purchase virtual goods, according to the study. Console games with online play account for the majority (51%) of virtual purchases using real world money, with social networking games (30%) coming in at second.
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65,000 CDs hand-sewn together to create metallic ‘sea dunes’
Repurposed CDs given a whole new look.
French artist Elise Morin and architect Clémence Eliard hand sewed 65,000 old CDs and laid them out on inflatable mounds to create a sea of discs. The purpose? To “reveal the precious aspect of a small daily object.”
The art exhibit is called “Wastelandscape” and is located in Paris. The point is to transform the seemingly mundane objects that we take for granted into monumental “sculptures” as they reach the end of their life…
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Top 10 safest airports in America
Flying is safer than ever.
You may still encounter air rage and sleepy controllers, but when it comes to accidents on the runway, airplane safety is at an all-time high. Last year’s accident rate was 0.61 percent—one for every 1.6 million flights.
Teaching teens how to breakup Facebook
“Face it, Don’t Facebook It”
A conference in Boston was held to teach 200 teenagers how to have “healthy breakups”, according to a story in the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the discussion revolved around proper Facebook breakup etiquette.
Feeling anxious? 5 Scientifically proven relaxation techniques
Is it time to destress and relax?
Everyone gets anxious from time to time: there’s public speaking, job interviews, the dentist and all the rest. For about one in six of us this will cross over into what psychologists term a disorder at some point in our lives. This is when people are almost continuously anxious and find it difficult to concentrate, have trouble sleeping and become irritable and restless…
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Three radical nation-less visions for the future
Country living can be a pain. And we’re not talking about the hardships of life in a rural community, we’re talking about the difficulties of living in a country. For all the services and security the social compact buys us, we are forced to pay a price in compromises — something made all the more poignant by what’s going on in the White House right now. But unless you want to drop out of the modern, law-abiding world altogether, this is the deal we’re stuck with.
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Local Colorado brewery transports kegs via tricycle
Kegs are a rollin’.
When Shannon and Colin Westcott decided to start Equinox Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado, they wanted it to be a local, green operation. And that meant no keg deliveries by car or truck. So to save themselves a lot of back-breaking keg-carrying, the Westcotts teamed up with custom bike designers Yendra Built Cycles. The partnership yielded the Bootlegger: a tricycle built for transporting kegs…
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4GB of storage on a paper clip
The Data Clip
As flash memory chips continue to get smaller the main advantage is more storage in the same space. For example, the 64GB USB stick of today, will hold double or triple that in the same chip space within just a few years.
However, there is another advantage to decreasing the size of the storage chips: you can attach a decent amount of storage to tiny objects you’d usually associate with another function entirely…
Melting Islands
World of Islands as it is now.
Seems like we’ve flown too close to the sun on this one–Dubai’s ambitious World of Islands that were built as part of a luxurious resort are now eroding back into the sea from which they came. Millions of tons of sand were pumped in to form the islands to mimic the world, and as you can see no longer resemble the world so much as… suggesting it. Property assessments are grim…
Rethinking the Court of Public Opinion
Futurist Thomas Frey: American TV personality Ryan Seacrest has a grim look on his face as he walks briskly across the stage. Turning to the camera, he pauses briefly before saying, “You have heard the arguments, listened to the experts, and seen the photos. But now it is up to you to decide the fate of Mr. Howard Cullens.”
‘Track therapy’ – Indonesians risk lives in latest health craze
Indonesians lay across railroad tracks in the belief the current wil cure them of their illnesses.
Despite the danger and the efforts by authorities in Jakarta to halt the craze, Indonesians with illnesses have been lying down across railway lines in the mistaken belief that a low-voltage electric current in the tracks will cure them as it passes through their bodies. (pics and video)