After rising steadily over the last several months, Bitcoin has reached an all-time high according to data on Bitcoin Charts . As of this writing, Mt. Gox , the most popular Bitcoin trading site (which announced on Wednesday that its operations would move to Silicon Valley), recorded a high price of $33.22 per Bitcoin. There’s no single explanation as to why Bitcoin has continued to rise, accelerating particularly over the last month. That said, it’s been clear that interest in the digital currency has been rapidly rising, as any regular reader of Ars knows. It’s likely that online gambling has played a part. As we’ve reported earlier this year, one Bitcoin-based site took in $500,000 in profit in just six months in 2012—and Bitcoin gambling is set to get even bigger . For now, gambling with the cryptocurrency, like using Bitcoins in general, remains in a legal grey area (which may be part of the appeal as well). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
View article:
Bitcoin reaches an all-time trading high of over $33
This intriguing new service, currently rolling out in San Francisco, collects your physical mail, then opens, scans, and delivers it via app or browser. [Read more] 
Materials movement sucks, and it’s our job as designers, engineers or craftspersons to learn tricks to deal with it. You’ll put a slight arc in a plastic surface that’s supposed to be flat, so that after it comes out of the mold and cools the surface doesn’t get all wavy; a furniture builder in Arizona shipping a hardwood table to the Gulf states will use joinery that compensates for the humidity and attendant wood expansion; and similar allowances have to be made when joining steel and aluminum, as they expand at different rates when the temperature changes. On this latter front, Honda’s engineers have made a breakthrough that those who work with fabrics may find interesting: They’ve discovered that by creating a “3D Lock Seam”—essentially a flat-felled seam for you sewists—and using a special adhesive in place of the spot-welding they’d use with steel-on-steel, they can bond steel with aluminum in a way that negates the whole thermal deformation thing. Practically speaking, what this new process enables them to do is create door panels that are steel on the inside and aluminum on the outside. This cuts the weight of the door panels by some 17%, which ought to reduce fuel consumption. (Honda also mentions that “In addition, weight reduction at the outer side of the vehicle body enables [us] to concentrate the point of gravity toward the center of the vehicle, contributing to improved stability in vehicle maneuvering,” but that sounds like spin to us.) Unsurprisingly they’re mum on how they’ve pulled this off or what exactly the adhesive is, but they do mention that “these technologies do not require a dedicated process; as a result, existing production lines can accommodate these new technologies.” The language is kind of vague but it sounds like they’re saying they don’t require massive re-tooling, which is a manufacturing coup. Honda’s U.S. plants are the first to get this manufacturing upgrade, and we’ll be seeing the new doors as soon as next month, on the U.S.-built Acura RLX. (more…) 
