It took more than 2, 000 pounds of explosives to bring down this 32-story tower in Frankfurt yesterday—roughly the same amount as a Mark 84 bomb. Thankfully, since we live in the age of YouTube, there are plenty of astounding videos of the demo. Read more…
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Behold One of the Biggest Controlled Skyscraper Implosions Ever
How distorting are map projections? Here’s what four commonly used systems of projection do to a human head. Read more…
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This is how map projections warp your understanding of geography
We can only dream of soaring above the clouds, the way so many birds do. They swoop over our heads, taunting us with the freedom we’ll never have. But at least there are tons of bird-cam videos, which give you a birds-eye view of the world below. Read more…
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Fly with eagles in these breathtaking bird-cam videos
Using a powerful new software program called the Scientific Exoplanets Renderer (SER), astronomer Abel Mendez Torres has produced a stunning set of new images — including a global map — showing the distant dwarf planet of Pluto in unprecedented detail. Read more…
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The surface of Pluto like you’ve never seen it before
Dr Herbert West writes about a reported $3 billion offer from Facebook that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel turned down. “Snapchat, a rapidly growing messaging service, recently spurned an all-cash acquisition offer from Facebook for close to $3 billion or more, according to people briefed on the matter. The offer, and rebuff, came as Snapchat is being wooed by other investors and potential acquirers. Chinese e-commerce giant Tencent Holdings had offered to lead an investment that would value two-year-old Snapchat at $4 billion. Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO, will not likely consider an acquisition or an investment at least until early next year, the people briefed on the matter said. They said Spiegel is hoping Snapchat’s numbers – of users and messages – will grow enough by then to justify an even larger valuation, the people said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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SnapChat Turns Down $3 Billion Offer From Facebook
Ikea furniture names are often full of umlauts and improbable double consonants. I’ve been told that the names are Swedish—and I have no choice but to believe this, because I don’t speak Swedish. Come to think of it, they sort of resemble the names of another fantastical Scandinavian export: Death Metal. Read more…
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Can You Tell These Ikea Products and Death Metal Bands Apart?
It’s one of those unintended consequences of medication that you rarely think about. What happens when parents are using a medical cream, and then they hug their kids? In two recent cases, it caused toddlers to go through early puberty. Read more…
This is incredible. Scientists have found an underground water reserve in Kenya so large that it could meet the entire country’s water needs for the next 70 years. Using satellite, radar and geological technology, scientists found an aquifer—an underground layer of water-bearing material—that contains 200 billion cubic meters of fresh water. Read more…
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Scientists Have Found a Huge Underground Water Reserve in Kenya
Bunnie Huang paid a visit to Shenzhen’s Mingtong Digital Mall and found a $12 mobile phone, with Bluetooth, an MP3 player, an OLED display and quad-band GSM. For $12. Bunnie’s teardown shows a little bit about how this $12 piece of electronics can possibly be profitable, but far more tantalizing are his notes about Gongkai, “a network of ideas, spread peer-to-peer, with certain rules to enforce sharing and to prevent leeching.” It’s the Pearl River Delta’s answer to the open source hardware movement, and Bunnie promises to write more about it soon. How is this possible? I don’t have the answers, but it’s something I’m trying to learn. A teardown yields a few hints. First, there are no screws. The whole case snaps together. Also, there are (almost) no connectors on the inside. Everything from the display to the battery is soldered directly to the board; for shipping and storage, you get to flip a switch to hard-disconnect the battery. And, as best as I can tell, the battery also has no secondary protection circuit. The Bluetooth antenna is nothing more than a small length of wire, seen on the lower left below. Still, the phone features accoutrements such as a back-lit keypad and decorative lights around the edge. The electronics consists of just two major ICs: the Mediatek MT6250DA, and a Vanchip VC5276. Of course, with price competition like this, Western firms are suing to protect ground: Vanchip is in a bit of a legal tussle with RF Micro, and Mediatek has also been subject to a few lawsuits of its own. The MT6250 is rumored to sell in volume for under $2. I was able to anecdotally confirm the price by buying a couple of pieces on cut-tape from a retail broker for about $2.10 each. [No, I will not broker these chips or this phone for you…] The $12 Gongkai Phone
What harm could come to you when eating a close relative of carrots, parsley, and celery? As it turns out, quite a bit. A certain relative of the carrot can kill you, and if it doesn’t, it still permanently darkens your skin. Read more…
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The plant that darkens your skin permanently