Smart rings may seem like something from an impossible (or at least highly unlikely ) vision of the future, but surprisingly enough, tech you can wrap around your little finger isn’t anything new. Just take this itty-bitty abacus from the 17th century as proof. Read more…
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This Wearable Abacus Is Basically the World’s Oldest Smart Ring
Machines fill the floor of the Exploratorium , San Francisco’s beloved interactive science museum. Over there is a contraption called Bicycle Legs , in which visitors manipulate air pumps to replicate muscles we use when pedaling (it’s trickier than it sounds). A few hundred feet away is a perennial favorite, the Wave Machine , which demonstrates transverse waves with the turn of a crank (even I can manage that one). Read more…
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The Government-Surplus Machines Powering a Cutting-Edge Science Museum
While you might sometimes find it annoying that you can’t remember faces, names and details, forgetting is an important part of the brain if we’re not to become cognitively overwhelmed. And, it turns out, the brain takes a very controlled approach to how it goes about it. Read more…
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Your Brain Forgets Stuff Carefully and on Purpose
From ofabeautifulnight on tumblr come these maps of the United Kingdom and London, pinpointing the exact locations of many of the places mentioned in Harry Potter. If you were wondering just how far Harry had to go to get from Little Whinging to Hogwarts, this is your reference guide. Read more…
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Where in the UK is the world of Harry Potter?
Cubestormer 3 is a robot with just one job—to solve a scrambled Rubik’s Cube as swiftly as possible. Today, at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK , it did the task in an astounding 3.253 seconds, faster than any human or robot in the world. Just look at that thing go . Read more…
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Lego Robot With a Smartphone Brain Shatters Rubik’s Cube World Record
The number of syphilis cases is on the rise, and some public health officials think it’s because of Grindr . Well, Grindr and Adam4Adam and, presumably, Tinder and Hinge and OkCupid. These apps all make it easier to find people to have sex with, so naturally they cause more people to get STDs, right? Not exactly. Read more…
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Health Officials Blame Hook Up Apps for Syphilis Spike
sandbagger writes “The director of the U.S. government office that monitors scientific misconduct in biomedical research has resigned after 2 years out of frustration with the ‘remarkably dysfunctional’ federal bureaucracy. Officials at the Office of Scientific Integrity spent ‘exorbitant amounts of time’ in meetings and generating data and reports to make their divisions look productive, David Wright writes. He huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI ‘the very worst job I have ever had.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Top U.S. Scientific Misconduct Official Quits In Frustration With Bureaucracy
You know kaiju, right? Those Japanese-style monsters now have their own watering hole, which serves booze and eats. There’s an important rule, though: No superheroes allowed. Don’t you dare break it! Read more…
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Get Drunk with Kaiju at This New Japanese Bar
cartechboy writes “What’s $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87, 000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don’t have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can’t do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Environmentalists Propose $50 Billion Buyout of Coal Industry – To Shut It Down
Built for over a million people, the city of Ordos was designed to be the crowning glory of Inner Mongolia. Doomed to incompletion however, this futuristic metropolis now rises empty out of the deserts of northern China. Only 2% of its buildings were ever filled; the rest has largely been left to decay, abandoned mid-construction, earning Ordos the title of China’s Ghost City . Read more…
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Welcome to The World’s Largest Ghost City: Ordos, China