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Dega704 sends this news from Wired: Plenty of nightmare surveillance theories surround the million-square-foot NSA facility opened last year in Bluffdale, Utah. Any locals driving by the massive complex Friday morning saw something that may inspire new ones: A massive blimp hovering over the center, with the letters NSA printed on its side. Activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched the 135-foot thermal airship early Friday morning to protest the agency's mass surveillance programs and to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, a website that rates members of Congress on their support or opposition to NSA reform. The full message on the blimp reads 'NSA: Illegal Spying Below' along with an arrow pointing downward and the Stand Against Spying URL."

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An anonymous reader writes Through a partnership with a MIT Media Lab spinoff, Changing Environments, Boston has announced that it will install solar-powered benches in several of its parks that allow you to charge your cell phone. The bench has a USB outlet, and also collects and shares a wide range of data, including location-based information, as well as air quality and noise-levels. "Your cell phone doesn't just make phone calls, why should our benches just be seats?" said Mayor Martin J. Walsh. "We are fortunate to have talented entrepreneurs and makers in Boston thinking creatively about sustainability and the next generation of amenities for our residents."

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sciencehabit (1205606) writes Few scientists have ever seen the rare tufted ground squirrel (Rheithrosciurus macrotis), which hides in the hilly forests of Borneo, but it is an odd beast. It's twice the size of most tree squirrels, and it reputedly has a taste for blood. Now, motion-controlled cameras have revealed another curious fact. The 35-centimeter-long rodent has the bushiest tail of any mammal compared with its body size.

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An origami-inspired purse sounds needlessly complex. Futzing around with folds when you're trying to find your keys in the abyss of a bag? No thanks. But! But: The reality of this Distortion clutch, designed by tech-friendly design icon Issey Miyake, is rad. Like, I-would-definitely-carry-the-hell-out-of-this rad.

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This is the mother of all hacks, the genius device that saved the Apollo XIII crew from dying in their emergency return to Earth, as photographed during that trip using one of their Hasselblad cameras. Here are the actual step-by-step instructions that helped turn this mission into NASA's most successful failure ever.

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Executives from the flying car company Terrafugia are currently in China looking for funding, leading some in the media to innocently ask if flying cars could ease Beijing's traffic congestion. As the young folks these days might put it: LOL.

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At a pink limestone quarry in Sweden, finding meteorite is no big deal—workers have found 101 of them in the past 20 years. But a new space rock discovery has scientists scratching their heads. The meteorite is of a class that's never before been seen, and it may hold a key to the explosion of life on Earth nearly 500 million years ago.

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Swedish design company Tomorrow Machine has generated a few ideas of what food packaging could potentially look like in the future. The idea pictured above is a compact food package that expands when hot water is added. It saves space and is made of 100% biodegradable material.

Pretty neat, huh? Here are three more ideas from Tomorrow Machine, including a decomposing smoothie box.

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You can easily spend hundreds of dollars on a pair of headphones, but should you? Lifehacker tackles the delicate balance between budget and booming bass below.

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Cassini entered Saturn's orbit on July 1st, 2004. And ever since, this NASA-ESA-ASI collaboration has delivered stunning images of the crown jewel of our solar system. The following 50 images were chosen from thousands of similarly great photographs from a full decade of exploring the sixth planet and its iconic ring system and moons.

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The best way to think of Lékué's flexible silicone bowl is as a bread machine that won't waste valuable kitchen counter space when not in use. Because it's soft and flexible it can be easily stored in a cupboard or even a drawer, and because it's all silicone it can go straight from the counter to the oven without messing any additional mixing bowls or pans.

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When we think about the connected world, we think about hardware—from Twine to Nest—that connects our household appliances to the web for a pretty penny. But according to Quartz, one firm is pioneering an alternative that's cheap, easy to make, and embeddable in nearly any product.

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   Получихме следното съобщение: BGTSC има удоволствието да обяви концерта на неудържимите SABATON, който ще се състои на

"A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping."

"When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about."

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

"It is bad luck to be superstitious."

"The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward."

sofapizza:

What makes you think monsters won’t eat your parents?

[bearybearington]

via Steve M.

Furniture maker Greg Klassen builds intricately designed tables and other objects embedded with glass rivers and lakes. Inspired by his surroundings in the Pacific Northwest, Klassen works with edge pieces from discarded trees (often acquired from construction sites, or from dying trees that have begun to rot) which he aligns to mimic the jagged shores of various bodies of water. The pieces are completed with the addition of hand-cut glass pieces that appear to meander through the middle of each table. You can see much more of work here, and several tables are available through his shop.

In the future, we'll get the news from fair and balanced android newscasters that'll somehow terrify us more than the cable newspeople we have today. These android newscasters are frighteningly lifelike and can interact with humans, read the news and Tweets, tell a joke and basically replace the lousy talking heads on TV.

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An anonymous reader sends this story about medical research in zero-gravity environments. Many earth-based treatments need to be adapted for use in space, and anatomical behaviors can change in subtle and unpredictable ways as well. This research aims to protect astronauts and future generations of space-goers from conditions that are easily treatable on the ground. The ultrasound machine the students are testing would be well suited for space missions. It is light and compact, requires very little medical training to use, and the probe can stay in the body for 72 hours at a time. But the technology has only ever been used on Earth, and no one knows whether it would function correctly in zero gravity. The most significant concern is that microgravity will cause the probe to drift out of position. The team's mentor, cardiac surgeon and space medicine specialist Peter Lee, tells me that an ultrasound probe that sits in the esophagus is an ideal diagnostic tool for extended spaceflights. "If an astronaut far from Earth were to have a cardiovascular event, or for some reason became incapacitated and had to be on a ventilator, there's no imaging currently available [in space] that provides continuous images of the heart," he says. "You can use [external] ultrasound, but the technician has to be there the whole time to hold it on the chest."

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