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One great thing about smartphones is that they present a readily-accessible map and GPS for directions. As long as you have access to a network, it's much harder to get lost while wandering around a new city or an unfamiliar part of your town. But that's also a downside: Smartphones are screen-based creations, and even though new smartphone maps applications feature voice directions, those don't make as much sense on a bicycle.

The Hammerhead, an attachable device for you bike handles, addresses this problem by providing directions not with sound or direct visuals but simple flashes of light in your peripheral vision. With $51,000 raised on Dragon Innovation, the Hammerhead device works with an app of crowdsourced biking directions. This latter part will be good news for cyclists out there looking for the optimal route from point A to point B, which isn't always the same as when you're driving or walking. Data is communicated from your phone to the device via Bluetooth.

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Good morning! Coolest look inside the Space Shuttle cockpit - the most capable, complex flying machine ever built.

Read the rest of DIY: How To Make Vegan Wild Mushroom & Olive Tapenade in a Few Simple Steps

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Skyscrapers have always been symbols of architectural, economic and national might, the taller the better. They are meant to be seen from miles around. But a new tower slated to go up outside of Seoul, South Korea, has been designed with a twist: It is meant to be seen--and then not seen. The Tower Infinity, designed by the multinational GDS Architects, uses technology to render itself "invisible," or at the very least, optically camouflaged.

Clad in a surface of both cameras and image-producing LEDs, the 450-meter-tall tower will visually capture its surrounding environment and transmit those images to the opposite face of the building from which they were shot. With a building manager's finger on a dimmer switch, the opacity of the building could be adjusted.

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pepperjunkie:

City Canyon by Stefan Morrell..

How we live now.

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently unveiled a new concept car to add to the plethora of electric and space efficient vehicles. The research group headed by In-Soo Suh, Associate Professor in the Graduate School for Green Transportation, revealed a vehicle inspired by how an armadillo in the wild responds when faced with a predator. KAIST has been making major contributions to the electrical vehicle movement recently with their road charged buses and now with their car aptly named the Armadillo-T. Employing textbook biomimicry, the vehicle achieves its armadillo-like transformation when the rear body of the car tucks over the front covering the windshield. The resulting decrease takes the body of the car from a fully extended 110 inches to 65 inches in its folded position.

Professor In-Soo Suh comments on the car,

I expect that people living in cities will eventually shift their preferences from bulky, petro-engine cars to smaller and lighter electric cars. Armadillo-T can be one of the alternatives city drivers can opt for. Particularly, this car is ideal for urban travels, including car-sharing and transit transfer, to offer major transportation links in a city. In addition to the urban application, local near-distance travels such as tourist zones or large buildings can be another example of application.

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Building blocks taught children to stack things. Legos teach kids to build objects systematically. Now a company called littleBits wants to push building blocks to the next level by integrating electronics, teaching children that they can achieve more sophisticated results by combining a series of predetermined components with specific technological functions. And they're easy to snap together, via magnets that prevent incorrect connections.

Designed by Ayah Bdeir (whom we interviewed earlier this year during a littleBits/MoMA team-up), Paul Rothman and Jordi Borras, littleBits won Gold in the 2013 IDEA Awards in the Leisure & Recreation category. Writes the littleBits team,

Electronics are everywhere. People now produce, consume and throw out more electronic gadgets and technology-enhanced products than ever before. Yet, engineering is mysticized, electronic objects are black-boxed, and the creativity of today's designer is limited by the tools and materials available to them. With the democratization of technology and the DIY revolution gaining more momentum, creativity with electronics will explode when they can be used as (and combined with) other materials.

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We've posted our share of crazy GoPro footage before, as it never ceases to amaze us how the simple design of a small, durable camera has allowed us office dwellers to see sights we'd never experience with our own eyes. This GoPro tribute video, put together by Humans Are Awesome—"the official non-fail video website"—is the cake-taker. Just watch it.

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While running between booths at Computex earlier this month, we were momentarily distracted by these vegetable boxes (maybe it was lunch time as well). As it turned out, this product was launched by Taiwan-based Home Lohas around the same time as when the expo started. The company pitches its hydroponic gardening appliance -- so the vegetables rely on nutritious water instead of soil -- as a hassle-free, low-power solution for growing your own greens, plus it's apparently the only solution in the market that doesn't need water circulation. With its full spectrum LED light, air pump and timers, harvest time can apparently be reduced by about 30 percent. It's simply a matter of filling up the water tank, adding the necessary nutrients and placing the seeded sponge on the tray (the package includes three types of organic fertilizers and some seeds).

The only downside is that this system costs NT$15,800 (about US$530) in Taiwan, and for some reason, it'll eventually be priced at US$680 in other markets. If that's too much, then stay tuned for a half-size model that's due Q4 this year.

Filed under: Household

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Source: Home Lohas (Chinese)

If you're antsy at the idea of PRISM reading your Facebook messages, be thankful you're not a foreign diplomat. The Guardian is reporting that GCHQ, the UK's communications surveillance unit, hacked delegates' BlackBerry handsets during 2009's G20 summit in London. According to leaked documents, spies were able to relay private messages to analysts in "near real-time," and pass that information along to top politicians as they were negotiating deals. The organization is also said to have set up fake internet cafés around the conference area, which used key-logging software to steal dignitaries passwords for long-term surveillance. If you'll excuse us, we're just off to, you know, change all of our login details.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: The Guardian

eldavojohn writes "PBS's NewsHour interviewed Geoffrey Donovan on his recent research published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine that noted a correlation between trees (at least the 22 North American ash varieties) and human health: 'Well my basic hypothesis was that trees improve people's health. And if that's true, then killing 100 million of them in 10 years should have an effect. So if we take away these 100 million trees, does the health of humans suffer? We found that it does.' The basis of this research is Agrilus planipennis, the emerald ash borer, has systematically destroyed 100 million trees in the eastern half of the United States since 2002. After accounting for all variables, the research found that an additional 15,000 people died from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 more from lower respiratory disease in the 15 states infected with the bug, compared with uninfected areas of the country. While the exact cause and effect remains unknown, this research appears to be reinforcing data for people who regularly enjoy forest bathing as well as providing evidence that the natural environment provides major public health benefits."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

La gran mayoría de analistas económicos concuerda en que el gran ciclo de precios altos de los recursos naturales –que comenzó en el 2003– está llegando a su fin. Hay varias razones: la desaceleración de China es una de las más importantes (el crecimiento del consumo de metales se explica, en ...

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Okian Warrior writes "About a decade ago Slashdot ran an article about the Free State Project: an attempt to get 20,000 liberty-minded activists to move to one state (they chose NH) and change the political landscape. Eleven years on, the project is still growing and having an effect on statewide politics. NPR recently ran a program discussing the movement, its list of successes, and plans for the future. The FSP has a noticeable effect on politics right now — still 6,000 short of their 20,000 goal, and long before the members are scheduled to move to NH."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We love the magic of the movies, that trickery that lets us believe in beautiful robots, time-traveling scientists, wolf men, and flying superheroes. But sometimes it's fun to peek behind the curtain, and see the secrets and candid faces behind our favorite films.

Photos from the set of Metropolis (1927, dir: Fritz Lang), taken by brother-in-law, Horst von Harbou

(photos by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images, Hulton Archive/Getty Images and Horst von Harbou)

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980, dir: Irvin Kershner)

http://io9.com/5654412/photos...

(via blastr, screencrush, Slightly Warped and saurabh)

Star Wars (1977, dir: George Lucas)

(via Slightly Warped)

Back To The Future I-II-III (1985, 1989 and 1990, all directed by Robert Zemeckis)

(via Nights Into Dreams, GeekTyrant)

Iron Man 2 (2010, dir: Jon Favreau)

(via Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki)

Alien 3 (1992, dir: David Fincher)

(via cswap)

Planet of the Apes (1968, dir: Franklin J. Schaffner)

(via Chelloveck)

Superman (1978, dir: Richard Donner)

(via Capedwonder)

Godzilla (or Gojira, 1954, dir: Ishiro Honda)

(via The Sky Has Fallen and Retronaut)

Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964, dir: Ishiro Honda)

(via Retronaut)

War Of Worlds (1953, dir: Byron Haskin)

(via Las Crónicas de Tino)

Alien (1979, dir: Ridley Scott)

(via Geektyrant)

Frankenstein (1931, dir: James Whale)

(via vintag.es)

The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1941/1943, dir: George Waggner/Roy William Neill)

(via Vitagraph American)

Close Encounters Of Third Kind (1977, dir: Steven Spielberg)

(via The Bearded Trio, DVDTalk and Aint It Cool)

E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial (1982, dir: Steven Spielberg)

(via Cinema Salem and Cracked)

Blade Runner (1982, dir: Ridley Scott)

(via Douglas Trumbull)

Clockwork Orange (1971, dir:Stanley Kubrick)

(via Malcolm McDowell's Facebook, The Mathhattan and Awesome Phil)

2001: Space Odyssey (1968, dir: Stanley Kubrick)

(via A Clockwork Orange Tumblr, James Vaughan, Making Stanley Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey and FILMDetail)