Any task requiring the use of clear tape would be a lot easier if you could snatch a strip of the sticky stuff with just one hand. And while there have been many complicated contraptions that promise exactly that functionality, Black+Blum have found a simpler approach that takes advantage of that perpetual force known as gravity.
    
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While solar power promises a lot, it's only ever going to help satisfy our energy needs if it becomes efficient enough. Fortunately, Sharp has just made the world's most efficient solar cell, which converts a staggering 44.4 percent of incident light into electricity. Take that, fossil fuels.
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This gorgeous map by Nelson Minar shows every single river in the United States. Look how many veins America has!
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Having enough room for separate working and dining tables is a luxury that most urban dwellers don't have. But thanks to Daniel Liss' transforming Table For Two, if you live in a small apartment you can now work on your cake and have a place to eat it too.
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Every time you go to the beach, little grains of sand will inevitably follow you home. But thanks to a hidden mesh compartment, the genius Shake Bag keeps the sand on the shore where it belongs.
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Make sure you don't mutter to yourself at Murmur, because your petty grievances will end up visualized on the wall. The project uses Raspberry Pi and openFrameworks to visualize and project LED simulations of the sound waves in a room.
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If movies are any indication, a drowning person will thrash around wildly in the water, possibly scream out for help, or wave someone over. However, as Slate points out, that's completely wrong, and drowning doesn't look anything like people expect.
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Drill bits are incredibly easy to lose, and even if you have a case built specifically for bits you're still bound to lose one now and again. Over on Instructables, user bobzjr shows you how to build a simple, at-a-glance style bit holder using a piece of foam rubber floor tile.
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The term "landscape photography" usually conjures up visions of green vistas and sublime natural landscapes. But photographer Toshio Shibita takes a different approach in his series, Constructed Landscapes. Rather than focusing on what's natural about the landscape, he focuses on how humans have changed it.
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It turns out that Michael Graves-designed teapot with its unsettling resemblance to Hitler might not have been the only Nazi-related product in J.C. Penney stores. As Conan O'Brien discovered on his show the other night, the teapot is apparently just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the department store intentionally, or unintentionally, trying to cash in on Hitler's regime.
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Like when trying to choose a ripe melon at the grocery store, there are countless questionable ways to determine how much propane is left in your barbecue's tank. But if you don't want to drag a bathroom scale out to your deck, try Truma's LevelChecker which uses an ultrasonic signal to determine how full, or empty, your tank is.
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3D-printing useful widgets and dohickeys is great and all, but sometimes you just want to mess around. And what could be better for that than good, old-fashioned Play-Doh? What was once a ThinkGeek April Fool's prank is now a reality from another company altogether: Meet the 3D PlayDoh printer.
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I've always been amazed by wind tunnels. Why? First of all, they're massive structures. Then there's the remarkable contribution they make to science and engineering—without wind tunnels, we likely wouldn't have developed the aerospace technology that put us on the moon. And finally, wind tunnels are often simply gorgeous, dramatic spaces. For proof, see the striking images below, which span almost a full century of wind tunnel testing.
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Beta-Carotene, as far as I’ve known since I slogged through 8th grade Biology, is a pigment that gives sweet potatoes and carrots their color. But since it's used as a food dye and plenty of doctors recommend it as a supplement, it’s also the basis for a booming synthetic farming business—one we rarely see, since it’s based in rural Australia. But these photos, by Australian photog Steve Back, give us an unusual glimpse inside the world's largest β-Carotene farm.
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Ballet is considered one of man's most graceful artistic endeavors, but as is often the case, through the right lens, mother nature can still easily one-up us. In this case that lens happens to be pointed at the complex interactions between a falling water drop and a pool of water, capturing their intricate dance at 2,500 fps.
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There's science, and there's magic. And incredibly, this is the the first one. Behold the thermal tiles NASA used to protect shuttles from totally disintegrating on their way back to Earth. Awesome.
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Cloud Leopard
Cloud Leopard, detail
Cloud Leopard, detail
Cloud Leopard, installation view
Nahoko Kojima working on Byaku, upcoming
Peacock (3.3′ x 4.25′)
Peacock, detail
Kojima holding artwork
Chandelier, two paper planes
Chandelier, detail
Migration
Japanese paper artist Nahoko Kojima cuts intricate sculptures of animals, textures, and other natural phenomenon from single sheets of paper, some of which are displayed encased in acrylic sheets while others like her Cloud Leopard are installed as 3D artworks. The artist is currently working on a new piece titled Byaku that will be unveiled at the Jerwood Space in London next month, an ambitious artwork of a life-sized swimming polar bear made using a single sheet of white Washi paper.
You can see much more of Kojima’s work in this online gallery, and learn more about her work at Solo Kojima, a design studio she founded with Shari Solo. (via designboom)
Whether or not your child grows up to be the next Zuckerberg, programming is a highly useful skill for him or her to learn. It teaches vital problem-solving, creativity, and communication skills. Plus, it can be downright fun for you both. Here are some of the best tried-and-true apps for teaching kids of all ages how to code.
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Why spend hours digging through your closet trying to color-match the perfect outfit when with a little technology your clothing can match itself automatically?
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In the age of ubiquitous computing, we've grown fairly used to infrastructure, objects, and even furniture that adapt to the presence of humans. But what if you could control the behavior of a wall or room simply by thinking harder?
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Few routers utilize their full potential out of the box because their firmware limits their functionality. Thanks to an open-source project called DD-WRT, you can unlock your router’s potential to broadcast a stronger signal, manage network traffic, remotely access all your home computers, and a whole lot more. Here’s how to install it, set it up, and supercharge your network.
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In the wake of Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition of beloved social platform Tumblr, it's perhaps worth looking back what the company did after it caught—and gutted—another big fish.
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There are all kinds of ways to design a table, but most of them don't include resonant frequencies or specially-designed abrasive enzymes, much less both. Bonus Table 571 isn't most tables though, and that's exactly how it gets its very specific pattern.
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