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"There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil," says Bill Gates. Here's why...

This is the Reading Net designed by Spanish creative studio Playoffice. Of course I'm not sure how much credit Playoffice actually deserves. It's not like they invented nets, they just came up with the idea of hanging them in home libraries to give your kids a place to hang out and read the herpes-free books you've collected over the years.

[The Reading Net is] a meshed fabric suspended from the architecture of a family library, that acts as a second-level reading range. the hanging web is tautly attached to the railings of a lofted path, and -- as both children and adults climb onto the woven expanse -- they can both lounge and learn on the buoyant surface.

First of all, that home library in the pictures is ridiculous. Somebody is rich as shit. Secondly, forget about JUST the library -- I want nets in every room of the house. I want to be able to go for days or weeks without ever touching the ground. "What about when you need to go to the bathroom?" I'll do it like a little kid. "Which is?" In the bathtub. Keep going for a bunch more shots in case you like getting angry at rich kids for having way cooler stuff than you did growing up.

pieratt:

This might be the best educational diagram/gif I’ve seen.

At last year’s Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, Portuguese designer Susana Soares presented a device that can detect cancer and other diseases using honey bees. Known for their extraordinary sense of smell, bees can detect airborne molecules in the parts per trillion range and can be trained to recognize certain smells associated with diseases such as lung, skin and pancreatic cancer, as well as tuberculosis.


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Post tags: bees cancer, bees diagnostics, bees diseases, bees medicine, Dutch Design Week, green design, honey bees training, pavlov's reflex bees, portugese designers, Susana Soares bee's, trained bees

Tis the season for ugly Christmas sweaters, so naturally Coke Zero has a design-your-own tacky sweater contest. After you customize your fugly-ass masterpiece with their handy sweater generator, get all your friends to vote on it! Why? Because your jerk friends owe you big time! Also, if you rank in the top 100 designs, they’ll [...]
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Some of the world’s most sustainable cities have been given special recognition at the COP 19 Climate Change Conference underway in Warsaw. Vancouver, Cape Town, and Abu Dhabi are the winners of the World Green Building Council’s Government Leadership Awards (a competition held in partnership with ICLEI and UN-HABITAT), which focused on “global excellence in local green building policy. Each winning city has been honored for policies and practices that maximize opportunities for builders and developers to mitigate the environmental impact of the built environment. Take a look after the jump at what makes these three cities so special.

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Post tags: "energy efficiency", abu dhabi, Cape Town, COP-19, energy reduction, Green Cities, green cities around the world, green design, ICLEI, sustainable cities, un habitat, vancouver, Warsaw climate talks, World Green Building Council's Government Leadership Awards, world's greenest cities

Check out this fake trailer for a fake Rob Ford biopic starring Chris Farley as Rob Ford and Robert DeNiro playing Police Chief Bill Blair. It covers all the bases beautifully, from the drugs and thuggery to the football fixation and the bowling over of councilwomen. He even walks into a camera face first. Total genius!

TAKE ANOTHER BREAK

Not to be outdone (but still totally outdone) by The Ohio State University's marching band, this is a video of Clemson's marching band performing a tribute to Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. The performance is actually decent+/good-, but the person holding the camera leaves a little something to be desired. Mostly a steady hand, less constant panning and zooming, and, if you really want to get down to it, not talking the whole time. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say they're probably not a professional videographer. "Wow, GW, do you ever have anything nice to say?" Well they didn't shoot in portrait mode, I'll give them that. Keep going for the video, then let's get together this weekend and learn how to twirl batons.

via http://www.tumblr.com/dashboard

Inspired by her nephew's stories of bad food at the mess hall when he was on deployment in Afghanistan, retired photographer Jody Anderson created a recipe-book of meals that could be prepared using a coffee-maker (soldiers were allowed to have coffee-makers in their rooms), and posted some online. Coffee-makers are quick to clean, and the different stages of the coffee-maker give you different, simultaneous, cooking options (grilling, poaching and steaming). All useful stuff for frequent travellers: beats the old "cooking salmon in three thicknesses of foil using the ironing-board and iron" technique.

As Anderson describes it, the design of a traditional coffee maker gives you three basic cooking techniques:

1. Steam: The basket at the top is a great place to steam vegetables. You can throw in broccoli, cauliflower or any vegetable that cooks in about the same time as those.

2. Poach: The carafe at the bottom serves as a simple vessel for poaching fish and chicken. You can also use it to hard-boil eggs or make couscous and oatmeal.

3. Grill: This technique is a bit more advanced — and time-consuming. But if you're really itching for a grilled cheese sandwich or a cinnamon bun in a motel room, the coffee maker's burner can serve as a miniature grill.

Coffee Maker Cooking: Brew Up Your Next Dinner [Michaeleen Doucleff/The Salt]

(via Consumerist)

(Photo: Morgan Walker/NPR)

Electronics that rely on batteries have the disadvantage of succumbing to obsolescence once their charging and discharging cycles have reached their limit, but one firm is moving away from that model. Portland, Oregon-based Blueshift has created the world’s first wireless speakers powered by supercapacitors. This novel power-storage system not only allows their Helium speakers to juice up in just five minutes for six hours of continuous play, but it is designed to last a lifetime.

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Post tags: bamboo exterior, blueshift, bluetooth technology, helium, Helium speakers with infinite charge, Oregon, Portable Speakers, Portland, sam beck, smartphone compatible, speaker set, speakers powered by super capacitors, supercapacitor

A French art director named Thomas Jullien stitched together 852 different pictures from 852 different Instagram users in order to create some structure out of the social media chaos. The result is pretty cool.

TAKE ANOTHER BREAK

This is a video of the cutest teensiest kitten barking like a puppy. I know what you’re thinking and yes, it gets even worse. This cutest teensiest kitten barking like a puppy’s name is Bun Bun. WTF! Are you people trying to make my face explode with cute? Because it’s totally working! I’ve been screaming [...]
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Listen: I'm sick, so bear with me. And not sick like somebody who will eat food off the ground, sick like on meds and my brain feels like a cloud. It's even harder to think than normal (which was already near impossible). This is a video tutorial by Youtuber CrazyRussianHacker (arguably one of the most dangerous men in the world) of how to open a can without any tools. The secret? Rubbing the top on concrete to expose where the top and body of the can are joined, then giving the thing a nice firm squeeze. BOOM -- tuna. I suppose it's a little neater than repeatedly smashing the can on the ground until it explodes, but some of us don't mind eating off the ground. "I thought you just said you weren't sick like that." Haha, I am ALWAYS sick like that. I'm just bonus sick right now. Keep going for the video, then go home and impress your roommates with your new zombie apocalypse survival skill.

This is an interactive music video for Bob Dylan's classic 'Like A Rolling Stone' featuring a little TV set that you can use to change the channel and watch people on all the different programs lip-sync the song. There's Drew Carey on The Price Is Right, Marc Maron doing a podcast, a tennis tournament, a home improvement show, a kid's cartoon, the History Channel, a cooking show, a home shopping channel, some romance movie, Pawn Stars and a couple news channels. It's worth checking out. Unfortunately, there was no softcore p0rn channel like Cinemax. Which, considering my boss walked in halfway through the video, was probably a blessing in disguise. Keep going for the worthwhile interactive video.

There is a revolution underway, but it has nothing to do with politics. Stuart Williams, a researcher from the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute, believes that advances in 3D-printing could culminate in a ‘bioficial’ heart within the next 10 years. Williams describes the process as taking a three-dimensional structure “and essentially cloning it, using a printer.”

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Post tags: 3d printed heart, 3d printer, 3D printing, 3d Technology, 3d-printed hearts in 10 years, 3d-printing human hearts, bioficial heart, Cardiovascular Innovation Institute, printing human hearts, Stuart Williams

A charging african lion is an alarming sight for most people – but for zoologist Kevin Richardson it’s just the start of another day on a reserve in South Africa. Richardson wrestles with fully-grown lions like other people play with house cats, as you can see in the video above. As a testament to his ability to become part of the pride, Richardson has even earned the title of “lion whisperer” – something very few others could ever hope to achieve.

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Post tags: GoPro video of lions, Kevin Richardson, kevin richardson wrestles with lions, lion preservation, lion reserve in South Africa, lion whisperer, man becomes part of a lion pride

Note: Your cards don't actually hologram out like that. False advertising, I know. This is Coin (despite clearly being a card), a digital credit card that can store all your other credit cards (plus magnetic strip membership cards) so you only have to carry one. That way you don't have to walk around with a wallet so fat that, after years of sitting on it lopsided, will cause you to develop back and buttcheek problems. That's a real thing BTW, I didn't just make that up. You enter your individual credit card's data via swiping through a smartphone dongle, then the data is added to the Coin card. You choose a card by scrolling through a LCD display on the back. Plus it uses a low-power Bluetooth signal to let you know if you ever venture too far away from the card with your phone. They're available for $50 pre-order now and are supposed to ship summer 2014. Will they? Beats me, next summer -- that's a long time. I know if I owned the company I'd already have everybody's money and be on a beach in Costa Rica by then. But don't let that stop you, I'm sure they're legit. Keep going for a video about the card.

The Powder Room, a new cocktail bar in Los Angeles, has a $500 boozey milkshake on the menu. LOLWUT? The menu says the lux shake will include edible gold leaf, the finest Belgian chocolates, some as of yet unnamed premium liquors, and a Swarovski Nirvana Mountain Ring priced at $190. Yeah, and let’s just assume some [...]
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In addition to wreaking incredible human devastation, Typhoon Haiyan is predicted to have unleashed a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere. A group of scientists recently published a study in Environmental Research Letters that reveals how trees killed during these super storms translate into a new source of carbon pollution and worsen the plight of an already warming planet.

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Post tags: carbon pollution, carbon sink, Climate Change, dead trees amplify global warming, dying trees, dying trees release CO2 into the atmosphere, Environmental Research Letters, global warming, Haiyan, Hurricane Katrina, typhoon, Typhoon Haiyan CO2 emissions, Typhoon Haiyan releases CO2 into the atmosphere

Good news, folks: romance isn’t dead. Redditor hshshshshshshs posted these Breaking Bad engagement photos. Because a couple who cooks up and deals meth together will probably not last very long. However a couple who shares the bond of enjoying a TV series together, well, at least they have something in common. “We’ll always have Breaking [...]
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Facebook’s new headquarters for London and Dublin will receive the same treatment as the company’s Silicon Valley campus with designs by starchitect Frank Gehry. The London office will take over three floors of a preexisting office space in Regents Park, giving Gehry the opportunity to redesign a renovation, while Facebook’s Dublin office will be built from scratch in iconic Gehry style – both inside and out.


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Post tags: eco design, Facebook headquarters dublin, Facebook Headquarters london, Frank Gehry, frank gehry facebook, Gehry to design Facebook campus, Gehry-designed Facebook campuses, Gehry/Facebook partnership, green design, New Facebook headquarters in Dublin, new Facebook headquarters in London, sustainable design

A clever new device called Powerslayer aims to stop the vampire draw on electronics – that insidious power suck that happens when you leave something plugged in even after your device is charged. Velvetwire’s Powerslayer has the brains to know when your device is charged and can stop the power draw until the next time you need it. This not only saves power, but saves batteries as well. All you have to do is plug it in and let Powerslayer do the rest. No more vampire draw and no more inefficient charging.

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Post tags: charging electronic devices, crowd funding campaigns, energy reduction, kickstarter campaigns, Kickstarter Powerslayer, Powerslayer, reducing energy consumption, smart charger, smart device charging, standby power, standby power charger, vampire draw, vampire energy, Velvetwire, Velvetwire Powerslayer

Meteorologists are asking citizens of the world to prepare themselves for increasingly violent storms such as the devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines earlier this month. Weather experts have linked global warming to rising tides, volatile weather, and super storms such as Sandy and Haiyan. Typhoon Haiyan is the most powerful typhoon ever recorded in history, and meteorologists warn it may not be the last.


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Post tags: eco design, extreme weather, global warming, global warming increasing cyclones and typhoons, green design, meteorologists warn that there will be more violent cyclones and typhoons, more extreme weather due to climate change, Super Typhoon Haiyan, superstorms, sustainable design