Google Employees Sleep In Alien-Like Pods

How does Google keep its employees fresh for long days and nights of working? With sleep pods.

FT reporter Richard Waters was in Google's Mountain View headquarters and snapped this photo of an anonymous Googler catching some rest. When Richard walked past the pod later, he said a pair of female legs were sticking out from the pod.

This contraption is a MetroNap EnergyPod. Metronap says it "harnesses science and NASA technology" to deliver a refreshing nap for users.

On its site, Metronap says, "Occupants are reclined into the optimal napping position to promote blood circulation and reduce pressure on the lower back and ambient sounds help nappers drift into light sleep."

When it's time to wake up, the EnergyPod delivers a light vibration.

Facebook Like and Dislike Button Rubber Stamps Now Available

The Facebook Like rubber stamp was so popular, that its creators are now selling them. Not only that, but they've created what everyone wants for the real Facebook: A dislike button stamp. Come on, Zuckerberg, you know you want it.

Like them? Then hit that like button in Facebook and go buy one. They are only $15 plus shipping each.Shop

 

 

Scientists Discover the First Planet With a Tail

Scientists have discovered the first cometary planet, one with a huge tail, a stream of gas being ripped off by solar winds at 22,000 miles per hour. This jovian world is located 153 light-years from Earth.

The planet—called HD 209458b—orbits 100 times closer to its home star than our Jovian neighbor, traveling in an astonishingly fast 3.5-day orbit. For comparison, Mercury—our solar system fastest planet—has an 88-day orbit.

Since HD 209458b is so close to the sun, the stellar winds are ripping the planet's atmosphere apart. Scientists have used the Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to gather evidence that support the theory that its 2,000ºF atmosphere is being ejected from its body at 22,000 miles per hour.

 

 

Samson Q2U Mic Is a Cheap USB/XLR Solution For Home Foley Action

You can easily make your own 1080p movies with relatively inexpensive gear at home now, but what if you want quality sound effects? Samson's (a name brand for microphones) Q2U might be your ticket for do-it-at-home Foley times.

The Q2U supports both XLR and USB cables, letting you plug it into basically any machine you have in your house. Now you can break glass, stomp on light bulbs and do whatever it is those crazy sound recording artists do to get effects to seem more exciting than they actually are in real life. It also has a 3.5mm headphone port so you can listen to what you're recording while you're recording it. Price $117.35

Tokyo Flash is Making This Watch a Reality

Enough people voted on this "Kisai RPM" concept watch submitted to Tokyo Flash by Brit James Fursedon, that the Japanese company is making it a reality. There's even better news—it's on sale now!

Thankfully, it's one of the easiest-to-read designs we've seen by the crazy watch manufacturer. Inspired by DJ decks, the glowing blue LEDs indicate the hours and minutes around the brushed stainless steel center. It costs £132 in the UK, which is around $208—get in quick!

 

 

LG's Got a Tablet Too. A Windows 7 Tablet, in Korea

Would you buy a 10.1-inch tablet, running Windows 7 with mediocre specs? LG's hoping Koreans will, because the tablet's launching there first. Citizens are probably better off waiting for LG's Android tablet, due out in January.

 

 

This Is the Fanciest Farm House You Can Imagine

This beautiful 4564-square-foot house reminds me of Magneto's base in Secret Wars, with its second floor almost fully suspended over the air. At night it looks like the Jawas' Sandcrawler. It's actually a farm house on the Minija Valley, Lithuania.

The owner of the Utriai Residence, who is dedicated to the production of chicken eggs and pigs, and his wife, an art college student interested in furniture design, wanted a house that looked like a place "made from huge logs". Like Noah's Ark, "where the family with all their belongings and animals moved from the city."

And on top of having an awesome house, they can have fresh eggs and bacon every morning.

2010 DeLorean Nike Dunk 6.0

As part of the Nike 6.0 Dunk series, the company teamed up with the DeLorean Motor Company to create a stylish shoe inspired by the retro-cocaine-era-cool car. But, just because they've got the DMC label doesn't mean they're magic. Let's get a few misconceptions out of the way:

1. They are dunks, but they will not help you dunk.

2. They say Belfast on them, but they were not made in Belfast.

3. If you can run 88 mph you will not go back in time, but you'll still be running 88 mph. Which is pretty cool.

4. There's no secret pocket for transporting cocaine.

5. They don't auto-lace or auto-dry

It's almost a shame to wear them as the material slightly deforms when you do — the only drawback to the look. For just $90, the shoes are cheap, which will make tracking down a pair of the limited edition, 1,000-copy shoes is the real challenge.

 

 

Chameleon Lamp Copies the Color of His Surroundings

While it won't cast enough light to read by, Huey the chameleon lamp would make a great night-light. Like a true chameleon, he adapts to his environment and glows in the same color as whatever's underneath him.

If your whole house is void of color, he can otherwise cycle through the whole color range. A small squeeze of his body when he settles on your preferred color locks it in. Surprisingly, this lamp only costs $30, which I think is a great price for something that uses a couple of white LEDs and an optical sensor to recognize and emulate the color under his belly.

 

 

Playboy's Hard Drive Has 250GB

Got National Geographic's external hard drive on your Christmas wish list? You may want to replace it with Playboy's $300 250GB drive which contains every single issue of Playboy, from vintage 1953 gals to current-day plastic zombies.

 

 

Self-Charging Batteries Powered by Vibration

Brother Industries has developed an AA battery sized generator powered by vibration, which can be used to charge another AA battery. Shaking your remote every once in a while could soon be all that's needed to keep it alive.

Inside the generator battery sits an "electromagnetic induction generator and an electric double layer capacitor" and although you'd have to do an impossibly vigorous amount of shaking to power a DSLR, for low-drain gadgets like remotes and LED torches a quick shuffle should dribble out enough energy for a brief spell of use. 

 

 

Imagine You Had a Camera With a ZillionX Zoom

This colossal star nest 5000 light years away, in the Sagittarius constellation, is the heart of the Lagoon Nebula. Now, imagine you could operate the Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys like a gigantic DSLR camera with telephoto lenses.

If that would be possible, this is how the zooming on this titanic dust and gas cloud would be like.

Of course, that's not how Hubble works. The video trip is composed with multiple images, merged onto each other in a digital composition program.

The intricate shapes of the nebula are caused by the ultraviolet radiation glowing from the infant stars, which disperse the gas and dust around them as they form. In fact, scientists found here the "first unambiguous proof that star formation by accretion of matter from the gas cloud is ongoing in this region."

Your Batteries Could Take Down A Plane

Ready for mass hysteria? Apparently the FAA has acknowledged that airplane cargo holds can get hot enough to cause lithium batteries to ignite. And there's more! There was a large quantity of such batteries on a plane that crashed recently:

The Federal Aviation Administration also acknowledged publicly for the first time Friday that a United Parcel Service 747-400 plane that crashed in Dubai last month killing both pilots was carrying a large quantity of lithium batteries.

Since the early 1990s, there have been dozens of incidents of batteries igniting in flight. But it has not been known what triggered many of the fires.

Now this announcement doesn't exactly seem like it's revealing anything novel. After all, batteries come with plenty of warnings regarding the temperature ranges they can tolerate and airplane cargo holds have little to no climate control—it makes sense that combining the two isn't a great idea.

What is fresh and new about this announcement is the potential for an extra huge wave of public hysteria and crazy demands that we leave our batteries off planes entirely despite cabins being air-conditioned.

Supercharge Your iPad and iPhone Right Now with iOS 4.2

Multitasking lets you quickly switch back and forth between apps, while Folders gets rid of flipping through page after page of apps. Mail gets a unified inbox, finally. Oh, and it forever changes the orientation lock to a mute switch—you now lock the orientation by double-tapping the home button and swiping to the left to reach a soft switch.

The other big feature is AirPlay. New to the iPhone too, it lets you wirelessly stream videos and music from an iPad or iPhone to an Apple TV, hassle-free. AirPrint does the same wireless magic thing, but for docs and webpages—lets you wirelessly print stuff easily.

The free Find My iPhone service is slightly limited: Only iPhone 4, iPod touch (4th-gen) and iPad get it. Once you activate Find My iPhone using one of those, though, you can use the service for free on your older iOS devices too. Find My iPhone, if you didn't know, shows where your lost iOS device is located on a map—as long as it has service—allows you to ping it with alarms and messages, or remotely detonate the information on it once all hope is lost.

Other things in iOS 4.2: new text ringtones for iPhone 4 (and only iPhone 4, weirdly), text searching inside of web pages in Safari, and the ability to use different fonts in the Notes app.

This Door Knob Lets You See What's in the Room Behind It

You probably don't spend much time thinking about door knobs, or how they could be improved. Maybe you should! This glass globe lets you catch a glimpse of what's going on in the room you're about to enter.

Hideyuki Nakayama's "A Room in the Glass Globe," developed in conjunction with door handle manufacturer LEVER, shows you a reflection of what's going on in the room behind it, cast in a sort of strange, dreamlike haze. It's currently on display at the at the Plain People store in Aoyama, Tokyo. I think I'd sacrifice a little bit of privacy to have such a beautiful and simple idea in my home.

Facebook Stalking Can Actually Kill You If You're Not Careful

A new article in the medical journal Lancet details the story of an 18-year-old kid who consistently found himself with "difficult and labored breathing" after using Facebook. The problem? He was using Facebook to stalk his ex-girlfriend.

The 18-year-old subject of the article, whose "post-Facebook" peak flow—the measurement of a person's ability to breathe air—was reduced by as much as 20 percent, was signing online to look at his ex-girlfriend's profile. The stress of seeing how totally over him she was, and how cute she looked, and who is that guy in that picture, no, don't tell me, do you think they've had sex yet, caused his breathing problems. (He had actually created a separate profile to look at her and all the fun she was having without him, which perhaps speaks to other, larger, psychological problems at play.)

Obviously, the knowledge that social stress and anxiety can induce asthma attacks isn't exactly new. But, the authors write, Facebook is "a new source of psychological stress," and doctors should keep their eyes out for Facebook-induced asthma attacks. Ten years ago, when you got dumped, you could only imagine all the hot guys your ex is banging—thanks to Facebook, you can actually see every single one.

The only solution, then, is to ban easily-stressed-out people from Facebook. Poor asthmatic kids! Not only do they have no friends, but they'll never make any, now that we know Facebook will actually kill them.

Seems Like Black Friday Comes Earlier Every Year

It's almost the holidays, which means it's time to start thinking about gifts for your mother, and brother, and wife's sister's dog.

MacMall is currently having a 36-hour sale which features discounts on a bunch of different Apple products. As most Apple fans know, it's very tough to get any sort of discount at all on the Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, Mac Mini, or iMac. During thisMacMall 36-hour Apple sale, you can save $50 to $85 off select Apple computers. They are also offering discounts on the iPod Touch, Apple TV, and various computer accessories.

 

 

Kitchen Concept Uses Pedal-Power to Grind Beans, Blend Soups and Save the Planet

This foot-powered food processor has numerous things going for it. As you will have noticed, it's incredibly stylish—and small. It's also eco-friendly, thigh-friendly and perfect for small kitchens. It's just a shame it's a concept.

Designed by German Christoph Thetard, it has various attachments that can be powered by pushing the pedal with a foot—including a coffee grinder and blender. Just pushing the pedal at 400rpm is enough to generate 350 watts a minute, which is enough for simple food preparation. But can it prepare a Thanksgiving feast?

 

 

The Looxcie Wearable Video Camera Never Stops Recording

The problem with YouTube is that you can only share stuff you happened to be recording. The Looxcie, a $200 video camera that you wear on your ear, proposes a simple solution: record everything, all the time.

Here's the idea: You wear the Looxcie on your ear and it records everything you see, roughly as you see it. The camera can hold up to four hours of video (in crummy 480×320 at 15fps); when it runs out of space, it starts dumping the oldest footage—it's not made for collectingclips, it's for capturing them in the moment.

Olympus' Camera Lacks Interchangeable Lenses, But Will Be New Compact Flagship

Early next year Olympus will be selling a new flagship compact camera.

Their claim about it being their new flagship compact camera seems a little strange when you consider their PEN series, but perhaps they're trying to say this will be even more compact—it certainly doesn't have the interchangeable lenses their micro four thirdscameras use, anyway. It will have an accessory port for attaching accessories like their SEMA-1 microphone adapter and presumably an electronic viewfinder.