The Nintendo 3DS Will Destroy Children's Eyeballs

Remember your parents telling you sitting too close to the TV would make you blind? Well, now when parents tell young kids to turn off the 3D on Nintendo's 3DS 'cause it'll ruin their eyes—they'll actually be right.

The machine translation is a little rough, but the gist is clear: Nintendo has issued a warning that kids under six shouldn't use the 3DS's 3D mode because their vision is still "in the development stage," and the way that stereoscopic 3D works, delivering different images to each eyeball, "has a potential impact on the growth of children's eyes."

Sony's also noted that kids under six shouldn't play 3D games without being examined by their eye doctor first. But the 3DS is in a slightly different position than the PS3, since Nintendo's way more geared toward kids than Sony is.

To keep the childrens away from 3D, the 3DS will apparently have a parental lock on 3D, locking the 3DS in 2D mode. Even with the parental lock, though, this is pretty crazy. Nintendo issuing a warning explicitly stating, "Hey, our product could screw up your child's vision." Who's gonna buy that for their kids?

Hoodie With Earbuds Instead of Strings Is Greatest iPod Accessory of All

Hoodies have strings around the neck, right? Have you EVER used those strings? Why you'd want to tighten a noose around your neck, I'll never know. The HoodieBuddie cleverly replaces the strings with earbuds; the pocket contains a 3.5mm jack.

All you need to do is whack your iPod into that 3.5mm jack, hiding in the front-right pocket, and you can listen to music without your wires getting tangled. Really, it costs $44. 

 

 

In the Future, We'll All Wear Clothes Made by 3D Printers

Designers are already using 3D printers to create textiles apparently. Fashion site Ecouterre has an article on the 3D printed clothes phenomenom, and the museum of Modern Art is exhibiting the Dutch designer Freedom of Creation's works already. 

It's not just the lure of having clothes that fit properly that's appealing for designers—3D printing also helps cut down on labor costs and could be seen as reducing waste.

WWF Is a New Green File Format That's Impossible To Print

The rabble rousers at the World Wildlife Fund (they re-named fake wrestling!) have created a new, PDF-type file format called WWF. It's a file format that CANNOT be printed out. The idea: save as WWF, save a tree.

WWF is currently only savable and readable on Mac, but a Windows version should be coming soon.

 

 

Electric Razors Really Are Better (for the Environment)

Electric razors use 30x less energy. How does Slate figure? An electric razor runs on 5-6 watts, consuming 0.35 kilowatt-hours a year. But! Most dudes using a disposable razor use a quart of hot water, using 10.4 kilowatt-hours a year.

All told, when you consider other elements, like the CO2 produced by making each disposable razor and the like, an electric razor will save you 14.9 pounds of carbon dioxide per year—which isn't a lot—but every little bit helps. I suppose if you wanted to go ultragreen, you could go ultra badass: a straight razor with no water.

 

 

The Most Magnetic Material Yet

Iron cobalt was the most magnetic material on Earth until physicists created what's in this man's hands. It's an iron and nitrogen compound which is 18 percent more magnetic and potentially disproves theories about how magnetic a material can be.

Jianping Wang, a physicist at the University of Minnesota, created the compound, but he's actually not the first to do so:

In 1996, researchers from the Central Research Laboratory of Hitachi in Japan made the same iron and nitrogen compound. Their research also showed that the material exceeded limitations set by traditional theories. However, scientists were unable to duplicate their experiments.

Apparently Wang has "taken special care to allow other scientists to duplicate his experimental setup" because of these failed attempts of the past. It's a shame that his experiment doesn't count as proof of the original compound's creation for some reason though.

Intel's 310 Series SSDs Are an Eighth the Size of Their Predecessors

SSDs are great, and they're getting smaller all the time. A lot smaller. Intel's teeny new 310 Series SSDs deliver the same performance as the x25s that came before them, but they're just an eighth the size.

The new drives, intended for notebooks, tablets, and rugged industrial and military devices, are 51mm-by-30mm and a mere 5mm thick.

Lenovo's signed the 310 up for their next-generation ThinkPads, and DRS Technology's planning on sliding the 310 in a tablet next year. Intel's shipping drives to OEMs in 1000-unit quantities in two capacities: 40GB ($99) and 80GB ($179). They say it's the first salvo in a wave of new solid state drives they'll be firing off next year, to which I say bring it on. The smaller and the faster the better.

Samsung Taking the "Thinnest" 3D Blu-ray Player

The defining characteristic of most home Blu-ray players isn't usually their thickness, but perhaps if you live in a house with low ceilings you might fancy Samsung's new, unnamed Blu-ray device. Seems pretty deep, though, Samsung. Got anything narrower?

While announcing the device, Samsung also took the time to blow its trumpet about US Blu-ray player sales—claiming it is "commanding" the US market and took a 35% share of sales between January and November.

Go Pew Pew in the Space Invaders Couch

This sofa is likely to never see the dawn of a waking day, nor the imprints of your buttocks as you settle in for a marathon 15-hour Space Invaders sesh.

Keep The Snow Out Of Your Brain With The Sony MDR-EX1000 Flagship Earphones

Seems a bit of a shame to spend $799 on something no one will ever see because it'll spend most of its life rammed down your ears, but if you need higher-end earphones, the MDR-EX1000 will do the job.

The Asia-only flagship earphones are available on import through Audiocubes, so if you'd like your audio reproduced by a custom Sony 16mm driver created from a liquid crystalline polymer with an impressively wide response range between 3-30,000Hz and a magnesium housing, they're the ear canal warmers for you.

 

 

Zip Tie Snow Tires

It's officially that time of year, with snow and slush and ice perpetually impeding your biking. What to do? Well, if you've got a box of zip ties and can conjure up a little MacGuyever spirit, you do this.

Fritz Rice of the Dutch Bike Co. is the clever rider behind these makeshift snow tires, and while he admits they look a bit silly (and that some fixie-riding hipsters may have pioneered the idea), he seems pretty thrilled with the results.

Embrace The Light

I never thought that a lamp which costs over $500 and has to be inflated before it can be used would be appealing, but then I was informed that it's huggable. Now I just want to snuggle up with one.

The lamp is called Supernova and it is created by a firm called Scale 1:1

Flexible LED Mat Can Bend and Fold for Any Emergency Lighting Situations

Running off three AA batteries, this FLEXiT blanket of LEDs is completely flexible and able to hold shape, meaning you can wrap and fold it around objects (your laptop, dog's tail, under the sink) for some urgent light-throwing.

There are 16 LEDs sprinkled across the silicone blanket, and there are even three light settings (I imagine for dim, dimmer, and dimmest light?) cost $30 on FLEXiT 

 

 

It's Official: LED Lights Are Coming

The future of lighting is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Light-emitting diodes (LED) lightbulbs have been coming on the market in the past few years, but their quality varies greatly, from "almost perfect" to "horrible."

The Qnuru bulbs use LEDs made by Cree. The versions are "cool white" (6000k temp), they're also available in "warm white" (3000k). They use a standard E26 socket and use respectively 6.4 watts and 9.2 watts, and they're both rated as replacing 60W incandescents, though the bigger OPAL definitely produces more light and has a wider beam angle.

They have a 50,000+ hours lifetime, which compares very favorably to about 15,000 hours for compact fluorescent (CFLs) and 2,500 hours for incandescent bulbs. It makes more sense to pay extra for quality if you're going to be potentially keeping these lights around for decades. In fact, they come with a 3 year warranty, not something you'll find on any fluorescent!

And of course, because they are LEDs, they don't contain any mercury, and they are a lot less fragile than CFLs and incandescents.

Why Do All the Christmas Lights Go Out When Only One Bulb Blows?

If you've dabbled in Christmas decorations with traditional Christmas lights, you'll know that when one bulb blows, the entire line goes out with it. Why is that? Because of how the manufacturers wire them.

That image above shows how the lights and power supply are typically wired (not the new LED varieties, though) in traditional Christmas lights. If the filaments of all the bulbs are intact, then the circuit is complete and all the lights work. But if one bulb so happens to break then the entire circuit is broken, thus making all the lights go out. It's basically much cheaper for manufacturers to build lights like this because it allows them to use this cheaper series wiring with inexpensive bulbs.

 

 

Chinese Tweeter Arrested on Wedding Day for Tweeting Joke

China's not allowed access to Twitter, but obviously there are "ways" to work around that.Cheng Jianping and her fiancé Hua Chunhui, were two such users. Cheng, however, was arrested for RTing her fiancé's joke—on their wedding day.

The situation was made even more traumatic, because her family and fiancé weren't told of her arrest—leading them to think she'd done a runner. All for retweeting her fiancé's tweet, which said:

"Anti-Japanese demonstrations, smashing Japanese products, that was all done years ago by Guo Quan. It's no new trick. If you really wanted to kick it up a notch, you'd immediately fly to Shanghai to smash the Japanese Expo pavilion."

It was turned into a joke because she added "angry youth, charge!" to her retweet.

So, instead of enjoying life as a newlywed, Cheng was sent to a women's labor camp, where she immediately went on hunger strike. She's to remain there for a year, for "disturbing social order." This comes only a week after Irish chap Paul Chambers was slapped with a guilty verdict for joking he was going to blow up Robin Hood airport in England. Tweeters, stay vigilant.

Make Your iPhone the Heart and Soul of Your Car Stereo

I get so frustrated when I'm in a new car and there's no way to plug in my iPod. Get with the times, car manufacturers! Or bring them up to speed yourself with the O'Car, a dedicated iPhone-based head unit.

Oxygen Audio's O'Car has a RDS radio tuner and a 4x55W amp, but the magic happens when you strap in your iPhone. The rotating mount charges your phone and holds it horizontally or vertically, allowing you to play tunes through the iPod app, Pandora radio or whatever else, put your iPhone to work as a GPS navigator, or make hands-free calls over your car's speakers. Or play Infinity Blade while you're in bumper to bumper traffic.

The Oceans Are Getting Louder

We all know carbon emissions are making our planet warmer. But the increase in carbon brings with it other surprising problems. More carbon apparently means low sounds travel farther underwater, making the ocean a noisier place to live and work.

The reason is complex. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide also means increased absorption of carbon in the Earth's oceans. And this increase, in turn, means more acidic sea water. More acidic oceans mean less absorption of sound at low frequencies.

And less sound absorption means louder noises over longer distances. In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, scientists predict that, within 100 years, absorption of sounds at around 200 Hz will go down by 70%, meaning sound could travel much farther.

The effects of less absorption and more noise at this frequency could be huge. For instance, scientists and commercial shipping vessels use these lower range frequencies for navigation and oceanic research. Also, marine mammals, such as whales, use these low frequencies for finding food and mates. Noisier oceans might cripple ocean navigation and interfere with whale life.

Unfortunately, the acidification of the ocean won't end when we stop polluting. In fact, the acidic shallow waters will propagate into the deeper ocean, where sound travels farthest, and possibly spread this noisy effect much farther than expected.

Recently, scientists found that blue whale songs are changing, drifting lower in pitch. Their research hinted at the deep complexity of marine life and the in-progress nature of this kind of science. This new marine acoustics research puts an additional wrinkle in the world of underwater communication, making the story more complex and even more interesting.

He Sees You When You're Tweeting, He Knows When You're Awake

Are you following santa? I know I am @santa__claus

Solar Radio Doubles As USB Charging Multitool for Adventurers

Eton's Raptor doesn't know if it's a radio, a weather-gauge or a bottle opener. An inbuilt solar-panel charges the li-Ion battery, powers the AM/FM/digital tuner, and also juices-up your phone through the miniUSB port.

Planning an expedition through uncharted territory? You also get a compass, chronograph, altimeter and barometer to keep you on track and informed of atmospheric conditions. There's a clip for your utility belt and of course, it's rubberized for waterproofing and shock protection. There's even a line-input for amplifying your iPod, too.

And the feature you'll probably end up using the most? The bottle opener of course. On sale soon, for an unspecified amount.