Cross-Stitched iPhone Cases

You might think cross-stitching is for bored Puritans and nursing home artists—and maybe you're kind of right—but you can cross-stitch yourself one of the coolest custom cases we've ever seen.

All it takes is $25, some thread, and the ability to cross-stitch. That last one is important! But if you've got the know how, you can craft yourself anything you think of. That bird-in-tree design is pretty rad, but imagine the possibilities! Your name. Your girlfriends name. A dino. An infinitely repeating smaller cross-stitched iPhone. More here.

Carbon Fiber Sunglasses Sound So So So Great

Sunglasses made out of molded carbon fiber with scratch-resistant lenses would fix a lot of standard sunglass-related problems. Like sitting on them. Or having them fall off your face. They're perfect! Kind of.

For all their engineering might, there are still two problems with the admittedly attractive Kolstom Classic sunglasses—neither of which are really their fault. First, hinges. Your frames and lenses might be nigh indestructible, but you can still destroy the glasses at their weakest points. The Kickstarter video mentions some advanced hinge techniques, but it sort of just sounds like a spring. A direct hit from your butt is still going to be trouble. The other problem is that these frames look rather large, and could (will) make your head look small and dumb.

But if you're not too worried about either of those, check out the Kolstoms over at Kickstarter, where they're already funded and you can lock in a pair for $150.

Angry Birds Space Won't Land on Windows Phone

While no doubt swathes of Android and iOS users have experienced massive productivity slumps since Angry Birds Space came out this week, Windows Phone owners will be left staring at their spreadsheets. Peter Vesterbacka, chief marketing officer, at Rovio has told Bloomberg that there are no plans to release the latest iteration of the popular time sink on Microsoft's mobile platform.

Despite the original game still being the most popular app in the Marketplace, Vesterbacka claims that "...it's a big undertaking to support it, and you have to completely rewrite the application." So, until a Series 40version is confirmed, you bird slingin' Nokia fans will just have to wait.

Facebook Photos Just Got Bigger and Prettier

Facebook's photo viewer just got two overdue improvements. First of all, Facebook now supports high-resolution photos. When you click on an image in the photo viewer, it will display images at the highest resolution possible, which could be up to four times larger than the old size depending on the size of your display (the maximum size is 2048 x 2048). While you've been able to upload hi-res images for some time it's only now that you're able to actually view them in their massive glory.

The photo viewer is also getting fullscreen view, which you activate by clicking on a familiar-looking expand button in the top right corner.

Scientists Have Worked Out How to Stop You Going Bald

Going bald is the one big vanity concern among most men. But relax, it doesn't need to be that way; scientists have just worked out exactly why men go bald, and already have a way to stop it happening.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have been testing the scalps of men with male pattern baldness. They've discovered that tissue in bald areas has three times the concentration of a fatty compound called Prostaglandin—PGD2 to its buddies. The research is published in Science Transnational Medicine.

Fortunately, there are already 10 drugs available that can block the receptor that allows PGD2 to work—which means it shouldn't be too long before a baldness treatment, in the form of a cream or ointment, is available. Speaking to The Telegraph, Professor George Cotsarelis, one of the researchers, said:

"Our findings should lead directly to new treatments for the most common cause of hair loss in men."

Apparently, the next step is to establish whether similar treatments could work for women. Let's hope so! More here.

YouTube Auto Fix Makes Bad Video Suck Less

YouTube is expanding its video manipulation options with a new feature that will automatically fix up your crappy video footage. The edits include color correction and image stabilization.

But there's a catch: Any time video is manipulated digitally, it is degraded to some extent. Automating the manipulations, as opposed to making adjustments as the user's eye sees fit, often results in some wacky and gross results. Software stabilization in particular is an imperfect art—common methods to compensate for shaky movement can lead to pixelated or warped images.

It will be interesting to see how well YouTube's tools function when processing the vast diversity and quality of video content submitted. Luckily, the company had the sense to make the automatic fix optional, and to allow you to revert back to the original video if you are dissatisfied with the results.

Vietnam Considers Limiting SIM Card Access, Suggests 18 per Person is Enough

How many SIM cards do you have in your stash? If your answer is less than three per operator -- of every network provider -- then you may have trouble sympathizing with the apparent plight of some Vietnamese. Proposed legislation from the Ministry of Information and Commerce would effectively regulate each citizen to a maximum of three SIMs per carrier, leading to a theoretical limit of 18 SIM cards per individual, as the country as six operators. The draft law is intended to curb unauthorized distribution in that nation, where SIM cards with student discounts and the like are re-sold without carrier knowledge. 

The proposal could affect businesses too, limiting each company to a maximum of 100 SIM cards -- but there's no word on whether this cap is per network or absolute. Meanwhile, industry officials insist that a limit of five SIMs per operator would be more reasonable, given the number of SIM-enabled devices available to consumers. What's most clear, though, is that Vietnam is awash in marketing opportunity -- just imagine how popular Nokia could be with a mobile phone that supports 18 SIM cards.

All Your iPad Dictations Belong to Apple

Though the new iPad doesn't have Siri, it does have Dictation, which lets you dictate what you want to say to the email, notes, messages, and other apps. And like Siri, Dictation needs an internet connection in order to work, that's because Apple needs to send your phrases to its servers to make sense out of your yapping.

But Apple also stores your messages for an unspecified amount of time when you use Dictation on your iPad. ZDNet notes that though Apple is upfront with what they're doing (there are clear warning prompts), Apple is still unclear on why they're doing it. Specifically, the words and phrase Apple uses—'information like', 'your device will also send Apple other information' and 'Older voice input data that has been disassociated from you may be retained for a period of time'—is incredibly vague.

Of course it's not like Apple is going to use your voice messages against you or something. Apple is collecting data to improve Siri and Dictation. But it's important to remember, especially if you work in a sensitive workplace, that Apple will store your dictations on its servers and once they're on its servers, they pretty much belong to Apple at that point.

Breakthrough Opens Door for 60Tb Hard Drives

Seagate just shattered the record for storage density on hard drives by using a novel recording method to stuff 1 terabit into a square inch. That's nearly twice the old record. Hard drives are about to get huge.

Seagate squeezed all of that data into that tiny space by using "heat-assisted magnetic recording" instead of perpendicular recording to write data to disk. ExtremeTech reports:

HAMR, which was originally demonstrated by Fujitsu in 2006, adds a laser to the hard drive head. The head seeks as normal, but whenever it wants to write data the laser turns on. Reading data is done in the conventional way. Just so you understand how small the magnetic bits are in a HAMR drive, one terabit per square inch equates to two million bits per linear inch; in other words, each site is just 12.7 nanometers long - or about a dozen atoms.

In the short term the technology will result in new 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives. Currently the largest capacity drives are 1TB and 3TB respectively for laptops and desktops. That's already an impressive boost in capacity.

In theory, though, HAMR should allow hard drives to write up to 10 terabits per square inch, which means that in the future you could potentially cram about 60Tb onto a 3.5-inch drive. Seagate.

The New Worst Place for QR Codes: Burqas

They're controversial, confusing, and their presence creates tension across the western world. Now QR codes have found their way onto the burqa—but why? I can't wait to download this app!

The aptly named WTF QR CODES, where the imaged surfaced, provides no context for this strange sight. Is this a new trend in Islamist society? Was this taken at some booth of Consumer Electronics Association? App here.

Nokia Wants Your Call Alert To Be a Vibrating Magnetic Tattoo

Patents come and go all the time, but here's a crazy-ass one from Nokia: magnetic tattoos that vibrate to alert you to your phone. Talk about keeping in touch.

The patent proposes "a material attachable to skin, the material capable of detecting a magnetic field and transferring a perceivable stimulus to the skin, wherein the perceivable stimulus relates to the magnetic field."

Basically, that means a magnetic field would cause a tattoo to vibrate in a specific way. The tattoos, the patent suggests, would have to use "ink enriched by ferromagnetic or paramagnetic compounds"—not too tricky, given that tattoos already contain metallic compounds. Then, different magnetic fields could be used to provide different sensations, allowing the tatt-wearer to discern between different callers, or different kinds of alerts.

While the patent does suggest that similar technology could be rolled into something else wearable, like a badge, the obvious application is for something truly embedded. At least you can never lose a tattoo. The patent.

In-App Ads Are Destroying Your Battery Life

You intuitively know that all of those applications running in the background on your phone are latently eating away at your battery's charge, but a new study reveals that the main culprit isn't any useful function. It's location-pinging ads.

The study, conducted by a team lead by Abhinav Pathak from Purdue University, analyzed the energy used by several popular free Android apps (PDF) like Angry Birds, Facebook, the New York Times, and Chess. The team developed an "energy profiler" they call "Eprof" that determines what processes within an app are using energy. The results are shocking: 65 to 75 percent of energy consumed by the free apps studied are used by third-party advertising modules within the programs. These apps continue to run in the background even when you're not actually using the app. Only 10 to 30 percent of that energy is used to power the applications' "core functions."

Apps shouldn't continue to serve you ads when you're not locking at the apps. It's a bug, or something more nefarious. According to the researchers, developers don't notice energy consumption problems—bugs or otherwise—because most apps are "energy oblivious," meaning that the developers don't pay attention to how much energy apps use.

Sleeping Bag Hammock Lets You Relax Under Any Weather Conditions

Hammocks aren't designed with cold weather camping in mind. Even sleeping bags are helpless against the slightest chill.Grand Trunk's hammock compatible sleeping bag solves this by turning your hammock into a toasty insulated cocoon.

In a normal sleeping bag, the insulation on the back gets squished to oblivion as soon as you get inside, leaving nothing more than a thin piece of fabric protecting your back from the elements. Grand Trunk's hammock compatible bag gets around this by letting you pull your entire hammock through the bag.

Now instead of a sleeping bag pressing against a hammock, you have a hammock inside a sleeping bag. That means the insulation stays lofty so you can stay toasty, even when it's freezing outside. It's one size fits most, so long as hammock apartments don't become the next big thing. It's available for pre-order today for $180 here.

This Tiny Display Measures Less Than an Inch But Still Packs As Much Resolution As the New iPad

Cramming a QXGA display with a resolution of 2048x1526 into a device as small as the iPad might seem like an impressive accomplishment. But Forth Dimension Displays have managed to squeeze that same number of pixels into a display that's smaller than an inch.

And since Apple claims that it's impossible for the human eye to discern individual pixels on their Retina Displays, you might wonder what's the point of having so many pixels on such a tiny display unless you intend to hold it right up to your eye. But that's exactly what they've been designed for.

Forth Dimension Displays is hoping to revolutionize near-to-eye microdisplay hardware, like virtual reality goggles that have so far been a disappointment thanks to their low-resolution displays that don't exactly draw you into the action. In fact, by next year they're hoping to have a high-end gaming accessory on the market using the hi-res displays which would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500 to $2,000. And if more OEMs started adopting the company's technology, that price would certainly drop over time. More here.

How a Particle Accelerator Works: Explained With Donuts and Chocolate Bars

Using a fried dough and Kit Kat stop-motion animation, the folks over at Elements explain how a synchroton particle accelerator—like the Large Hadron Collider—accelerate particles up to the speed of light.

And who knows, if high school teachers used baked goods as educational aids, maybe more kids would be excited about pursuing a career in science. More here.

St. Patrick’s Day Hero Attempts To Drink a Gallon Of Shamrock Shake

Guinness is certainly the most popular drink on St. Patrick's Day, but McDonald's Shamrock Shake probably comes in at a close second. It's only available for a limited time every year, which inspired Sam Jordan to drink a gallon of the minty concoction.

Or at least try to.

Filling an empty one-liter milk jug required six of the shakes, which amounts to just over 5,000 calories, or more than twice Sam's recommended daily intake. He started out drinking it with a straw, but it soon became obvious that chugging was the only way to go. Sadly, the sheer volume of Shamrock deliciousness got the best of him about halfway through, but since he's alive to tell the tale, more here.

Steve Wozniak Was Doing his Regular Waiting-in-line Thing

Sure it's marketing, but it's also a nice little ritual. Speaking to an interviewer from What's Trending, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak acknowledged he doesn't have to wait in line for his new iPad, but said he'd "rather be genuine, like the real people". They're the ones you can see pretending to sleep / read in the background.

The New iPad Has a Gigantic 70-Percent Larger Battery

The new iPad guts are nice, at last with 1GB of much needed RAM to accelerate all that web browsing. But the most impressive thing is the new battery, which takes most of the space. It's a gigantic 70-percent larger!

The iPad 2 had a 25-watt-hour Li-ion battery. The iPad 3 has a 42.5 watt-hour battery! That's 70-percent more than the previous capacity. 70-percent more magical battery unicorns, people.

The battery life hasn't changed, however: it's still ten hours of use, nine with average use of the cellular data network. So why the increase? Obviously, that big screen and the more powerful processor are hitting the power big time.

This Desk Hides Your Mess

Nika Zupanc calls this elegantly minimal workspace her Homework Table. But work is probably the farthest thing from your mind when you feast your eyes on it since the table's devoid of drawers and clutter thanks to a clever retracting accordion file.

A small brass crank on the side of the table looks like a few turns will result in a scary jack-in-the-box clown jumping out at you. But it's instead used to raise and lower an expansive set of folders that can be used to hide documents that would otherwise take away from the table's stripped-down aesthetic. More here.

Meditation Makes Your Brain Quicker

Most people dismiss meditation as a bunch of hippy nonsense. But no longer; scientists have established that meditation, if done regularly and for long enough, is linked to the brain being able to process information faster. Take that, skeptics.

The research, undertaken at UCLA, used MRI scans to compare the brains of 50 meditators to 50 non-meditators. What they discovered was that long-term meditators display large amounts of something known as gyrification in the brain. Gyrification is just a fancy-pants term for the amount of folding in the cortex—it's what gives the brain its unique, ridged appearance. Furthermore, there's a heap of evidence supporting the fact that the more folded a brain is, the quicker it can process information.

In fact, the researchers found a direct correlation between the number of years participants had been meditating for and the amount of gyrification, which suggests that, over time, people who meditate see an increase in the speed at which they can process information. Speaking to Medical Express, Eileen Luders, one of the researchers, said:

"Meditators are known to be masters in introspection and awareness as well as emotional control and self-regulation, so the findings make sense that the longer someone has meditated, the higher the degree of folding..."

While the finding will likely make those who meditate smile smugly and say "I told you so", you should attempt to rise above it with Zen-like calm. After all, it might do you good.