Rovio Intros Angry Birds Facebook Share & Play

Granted it's not quite, you know, organ donation, but Rovio's offering up some Facebook magic of its own. The casual game maker has rolled out the Share & Play feature, which lets users embed their latest Angry Birds level onto their friends' Timelines for some slingshot-happy bragging rights. Sharing goes beyond just Facebook however -- you can embed the playable level on other sites as well.

PoP Video Peripheral Turns iPod Touches and iPhones Into Pico Projectors for $99

The PoP Video pairs up with iPod touches (3rd / 4th generation) and iPhones (4 / 4S) via Apple's proprietary 30-pin connector, essentially turning your device into an unorthodox pico projector. According to PoP's site, the 3.5 ounce peripheral's capable of 960 x 540 video output and can give you up to two hours of "playtime" on a single charge -- achieved by way of micro-USB. 

It all wouldn't be worth it without the free iOS app, though, which lets folks tinker with settings and do what it's intended to do: project videos, pics as well as browsing within Safari. The $99 PoP Video is up for pre-order now here.

Windows 8 Won’t Play DVDs as Standard

Microsoft has recently been dribbling out news of the media functionality of Windows 8, and little has been surprising. But here's something weird: unless you buy the Media Center version of the OS, Windows won't offer any native facility for DVD playback.

Of course, you'll be able to use a piece of free third-party software, like VLC, to watch a DVD. And to make it clear, we are only talking about video DVDs, not data DVDs. But, uh, it still seems like somewhat of a step back in time. So what gives?

The Windows developers justify the decision by explaining DVD use on computers is "in sharp decline", adding that it would have to spend "a significant amount in royalties" to offer support for optical media. Instead, online media is the focus for Windows 8: H.264, VC-1, MP4, AAC, WMA, MP3, those kinds of file types.

So, what seems like an odd decision is just a big money-saver for Microsoft. And it won't really affect end users, who can just download a piece of free software. But that doesn't stop it feeling plain weird.

Heat-Conducting Spoons Make Ice Cream Scooping Hassle-Free

There's nothing like a heaping serving of perfect, barely melted ice cream. But when you take the tub out of the freezer, it's so hard and cold, you have to use some serious elbow grease to force out a proper scoop .

You just can't wait, either. The good news is now, you don't have to. Japanese designer Naoki Terada has invented heat-conducting spoons that slice right through your rock solid ice cream, softening as it cuts through the frosty fare.

Tereada deserves some kind of medal for his innovative utensil, dubbed 15.0%, a reference to the Japanese regulation that requires ice cream to include 15 percent milk solids. With a wide handle, the spoon is designed with the shape of your hand in mind, in order to give you more power when you exert the brute force to required to extract your desert from the carton. More here.

Made out of aluminum, it comes in three styles specific to different flavor, each shaped for optimum bowl-scraping. The vanilla version has an egg-shaped tip, the chocolate model comes with an angular end, and the strawberry one is more like a spork. While the spoon is supposed to be sturdy enough to help you gorge on ice cream, you might not have the strength to resist.

Treasure Hunters Flock to California Searching For Pieces of Six-Billion-Year-Old Meteor

A stay-at-home mom was out walking her dog recently when she stumbled upon a weird, 17-gram rock. It turned out to be 4 to 6 billion years old. And from space. And it's worth $20,000. Is El Dorado County due for another gold rush?

Space rocks have been on the county's mind ever since a mini-van-sized meteorite exploded over it, creating a sonic boom. Tiny fragments of the rock—which predates the formation of the sun—were scattered all over the hills, setting off a red alert to fanatics of a certain stripe. the local CBS affiliate reports that thousands of geologists, scientists, and treasure hunters have descended upon the town from all over the world hoping to get their own piece of precious space rock. Brenda Salverson, the lucky local mom, isn't the first to find a chunk of the pie. At least one professional hunter found some fragments, and if people keep hitching their wagons for gold country—many other's will likely get lucky as well. More here.

Very Little Jogging Can Make Your Life Much, Much Longer

You probably go jogging because it makes you less fat and it is less humiliating than being yelled at through a 60-minute spinning class. But according to a new examination of the Copenhagen City Heart study, jogging less than two hours per week can add years to your life.

The Copenhagen City Heart study started in 1976, around the time that the jogging boom happened, and followed 20,000 men and women, aged 20 to 98. Of the group, there were 1,116 male joggers and 768 female joggers. When their mortality rates were compared with the main group, the men lived 6.2 years longer than non-joggers, and women 5.6 years longer. Even crazier? The amount of exercise needed to drastically increase your lifespan isn't much at all. Just one to two and a half hours per week, split over two or three sessions. More here.
Sure, folks who at least make the effort to run a little bit every week might also be taking care of themselves in other ways. The lesson? Stop being such a lazy turd. Or if you're already pretty active, you are probably going to live to be older than your lazy turd friends. Really, though, rippling abdominals aside, five or six years tacked on to the end of your life for a few hours' worth of effort a week is a pretty good deal.

Is This the World’s Most Expensive Bookmark?

You should never save your place in a book by laying it face down. When it's bookmarked that way, its spine breaks and the binding will never be the same again. But if you're reading next to this beautiful book table, you can probably get away with it.

Designed by German studio Voigt Dietrich, this table's design does two things very efficiently: it houses books while serving as a bookmark. Simply put the tome you're reading across its peak, and your page will be saved until the next time you want to read. The table also includes a flat surface for objects that need a level place to rest (like, almost everything.) More here.

Facebook's iPhone Messenger to get Video Chat, Enlarged Variant for iPad?

Been itching for Facebook's iPhone-dedicated Messenger app to make its way over to the iPad?  Maybe for the iPhone variant to finally reap the benefits of Skype video chat integration as well? Well, according to 9to5Mac, Camp Zuckerberg is testing both in-house, with the latter planned to hit iPhones this summer. 

According to the site, one of its trustworthy tipsters was able to grant it access to beta versions of the new apps, and it has the pictures to prove it. Unsurprisingly, the Messenger app for iPad is described as simply a sized-up port of the iPhone version, but surely the bump would be appreciated by many if it ever gets officially released. Perhaps more interesting, though, is having Skype video chat baked into the iPhone version -- tapping an arrow next to a contact initiates your video session, and9to5Mac reports that it's "smooth most of the time." More here.

This Warm-Water Shower System Will Make Camping Considerably More Comfortable

Nemo Equipment's Helio Pressure Shower just might be the gear that finally gets me to go camping. This small, freestanding pressure-pump shower derives its heat from the sun and travels light at just about 2lbs all packed up.

Helio's foot pump and spray nozzle (which comes at the end of a 7-foot hose) provide a steady stream of pressurized water for your warm outdoor rinse-off—which, if its 11-liter bag is full, will last for between 5 and 7 minutes.

Just in time for camping season, The Helio Pressure Shower will be available this June. More here.

Sticky Protective Skin Lets You Mount Your iPhone Anywhere

Uguard.me's adhesive skins provide a more svelte alternative to bulky cases for protecting your phone. But they're also made with a special resin material that's slightly sticky to the touch. So they provide a bit of extra grip in the hand, and will actually stick to a smooth surface like a window.

Here's the kicker, though. The skin doesn't hold indefinitely. So while you could stick your phone to your car's window for some hands-free GPS navigation, it would only be a matter of time before it lost its grip and fell off. So it's best to think of these skins as a game of Cupertino Roulette that could end up costing you a lot more than just $20. More here.

Keep Your USB Thumbdrive Safe the Way the Ancients Did

Wax seals have been used for millennia to guarantee a document's authenticity. If you got a letter with an intact seal, you could be assured that what you're reading was legit. The Top Secret USB does the same thing for your digital documents—literally.

The Top Secret is a porcelain USB drive available in 2, 4, or 8GB models. Its casing includes a small indentation where, once sensitive documents have been loaded onto the drive, a small amount of molten wax is poured and imprinted with an intricate design from the included metal stamp. Once the wax cools, there is no way to open the drive and access the files without breaking the seal—your recipient can rest assured that they are receiving the unadulterated files. The Top Secret is currently available here and is available for $46 (2GB), $52 (4GB) and $59 (8GB).

Billionaire To Build Full-Sized Replica Of the Titanic

Just a few weeks after the 100th anniversaryof the Titanic's only voyage, Australian billionaire Clive Palmer has commissioned a Chinese shipyard to build a historically accurate replica of the colossal boat.

In addition to the Chinese builder, Palmer has hired a historical research team to mind all the details of recreating the nine-deck, 840-room cruise ship. The Daily Mail reports that like the original, Titanic II will have four towering smokestacks, but this time around they'll be entirely cosmetic. Instead of coal, Titanic II will be powered by diesel engines. Palmer says the ship will have gyms, spas and all the amenities people expect from luxury cruise ships. It'll also be outfitted with "21st-century technology"—presumably so that it doesn't sink on its 2016 maiden voyage.

At this time, Palmer says he has no idea how much the project will cost. We're taking bets on whether the bill will cost more than the political campaign Palmer also just announced. Yes,Titanic II Is obviously a stunt designed to promote Palmer's political career. But if you're going to spend a lot of money to get elected, you might as well build something huge and awesome. More here.

Does Chewing Gum Make You Dumb?

If you thought that chewing gum helped you concentrate, it might be time to reassess. While some old research has suggested that it can help you with abstract reasoning and logic puzzles, new research reveals that it can completely screw up your short-term memory.

The new study, carried out at the University of Cardiff in the UK, pitted participants against classic short-term memory challenges, with and without gum. The tests had the volunteers attempt to recall lists of words and numbers in the order they were seen or heard, and also had them identify missing items from lists after they had been read out.

The researchers found that chewing seems to impair our ability to recall items in the correct order, and also makes us worse at suggesting missing items from a memorized list. While in the past researchers have suggested that chewing promotes blood flow to the brain, in turn improving cognitive function, the researchers from Cardiff have a different theory.

They suggest that the periodic action that is chewing gets in the way of repetitious cognitive tasks. If you try and memorize a phone number while tapping your finger, you'll find it much harder than if you're not tapping—and they suggest the exact same thing is true of chewing. In fact, they even performed an experiment along those lines, and found that both tapping and chewing gum had similar results on short-term memory.

This flies in the face of some previous studies, which have suggested that chewing gum canimprove your ability to reason through complex problems and solve logic puzzles.

But there's a fundamental difference between these two cognitive processes: memorizing and accessing lists from short-term memory uses completely different processes and parts of the brain to logic and abstract reasoning. Logic is handled primarily by the neocortex, while short-term memory is dealt with all the way over in the pre-frontal lobe. Perhaps most interesting, though, is that the most recent studies have shown that any improvement only lasts for 20 minutes at best, anyway.

What this all means for your future chewing is difficult to say with certainty. If you use your short-term memory a lot at work, it might pay to kick the habit. If you're thinking through abstract concepts all day long though, the occasional quick chew might give you the boost you need. More here.

Forget Graphene, Silicene Is Here to Blow Your Mind

Remember how graphene, the single-atom thick layer of carbon was so slick it was going to change everything? Well it looks likesilicene is here to steal the spotlight. Researchers have just made the first sheet of single-atom thick silicon.

Silicene has been a work in progress for years, but they think they've finally got it down now, and it represents a tremendous breakthrough. Graphene is awesome, but it's proven a bit tricky to work it into components. Because silicene is made of silicon, which most chips are already made of, the integration process could be much simpler.

Patrick Vogt of Berlin's Technical University in Germany, along side researchers at Aix-Marseille University in France managed to create silicene by condensing silicon vapor onto a silver plate to form a single layer of atoms. They then tested the sheet and found that it closely matched the properties silicene was theorized to exhibit. The next (challenging) step will be to grow silicene on insulating substrates so that it can be fully tested and evaluated for potential future uses in electronics. More here.

Siri Will Cause Your iPhone 5 to Self-Destruct

Hey there, future person, you've misplaced your iPhone 5. Some nefarious person is trying to break in and steal all of your naked pictures. Not to worry, you've programed Siri to self-destruct Mission Impossible-style after three incorrect login attempts. Boom.

I just feel bad for the guy that thigh-dials three wrong logins in his pants pocket.

Hate Itchy Mosquito Bites? Building Up an Immunity Only Requires About 15,000 Bites Per Year

Meet Steve Schutz. Some might say he's very dedicated to his work. But others would call him downright crazy. You see Steve works in an insectarium, a place where mosquitos are born and raised. And to ensure its residents are well-fed and propagate, he serves up his bare armonce a week for dinner.

As a result, after a feeding the 50 red welts on his lower arm barely even register as a slight tingle since Steve has built up an immunity to the mosquito's saliva. Over the past 12 years he's been bitten over 150,000 times, since the warm fresh blood is basically what the insects feed on out in the wild. And it's just a heck of a lot easier than preparing 50 tiny insect-sized baby bottles full of blood. But it's all in the name of science, since the lab where Steve works studies the effects of pesticides on the bugs, to test if, and how quickly, they become resistant.

Temperature Sensitive Rug Changes Colors To Match the Seasons

When you decorate a room you're stuck with a single color palette all year round that doesn't necessarily reflect the changing seasons outside. So maybe we should look toSiren Elise Wilhelmsen's color-changing rugfor inspiration on designing a room that reflects, or contrasts, the temperatures outside.

Wilhelmsen refers to her Season Carpet as a "soft thermometer" and it's made from 100-percent wool dyed with special heat-sensitive pigments that change color depending on the ambient temperature. The rug is actually made up of three different colors that all shift their hues at different temperature ranges, so the pattern should actually be fairly unique as it transitions throughout the year. Unless your home's thermostat always maintains the perfect temperature indoors. In that case the rug's not going to put on a show for you. More here.

Samsung Overtakes Nokia as the World’s Biggest Phone Manufacturer

Samsung has just toppled Nokia's 14-year run as the world's biggest vendor of mobile phones in terms of shipments. In the first quarter of 2012 Samsung shipped 93.5 million handsets—36 per cent more than a year earlier—overtaking the Finnish phone giant who shipped a mere 82.7 million.

Bloomberg reports that it's Samsung's smartphones that have driven its sales, as it shipped a massive 44.5 million of the things in the first three months of the year. By way of comparison, Apple shipped 35.1 million units in the first quarter.

Nokia has been the world's biggest seller of mobile phone since 1998, a title which it snatched from Motorola. Remember those days, Moto? More here.

Keep Your Files Safe With Voice-Authenticating USB Drive

There are some sensitive documents that you want to ensure don't fall into the wrong hands, such as contracts or financial records. This voice-authenticating USB drive($50) will ensure no one's snooping into your sensitive stuff.

It looks just like a regular thumb drive, but using voice-recognition technology, it will only grant access to a password spoken by the owner. There's no installation required. Once you plug it in, it speak the password, and once it's authenticated you can start stashing your files. In the event you space on your password, it provides steps for you to reset. Get is here.

You Can Buy This $195 Million US Navy Stealth Ship for Just $100,000

If I had $100,000 handy, I would bid for theSea Shadow, the stealth ship that DARPA built for the US Navy in 1983. It's now for sale at GSA Auctions. The original price tag: the US Government paid $195 million to Lockheed Martin to build it. And you get a HMB-1 Mining Barge too in the package too.

THE EX-SEA SHADOW (IX-529)
YEAR BUILT: 1983
BUILDER: LOCKHEED MARTIN
OVERALL LENGTH: 164 FEET
WATERLINE LENGTH: 118 FEET
EXTREME BEAM 68 FEET
WATERLINE BEAM: 58 FEET
MAXIMUM NAVIGATIONAL DRAFT: 15 FEET
DRAFT LIMIT: 15 FEET
LIGHT DISPLACEMENT: 499 TONS
HULL MATERIAL: STEEL HULL AND SUPERSTRUCTURE
DIESEL ELECTRIC PROPULSION SYSTEM
NUMBER OF PROPELLERS: TWO

Needless to say, this ship would be perfect is you want to be a superhero or a supervillain.

The price will keep going up, for sure. It started at $50,000. But it will not get anywhere its original price tag. The reason: the US Government doesn't want you to keep it in its original form. If you want to buy it, you will have to destroy it! It has to be converted into scrap. More here.

THE EX-SEA SHADOW SHALL BE DISPOSED OF BY COMPLETELY DISMANTLING AND SCRAPPING WITHIN THE U.S.A. DISMANTILING IS DEFINED AS REDUCING THE PROPERTY SUCH AS IT HAS NO VALUE EXCEPT FOR ITS BASIC MATERIAL CONTENT.