Foldable Rain Boots Are Perfect For Finicky Spring Weather

You wear your rain boots to work, but when you get there, you want to stash them somewhere else. And you know what's good for that? These foldable Japanese wellies ($130).

They were originally designed with Japanese rice farmers in mind, so they can handle a lot of muck and general nastiness. And that's exactly the point of wearing rain boots in the first place. But they're not just durable, they're also compact thanks to the folding feature. That makes the boots extra handy because you can take them with you if there's threat of rain, or squirrel them away if the weather turns in your favor. That's pretty awesome, because rubber doesn't exactly breathe. More here.

This Is (Probably) the New Facebook Phone

Facebook has a big event planned Thursday to show off a new homescreen, reportedly, along with a "midtier" (read: cheap) phone. According to well-known tipster evleaks, this is it. It looks pretty boring, sure, but boring is a billion million times better than Facebook's last gawd awful swing at hardware. Baby steps! More here.

This Could Be the World’s Smallest Night Vision Camera

The CHOBi CAM Pro 3 looks like it's just barely larger than the compact flash memory cards our digital cameras once used, but it's still capable of snapping 11 megapixel stills, and recording full 1080P video. On a full charge you can expect to get an impressive 120 minutes of record time, but that's probably a bit shorter when shooting in the dark since you'll need to switch on the five infrared LEDs surrounding the lens.

And since the camera is so small, when using its night vision capabilities you only have a range of about three feet, but surprisingly the results don't completely suck. Especially since it will only set you back about $54. More here.

You Can Access Dropbox From Inside Yahoo Mail Now

If you're using Yahoo Mail, you don't have to worry about attachment size limits anymore—you can now access your Dropbox from right within your email account.

You can add files from your own Dropbox to any message, and you can save stuff people send you back to Dropbox as well. And the integration does away with file size limits, so you can send giant photo albums around to your family at will. That is, if you are actually using Yahoo Mail. More here.

The Pirate Bay Is Now the World’s Largest File-Sharing Site

While The Pirate Pay is certainly notorious, it's always oddly lingered in the mid-table when it comes to real-world file sharing. No longer, though: according to fresh analysis by Torrent Freak, the site has now sailed into the top spot as the world's most-used file sharing site.

While that is in part down to a gradual increase in the number of people visiting the site, Torrent Freak points out the real reason behind the success is in fact the fall in popularity of one-click hosting sites, like 4Shared, following the shutdown of Megaupload.

Less than two years ago those one-click download sites ruled the roost by a significant margin, and The Pirate Bay sat at a lowly sixth place. But since the Megaupload shutdown, most cyberlockers have implemented measures to keep pirates at bay—and seen a massive decline in user base as a result. Now, half of the top 10 file-sharing sites are BitTorrent-based, compared to just two back in 2011.

The figures—which include just English-language file-sharing sites—were calculated using several traffic comparison and analytic tools, according to Torrent Freak, including Compete, Quantcast and Alexa. You can see the leader table below, or read more over on Torrent Freak.

What If The Sun Disappeared?

This is actually a pretty great thought experiment. At first it might seem kind of pointless to talk about what would happen if the sun vanished, but it doesn't actually result in the immediate destruction of everything. Which is weird. Vsauce walks through a pretty nuanced description of how earth's natural systems would slowly fail, but over weeks and even years, not seconds. The cold would get us in the end, but extremophiles that live in deep sea volcanoes and thermal vents could survive for billions of years.

Scrambling Eggs Inside Its Shells to Make Scrambled Hard Boiled Eggs Looks So Fun

Here's a fun little cooking trick for you to try: scramble eggs inside its shell so that you can make scrambled hard boiled eggs. Meaning the entire egg will be perfectly golden all around. Delicious!

A Sculpture Made of 10,000 Balloons Redefines Balloon Art

Jason Hackensworth is a balloon artist, but not the kind that wears oversized shoes and has been the villain in a 1990 horror movie. He's known for his balloon sculptures of biological forms and creatures, like this anemone-like sculpture, currently on display in the Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

The installation is called Pisces. Made from 10,000-balloons, it's Hackensworth's interpretation of the Greek legend of Aphrodite and her son Eros escaping the monster Typhon by becoming a pair of intertwined fish. The image of the duo was later immortalized in the sky as the constellation Pisces. It took Hackensworth and his team nearly a week to blow up the balloons then weave them all together into this towering creation. Imagine how many balloons popped in the process. Anyway, it came together to create this amazing sculpture, which is on display through April 14. It's much more impressive than your average balloon animal. More here.

A Batman Coffee Table Bruce Wayne Wish He Had

Because we all dreamed about being Bruce Wayne once upon a time (or to this day), here's something you can get that he could never: a batman logo coffee table. Made by Charles Lushear of the Bohemian Workshop, the coffee table is carved from wood with hairpin legs and is a must for any comic book geek still living with his parents or someone who has a really understanding girlfriend (or boyfriend).

The bad news? You can't actually buy the Bat signal coffee table. DC Comics found out about Lushear's beautiful wood work and only allows him to display it on his website. Still, it's comforting knowing that at least one man can pretend to be Bruce Wayne. More here.

With an Arched Bookshelf You’re Never At Risk of an Avalanche

Designer Ivan Zhang has the perfect solution for anyone who's tired of angling the last book on a shelf so the rest of them don't perpetually fall over. Instead of some space-wasting bookend, he's simply added graceful arching shelves to this piece which tasks gravity with keeping them all standing.

The arched shelves also provide structural support, constantly pushing outwards which keeps the folding frame from collapsing when it's set up. And while function is definitely leading the way with this design, form is not far behind since the curved shelves don't look too bad either. More here.

Google Translate Will Now Work Without the Internet on Your Android Phone

Google Translate for Android will now offer downloadable offline language packs. So now when you're staring at a weird sign in a country where you don't speak the language, your phone will actually be able to help you.

This solves one of the hugely obvious problems with the translation app. When you're traveling abroad, you usually don't have access to the Internet. That also happens to be when translations are most useful.

The new language packs will be available in fifty (!) languages. They aren't as comprehensive as the real thing, but you don't need to translate fine literature. You just need to find the bathroom. More here.

A Wooden Chair That’s As Comfy As a Cushion

Whether at school, at the DMV, or at an over-crowded family get-together; we've all done time sitting on a cheap, uncomfortable wooden chair. But it doesn't have to be that way. With just a little flexible polymer added to the mix a wooden chair doesn't need a cushion to be comfy.

J.C. Karich's Rombo Chair is proof of that. The backrest and seat are composed of ash plywood segments connected in a diamond pattern using flexible polymer in between. The results are a chair that's still made of cheap components, but one that flexes under your weight providing an enjoyable spot to sit for a spell. More here.

The Sne Stand Cradles Your iPad In Its Graceful Curve

Each stand is hand-made from Baltic Birch plywood, and in the landscape orientation it holds your iPad at a comfortable 40 degree angle without hindering access to any of its buttons. There are no product shots of it being used in a portrait orientation, but presumably it's not impossible—just not ideal. Only 2,000 of the snes are being produced, which helps explain the $90 price tag for what is essentially a warped piece of wood. More here.

The Next iOS Needs to Look Like This

App Switcher Concept: Multitasking Redesign for iOS from Jesse Head on Vimeo.

Graphene Sponges: The New Lightest Material on the Planet

At this point, it'd be more of a surprise if graphene wasn't an integral part of a mind-bending, record-setting new technology. But, of course, it is. Again. Enter the lightest material in the world: graphene aerogel.

Aerogel is nothing new. All made primarily of air, different flavors of aerogel have been one-upping each other for the title of lightest for years now. The previous record holder was aerographite with a density of 0.18 mg/cm3, and now researchers at China's Zhejiang University have made some aerographene, which takes the crown with a density of 0.16 mg/cm3.

Building chunks of the almost-but-not-quite weightless material involves some high-tech freeze drying that can yield graphene sponges of arbitrary size. Professor Gao Chao, the research team's leader, says the process can easily be scaled up to an order of meters. And aside from being less dense than helium—an acheivement in and of itself—aerographene is extremely resilient and can mop up 900 times its weight in oil, making it potentially indispensable as a clean-up sponge.

The sponges may not be as immediately useful as say, terabit-down graphene antennas, but if/when there's another awful oil-spill, aerographene will be worth far more than its weight in awesomeness. Tack it on to the ever-growing list of graphene craziness. Some sort of graphene immortality can't be that far off, right? More here.

Hollow Fiber Optic Tunnels Can Blast Data at Practically the Speed of Light

We all want faster downloads, and developments like graphene antennas promise a speedy future. There is an upper limit—the speed of light—but that should be fast enough, right? Well a new kind of hollow fiber optic cable promises to get us 99.7 percent of the way there.

Developed by researchers at the University of Southampton in England, the new breed of cables makes use of good old-fashioned air to get the data really cooking. Technically, all fiber optic cables transmit data at the speed of light, but the transfer material can slow that down. And while the speed of light in air isn't close to max speed in a vacuum, it beats typical glass handily. Air-cables are 1,000 better than what we've got now, and can hit speeds of 10 terabytes per second.

Air-filled cables aren't a new idea, but in this iteration researchers have vastly improved the way light is bounced around corners, enabling not only blistering speed, but also reasonably low data loss of 3.5 dB/km. That still adds up at a distance though, so these crazy fast cables are most likely destined for supercomputer and data center applications, for now at least. But it's still a gigantic leap towards the ultimate end-game of high-speed data transmission. Then it's just a matter of rollout. More here.

Finally Someone Stepped Up and Designed A Way To Not Lose MagSafe Adapters

The $10 MagSafe to MagSafe 2 Converter is annoyingly expensive, but it's better than buying new gear. And now for $15 you can adopt an annoyingly expensive, but ingenious way to keep track of the tiny dongle. It's the Apple way.

The MagSafe Adapter Key Ring, created by Jonathan Bobrow, is 3D printed from stainless steel and uses the MagSafe converter's internal magnet to hold everything together. Bobrow claims that the magnet is much stronger than people might think, because usually we create torque from the charger cable to get it off.

There were some blissful years when MagSafes abounded and anyone who had a Macbook could find solace in a stranger at Starbucks if they lost their charger or their way. But in these treacherous, next-gen days only a steady diet of cash and 3D printing can save you. More here.

It Took Five Years To Make a Beautiful Android Phone

Android has become an enormous success in part by appealing to a lot of people who don't prioritize aesthetics. It's no wonder it's been ugly for half a decade. But finally, it's spawned a truly gorgeous object for everyone: the HTC One.

Google's take on phones was never meant to be pretty—it was just supposed to do all the things the iPhone could. All that mattered was that big touchscreen, and Computer Lite™ things like email and internet. And it did! It was rough, but hey, so was the first iPhone.

But as the software advanced into a fantasy cartoon playground for people who care about custom ROMs and spending hours tinkering with settings, the hardware stalled. Every new Android phone was like every other Android phone—and not in an Ah, slight refinement! way. Just a lazy way. Just a, Hey, let's make this part red now way. All smartphones are basically just glass rectangles, but the Android lineage has never cared to be anything more—never put any attention into powdering its pedestrian little face. More here.

You Should Wear a Red Shirt on Your Online Dating Profile

If you want to improve your chance of getting a date on any online dating site, you should wear a red shirt. Slate took a look at various studies comparing the same person wearing different colored clothes and each time, red was the most successful color. Do it. Change your online profile now.

It's like the secretly effective scarlet letter. One study showed a picture of the same woman bordered in different colors and the picture bordered in red was found to be more attractive and sexually appealing. It was the same woman! Another study showed 64 women on online dating sites. Their shirt was rotated between six different colors and red won out again. Slate says:

Twenty-one percent of their emails arrived when they wore red, whereas the other colors-black, white, yellow, green, and blue-attracted 14 to 17 percent of the total.

Moral of the story: wear red. It works for guys too. Read more about why here.

Pepsi’s Plastic Bottle Design Gets a Swirliie

Pepsi has redesigned the shape of its 16-ounce and 20-ounce plastic bottles for the first time in 16 years. Move the arrows on the slider above back and forth to see the a before and after comparison.

The slider isn't meant to be a 1:1 model, of the actual bottle sizes but it gives you an idea of the leaner look Pepsi is going for. The snazzy new shape sure has a refreshing plastic swirl to it, huh? It's more lively than the dated look from 1997.

AdAge reports that the new bottles will begin shipping in April but it could take until the end of the year for the nationwide turnover to be complete. More here.