Unless you're completely killing your smartphone's battery on a daily basis, you don't need to haul around a massive backup battery. A single emergency charge is all most of us need for those days when we talk or stream more than we intended, which makes the Tarot's 1,500 mAh capacity the perfect balance of size vs. power.
At just 0.28-inches thick, Powerocks claims the Tarot is the thinnest backup battery you can buy. And while it's still considerably thicker than a credit card, it's certainly thin enough to slip into a heftier wallet. Like with any external battery the Tarot's got a USB port for charging/recharging and it's got enough capacity to fully recharge a single smartphone. So as long as you're not heading out into the jungle for a week, for just $35 it should easily serve all of your emergency power needs. More here.
You usually don't expect a lamp to do much more than provide a little illumination and snazz up a room. But maybe it's time you should. Monica Armani's Silenzio lamps are made with sound-absorbing foam and fabrics so they chase away the dark and the decibels.
But don't expect that sitting underneath the Silenzio to be anything like putting on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. At the most it will help minimize echos and prevent sounds from deafeningly bouncing around a large room like an underground cavern. And if you live in a house full of screaming kids and barking dogs, it's probably a worthwhile investment. More here.
If you're not living inside some kind of Beauty and the Beast nightmare, all your furniture is mercifully inanimate, but the Walking Cabinet gets you halfway there. It won't actually stroll across your living room, but it looks like it wants to.
Designed by Markus Johansson, the walking cabinet appears to have been frozen mid-strut either on its way down some kind of a furniture fashion runway, or triumphantly headed home after a fantastic date with a beautiful coffee table. The illusion of movement isn't just an opporunity to make really bizarre anthropomorphic furniture jokes either; it actually allows multiple units to be slid together and connected into one, longer cabinet.
The Walking Cabinet is just a design project for now, so don't expect one to come strolling into a storefront near you anytime soon. But if you drink enough and tilt your head sideways, you should be able to get a similar sort of look out of all your current furniture. More here.
Weighing just 99 grams and folding away into a compact package that's easy to pocket, Victorinox's new Swiss Army Bike Tool is the perfect weapon against misaligned handlebars and other on-the-road cycling emergencies.
Instead of a folding design, the tool disassembles into an L-wrench with an adapter for eight included bits, a set of tire levers, and a bright orange plastic case for holding everything together. But for $48, where's the token cork screw, plastic toothpick, and emergency nail file? More here.
Early this morning, while most of us were resting peacefully in our beds, everyone's favorite flaming ball of plasma decided to give NASA's cameras a little show. More specifically, the Solar Dynamics Observatory managed to capture our sun's biggest solar flare of the year thus far.
Classified as an M6.5, it's not the hugest solar flare—that honor belongs to the X-class. But it was at least enough to cause a "moderate" radio blackout that has since subsided.
And if it seems like we've been seeing more solar flares than usual these days, it's because we have. The sun's 11-year activity cycle is approaching its maximum, which it should officially hit by the end of the year. So if these incredible images are anything to go by, we're in for a few more treats over the next several months. All of which we can safely enjoy thanks to our lovely, protective atmosphere. More here.
Everybody knows about using oil as a fuel source, but London is putting a new spin on the concept. Soon the city will be mining its own sewers to bring up glorious globs of old cooking grease and melting them down into fuel. Delicious.
The chunks of fat, oil, and grease build-up—affectionately(?) referred to as "fatbergs"—have been an ongoing problem in London's sewer system. When the waste isn't just clogging up drains, it's making its way down further and clogging up the sewers. But now, a new power station is set to generate 130 gigawatt hours a year from the clogs—enough to power almost 40,000 homes. And that's a good enough excuse to go sewer-grease mining.
Some of the fat-generated energy will go back into running the local sewage works where the chunks of fat-ore are being mined, establishing a gross little cycle that should benefit just about everyone involved. Except maybe the grease-miners. And while using food-waste to produce energy is great, you'd ideally set up a way to do it that doesn't involve first clogging and then de-clogging sewers. But in the meantime this is a solid solution. More here.
Apple, which hates Google, is supposedly working with Yahoo, who will take anybody's love at this point, to figure out how "Yahoo's services can play a prominent role on Apple's iPhone and iPad", according to the WSJ. This actually shouldn't be too much of a surprise as data from Yahoo Finance and weather already pops up on the iPhone.
Apple and Yahoo are supposedly in talks about using Yahoo's content from Yahoo Sports (which is fantastic), Yahoo News and other Yahoo websites through Siri. It'd presumably be like how sport scores and stats can pop up in Siri right now—Yahoo would feed more of its content and data to iPhone users. That's not a bad thing.
The WSJ says Yahoo has also "contemplated ways" to replace Google as the search engine for iOS but the idea "remains a long shot" because of Yahoo's partnership with Bing (Bing powers Yahoo, after all). That would be a bad thing. A non-Google search engine would make for a worse experience. More content—especially if it's the good Yahoo content—on the iPhone could be a good thing. Siri needs to get better. Can Yahoo make it better? More here.
Thunderbolt's makin' like greased lighting. Intel has just introduced the newest revision of the interface and it will be capable of 20Gbps in both directions (as opposed to the previous 10). In other words, fast enough to transfer and play 4K video simultaneously. And it's all backwards compatible with old ports and cables to boot.
Intel just made the announcement at NAB 2013, but it'll be a little while until the speed hits end-users; production isn't scheduled to kick into high gear until 2014. Of course all that delicious throughput is limited to devices that support it, but it'll be a lovely burst for that small portion that do. More here.
They say if you build a better mouse trap the world will beat a path to your door. And the same will probably hold true for the first coffee shop to adopt this clever spoon-securing NOTA coffee mug designed by Lee Hae Seung Scott.
Often times a hot beverage will require more than just an initial stirring, having you either trying to find a clean place to keep your spoon in the interim, or leaving it in the mug and where it hits you in the face as you try to drink. Both are less than ideal solutions, but the latter is no longer an issue with the NOTA mug that features a set of built-in supports preventing a spoon from sliding around. It's as brilliant a solution as it is simple, and while not for sale, it thankfully doesn't look like a design that's too difficult to steal. More here.
Slow motion was invented to capture every single thing in slow motion. Explosions, cheetahs, robots, people and of course, hummingbirds. The detail you see in slow motion is always better than real life. What's amazing though is that even when you slow down a hummingbird, those damn birds still seem fast. But ticking down those wings for just a little bit brings out something new in them. They look so graceful!
Bruce Douglas Johnson shot the footage of hummingbirds in a feeder with a RED Epic-M at 225 FPS. More here.
If you're tired of the iPhone's boring black or white color options, but would also like to avoid a bulky case or letting Colorware have at it with your device, you might want to check out Clear-Coat's new color-changing Aurora skin.
The $35 self-adhesive decal is applied to your iPhone the same way as a screen protector, but it includes panels to cover almost every inch of the device. And thanks to an iridescent finish, the Aurora skin has an ever-changing rainbow tint that lets you customize your iPhone's finish by just moving it about. Don't like orange? Just move two degrees to the right and you'll be happy. More here.
Sugar is sweet, sugar is delicious, sugar is lovely but sugar can be so terribly bad for you. How much sugar is in foods and drinks you love? Like a soda or orange juice or cereal or even baked beans? Sugar is everywhere! BuzzFeed made a video visualizing the actual grams of sugar in each food and to see the actual snuff is dizzying.
Well this seems kinda irresponsible. Fred & Friends claims this ice tray that produces 14 frozen spikes is actually designed to make your drink more badass—like a spiked collar. But what it's clearly failing to realize is that the tray is also an easy way to create 14 stabbing weapons that leave little to no evidence behind on a warm day. So here's to hoping the bad guys of the world don't have an extra $10 lying around. More here.
A team of scientists claim to have developed techniques which allows them to read dreams via brain scans—and it could help us better understand what goes on in the brain while we sleep.
The team of researchers, from the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto, have been performing MRI scans while people drift into early stages of sleep. Just after participants fall asleep, they are awoken and asked about what they have seen. Each tiny mental image—from bronze statues to ice picks—is recounted and recorded, and the entire process repeated 200 times for each participant.
That gives the scientists a database of images, linked with brain activity, which can be grouped together into similar visual categories. So, cars, trucks and buses might all be linked under the category of vehicles, for instance.
From there, the scientists were able to analyze brain activity while participants slept, and attempt to predict what they were dreaming about. The results, published in Science, show that the researchers could predict what volunteers were seeing—at least at the broad broad category level—with 60 percent accuracy. Not perfect, but pretty impressive. Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani, one of the researchers, explains to the BBC:
"We were able to reveal dream content from brain activity during sleep, which was consistent with the subjects' verbal reports. I had a strong belief that dream decoding should be possible at least for particular aspects of dreaming... I was not very surprised by the results, but excited."
But this is only the start. Crucially, the scientists have only so far considered light sleep—and now the researchers are particularly interested in studying more vivid dreams which occur during deeper sleep. Next stop, Inception. More here.
Do you hear that? That cheering off in the distance? That's the sound of a million amateur chefs celebrating the fact that they no longer have to spend several minutes dicing hot dogs for their casseroles, easy meatloaf, or awful jello moulds. Because the Dog Dicer can turn a hot dog into a pile of diced processed 'meat' in less than a second.
For just $13 it's not just a one-hit wonder either. You can put everything from grapes, to celery, to cooked carrots under its multi-bladed guillotine and turn it all into a mound of diced, easy to swallow pieces. Dog/other foods Dicer, where have you been all my life? More here.
Looking for a spot to keep a small flower arrangement that doesn't block people from having conversations at the dinner table? These ultra-thin ceramic vases are designed to stack amongst the books on your shelf so you can keep a rose next to The Wars of the Roses, a daisy next to an orchid next to Wild Orchids. It's available here for $33 in white or blue finishes, and sadly there's no Kindle Edition.
All of Facebook Home's innovations are good, in a vacuum. The gestures being used seem well considered and generally intuitive. But if you've ever tried navigating around an app—say, the Facebook app's sliding panels—on a phone that's more than a year or so old, you'll know where this can go wrong.
The S3 and One X are the oldest models running Home, and those should be more than capable for now. Facebook says it's adding "more devices in the coming months". That probably means just newer models that can handle the software load, but if Home does find its way to your old junker, be advised you might just end up with more Facebook than your phone can handle. More here.
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.
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.
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.
