There's a natural charm to cycling that allows you to feel at one with the environment that surrounds you—but if that's not enough, maybe you need this bike that's made from the environment that surrounds you.
There's no way around the fact that a wooden bicycle isn't as practical as its metallic brethren. Wood just isn't naturally suited to frame building: it doesn't weather as well, is bulky, and rides strangely. But this amalgam of wood and steel is a triumph of old-school design and craftsmanship, and its looks make up for the material's shortcomings.
There's a lot to lust over here, from the wooden handlebars to the neatly jointed head and seat tubes. But the best thing has to be those beautifully curved wooden mud guards, that hug the wheels just right. Pricing is as yet unconfirmed—expect it to be high—but the bikes will finally go on sale in September. More here.
There's an endless number of distractions that can prevent us from curling up with a good book. So the folks at the London-based design studio, Tilt, created the OpenBook chair. It's an oversized comfy seat wrapped in an empty library that you can fill with your favorite books and magazines, creating an oasis of reading in a sea of distracting electronics.
The upholstered wall, featuring racks for hanging newspapers and magazines on the outside, also provides a bit of extra privacy from noise, and of course a place to rest your head. And while the OpenBook chair is certainly a lovely spot to escape into your favorite book, it also provides the perfect place to show off your amazing taste in literature to friends and other guests. Just keep the Where's Waldos hidden in a back room. More here.
You might not think that spinach knows what's up, but the produce in your fridge is still alive and aware. Which is creepy. But kind of awesome. According to new research, fruits and vegetables still have circadian rhythms up to a week after being harvested. And they respond to light patterns by producing chemical compounds to protect themselves against herbivores.
When researchers subjected fruits and vegetables to light and dark based on when insect predators sleep and wake, the plants recognized the patterns and generated protective compounds called glucosinolates in response. And when samples of cabbage were put on the same light/dark schedule as looper moth caterpillars they were damaged the least by the predators, compared with other samples on different light cycles.
Lettuce, spinach, zucchini, sweet potatoes, carrots and blueberries all defended themselves similarly, though through different chemical mechanisms, when put on the looper moth caterpillar schedule. The research is interesting in itself, but more importantly has potential applications for reducing pesticide use in harvested crops. Though it may seem like protecting growing plants is the only goal, fruits and vegetables must also be safeguarded from pests after they are harvested. Plants' own defenses could reduce the need for harsh pesticides in the future. That zucchini knows when you eat ice cream in the middle of the night and it's throwing shade. More here.
There are the LED lightbulbs you know you should buy, and then there are the insane 10 for $10 sales that try to lure you back to the incandescent days. But betweeneverlasting light bulbs, app-controlled light bulbs and light bulbs that do the dishes and see into the future, it's pretty clear that change is upon us. Bulb life, light quality and price all factor in. What do you buy and why?
Now that its bigger brother Blu-ray has stolen the spotlight, paltry 4.7 GB DVDs have slowly started to fade into obscurity. But could they be poised for a comeback? A trio of Chinese scientists have discovered a breakthrough process that could, at least in theory, allow a DVD to store a whopping 1,000 TB—or a full petabyte—of data.
The exact science and technology behind the discovery is detailed in this paper, but here's the gist of it in layman's terms. The storage capacity of a DVD is limited by the size of the laser beam burning the small pits that represent the streams of data. Blu-ray increased this capacity by switching to even smaller blue lasers, but the storage capacity of that technology maxed out as well.
You see, back in 1873, a German physicist named Ernst Abbe found that a beam of light focused through a lens could not be any smaller than half of the light's wavelength. And for visible light, which is used to burn digital media discs, that's around 500 nanometers. So instead of breaking that law, the researchers found a way to work around it using two beams of light that cancel each other out. And by ensuring the beams don't completely overlap, a much smaller beam can be created to burn even smaller pits on a disc, massively increasing its capacity.
There's a still a lot to be perfected before this technology could reach consumers. Like how these incredibly tiny pits of data can be actually be read after they're created. And since writing 1,000 TB of data would take forever, developing faster ways to burn discs will also be necessary before consumers are ready to adopt the new technology. But the prospect of DVDs and Blu-rays taking a quantum leap in storage capacity is still incredibly exciting. More here.
You're about to be able to cloak short video clips in vintage filters. Facebook just added video to Instagram, similar to Twitter's Vine app, only smarter. It has many more features than Vine—it looks like video sharing done right.
Are you planning an early summer lakeside knife fight? To ensure you have the upper hand grab one of these floating cork knives.
But really, how clever is this $26 blade? It's summer, so you're (hopefully) going to be spending a lot of time by the water. Maybe you're fishing. Maybe you're tending to the boat. Maybe you're camping near a creek. Whatever it is, you might need a knife. And this one won't swim away because it has it's always wearing its cork life jacket. More here.
Though chances are Curiosity is going to come up empty-handed as far as living, potentially breathing Martians are concerned, four billion years ago might have told a very different tale. After recently examining meteorites and rocks from Mars, scientists have discovered that not only did Mars once have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, but it was developed over one billion years before Earth's.
Some of the rocks in question actually came from NASA's Spirit Mars rover, which scientists compared to Martian meteorites that had crash landed on Earth. Spirit's rocks, which came from a 3.7 billion-year-old section of the planet, show signs of early exposure to oxygen before they sank back into the terrain. The Martian meteorites, though, came from deep within the surface, which is why they appear virtually unaffected by any sort of oxygen-containing atmosphere.
Most exciting about this discovery, though, is the fact that an oxygen-rich environment is a very strong indicator for life. On Earth, we know that oxygen levels slowly increased thanks to photosynthesizing microbes, which just as well may have been the case on Mars. According to Professor Bernard Wood of Oxford University:
As oxidation is what gives Mars its distinctive colour, it is likely that the 'red planet' was wet, warm, and rusty billions of years before Earth's atmosphere became oxygen-rich.
Though it may still be mostly speculative at this point, there's a decent chance that all those wonderful pictures Curiosity beams down could actually be a peek into our planet's red, dusty future. More here.
How to actually access the hidden settings is unclear as it doesn't appear to be readily available to everyone with the beta. The above video shows a handful of nice-to-have tweaks like the ability to nest folders within folders now that iOS 7 has pages within folders. You can even hide pre-installed apps!
Other hidden gems include gestures that are activated from corners or swipes from the edge. The latter of which can already be found in Mail and Safari, for instance. As 9to5Mac points out, we could see these new-to-iOS gestures for quicker app switching later on but not much else, as the settings are hidden and likely only for internal use. More here.
If you've got $38 to spare and a few weeks to wait for delivery, Brando's got a new temperature sensing travel mug that guarantees you'll never again burn your mouth on scalding hot coffee—or accidentally sip a stale brew that's gone cold.
A built-in thermometer lets the insulated mug report back how hot or cold its contents are via a two-digit LCD display on the outside. But if you can't make hide nor hare of the metric system mumbo jumbo it uses to display the temperature, the mug also has a heart on its side that glows blue, orange, or red, visually indicating how hot or cold your beverage is. Just don't expect your lawsuit against McDonald's to hold up when you're holding indisputable evidence your coffee was too hot to drink. More here.
Just when you thought that mankind's genius could go no further, four years of research has given birth to a new apex in cork innovation. Please say hello to your newest wine-stopper, the Helix cork.
The product of a collaboration beween the industrious lushes at cork manufacturer Amorim and those at bottle-making company O-I, the new threaded, resealable design (and matching threaded bottle neck) is aimed at the "popular premium" wine market, which includes bottles that retail for between $8-$15, roughly. And while four years of research may seem a tad excessive, much of that time was spent waiting... and waiting... and waiting some more, allowing them to see whether or not the new cork had any effect on taste, aroma, or color. (Spoiler: it didn't.)
This kind of testing was necessary because the agglomerated type of cork used in the Helix is atypical of wine manufacturing. Since cork is cellular in nature, the presence of open spaces in a common, straight cork stopper is ideal—it allows the wine to fill those spaces, expand the cork, and form a tight seal. However, agglomerated cork is more granular, meaning fewer open spaces and less room for expansion. This would be a problem with a normal stopper, but the threaded design of the Helix creates its own tight seal, meaning oxygen can't escape on the sides while the density of the stopper prevents oxygen from escaping through the cork itself.
And its resealability is a major plus in the eyes of consumers, who want the convenience of a resealable container but still prefer cork to other methods of wine stoppering such as screw tops. According to Erik Bouts, O-I Europe president:
Cork is still by far the preferred stopper. Our research has found that at least 80% of consumers prefer the cork and glass combination for their wine. It has the highest-quality image in the market and now we have made it easier to use. And it is still the most sustainable option.
The Helix cork is being unveiled at Vinexpo in Bordeaux today, although its creators say it may still be two years before we start seeing it on shelves. So if you must have your fancy corks, until the day comes that we can leave the cork screws behind and securely reseal wine with ease, it seems your best option is to just finish the bottle. No one said being classy came easy. More here.
Sometimes a piece of design is so interesting, it's hard not to drop everything and pay attention to it. Dressed in bright, bold colors, with sharp, tessellated forms, these origami clocks from U.K. firm Raw Dezign definitely fits the bill.
The clocks come in turquoise, yellow, and cream, and you can pick from gold, black, or silver hands. Each one is cast in resin, and the tickers are hand molded to give each clock face its own custom look. They go for $78 and ship in two to three weeks (because, you know how custom work goes). They're eye-catching, one-of-a-kind, and infinitely more interesting than clock of the run-of-the-mill cuckoo variety. More here.
The Man has his hand in your inbox, cops are intimidating citizens who film them beating other citizens, it's only logical to want to keep the private contents of your SD card, well, private. The Covert Coin from CCS Spy Gear is a precision-machined piece of retired US currency that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing when closed. Which is great, until you accidentally deposit 16GB of files into a parking meter. More here.
For the most part, we humans are better at things than we were thousands of years ago. But there are some things the ancients had down pat. Roman concrete, for instance, is just way better than anything we can whip up today. Finally, after some 2,000 years, modern-day scientists have figured it out. And it's a secret worth knowing.
Concrete, while often not exactly pretty, is a super important tool of city-building today. We've been using Portland cement (an ingredient in concrete) as a binder for nearly 200 years as a building block of modern architecture, but it just can't hold a candle to that old Roman stuff. There are concrete harbors in Italy that are still doing pretty well after thousands of years. Meanwhile, a modern-day Portland cement structure is lucky to last 50 years when exposed to saltwater.
Now, after years of research in labs across the US and Europe, scientists have figured out that the most robust Roman concrete is a specific mixture of lime and volcanic rock, the details of which have been published in this month's issues of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and American Mineralogist.
The researchers described it this way in a press release on the subject:
The Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock. For underwater structures, lime and volcanic ash were mixed to form mortar, and this mortar and volcanic tuff were packed into wooden forms. The seawater instantly triggered a hot chemical reaction. The lime was hydrated – incorporating water molecules into its structure – and reacted with the ash to cement the whole mixture together.
And it gets even better. Portland cement is environmentally messy to produce, accounting for some seven percent of the C02 modern industry produces. Roman concrete? Much, much greener. There's still a lot of work to be done in adapting traditional Roman construction techniques to today's needs. But the recipe is as good as ever. We just have to get cookin'. More here.
Jun 14, 2013
While solar power promises a lot, it's only ever going to help satisfy our energy needs if it becomes efficient enough. Fortunately, Sharp has just made the world's most efficient solar cell, which converts a staggering 44.4 percent of incident light into electricity. Take that, fossil fuels.
The cell uses a special lens-based concentrator system, which focuses sunlight onto the cell to help improve the efficiency Once the light's focussed, a stack of three photo-absorption layers convert it into electricity. Even then it's no mean feat to squeeze out an efficiency of 44.4 percent, and the process saw Sharp invest a huge amount of time in tuning the device's dimensions to focus the light properly and reduce losses between layers.
While it's impressive, you probably won't see one strapped to the roof of a house any time soon. Devices this exotic are more likely to end up on a spacecraft in the first instance, where efficiency trumps cost every time. That's not to say it won't ever make it to the domestic market—it might just take a little time. More here.
Any task requiring the use of clear tape would be a lot easier if you could snatch a strip of the sticky stuff with just one hand. And while there have been many complicated contraptions that promise exactly that functionality, Black+Blum have found a simpler approach that takes advantage of that perpetual force known as gravity.
For starters, the On a Roll tape dispenser is made from cast iron, and weighs in at a hefty 2.3 pounds. So no matter how hard you pull and yank on a strip of tape, its weight and grippy rubber feet guarantee the tape will break before the dispenser budges. And further taking advantage of gravity, the angled support keeps the roll in place without requiring additional components. Simplicity is the name of the game here, and if you want a tape dispenser that could probably survive a nuclear blast, this would be $44 well spent. More here.
Amazon Japan's official Twitter account even jokingly tweeted that the Ideaco garbage can "was not the new Mac Pro".
The gag worked. That tweet was retweeted over thirteen thousand times and favorited nearly three thousand times. And currently, this garbage can is ranked number deux in the online retailer's interior furniture best sellers. It's also Amazon Japan's best selling garbage can.
There are also the inevitable funny Amazon reviews, with people "warning" that this was in fact a garbage can and pointing out that it could not run Thunderbolt 2. There was even a wry worry about how the black cylinder could show dust.
But as one Amazon Japan reviewer noted, "It does have the innovative ability to hide the plastic bag by a concealing cover." Shame it can't run Thunderbolt, though! More here.
You may have spent a small fortune on the impressive home theater setup in your living room, but when you're watching TV in bed, are you really going to settle for the crappy sound coming from its tiny speakers? Of course not. But skip the redundant bedroom surround sound setup and go with these SoftSound pillows which feature a wireless set of stereo speakers built right in.
Instead of opting for Bluetooth, which most TVs don't have built-in anyways, the pillow gets a wireless audio feed from an included RF transmitter that connects to and sits atop your TV. Because the audio out connection on your TV isn't controlled by its remote, the $130pillow comes with its own soft remote that won't hurt if you accidentally roll over onto it, plus a sleep timer to ensure you don't wake up at four in the morning with it blaring in your ears.
Now all we need is someone to develop a sub-woofer mattress for the experience to be complete. More here.
