Make a Cut in a Shady Box with a Pair of Light-Up Dikes

Diagonal-cutting pliers, known in the electrical trades as dikes, often do their work in the shadowy recesses of a junction box. Ever clipped the wires to hook up a new ceiling fan? You can't see a thing!

That's why the introduction of an LED is a welcome gimmick on these new pliers from Craftsman. The pair comes in a set alongside a pair of needlenose pliers. Those have a light, too. Handy, but not as essential. Most of their work happens in broad daylight, and even during those pliers' dark double duty as a roach clip, man, you've got the lighter right there anyway. More here.

Why Apple Stores Tilt the MacBook Pro Exactly 70 Degrees

If you thought Apple squeezes all those dollars out of your based on product and design alone, you're giving them too much credit.

Carmine Gallo, writing for Forbes, reports on an interesting bit of consumer-behavior mindfuckery the stores employ, specifically to seduce you into a love affair with their products—the MacBook Pro with retina display, in particular. Each morning, Apple Retail employees use an iPhone app as a level to ensure each screen is titled to exactly 70 degrees.

The main reason notebook computers screens are slightly angled is to encourage customers to adjust the screen to their ideal viewing angle-in other words, to touch the computer! ... Apple wants you to see the display for yourself and to experiment with apps and web sites to experience the power and performance of the devices.

It is for the same reason, Gallo explains, that the Apple Retail Stores let you spend unlimited time playing with the devices and browsing the internet, without any pressure to leave. More here.

Mysterious Electric Blue Clouds Appear Again Over the Poles

Every year around this time, mysterious electric blue clouds appear over the North and South pole. They are called noctilucent clouds and they can only be seen in deep twilight, when the Sun is below the horizon. According to NASA, "their origin is still largely a mystery":

Various theories associate them with meteoric dust, rocket exhaust, global warming—or some mixture of the three.

They are the highest clouds, located almost on the edge of space at 54 miles (85 kilometers) from the Earth's surface, in the mesosphere. They are very difficult to observe, but they appear as white and blue tendrils when they are illuminated by the Sun and the rest of the atmosphere is in our planet's shadow.

These were photographed by Brian Whittaker at 35,000 feet, on a flight from Ottawa to Newfoundland. More here.

First-Ever Mixer and Crossfader Dates Back Over a Century

In 1910, the French engineer Leon Gaumant demonstrated his sound-and-film synchronizing Chronophone system at the Gaumant Palace—a 5,500 seat reconstruction of the Hippodrome, which was at the time Europe's largest movie theatre—in Paris, FR.

At the time, moving pictures with synchronized sound were limited in length by the playing time of a gramophone records—the longest was 200ft, at 16 frames-per-second.

Gaument's Chronophone had two gramophone platters, between which a deft operator could switch back and forth—a clever solution! More here.

Microsoft Is Maybe, Possibly Launching Its Own Tablet Device Next Week

Mashable is posting about what is being called a credibly rumor of a Microsoft-made tablet, running Windows RT (a version of Windows 8), intended to rival Apple's iPad.

This is a big deal, maybe!

Hollywood blog The Wrap cites "an individual with knowledge of the company", who claims the software giant would be "making a foray into a new hardware category that would put the company in direct competition with rival Apple" - tablets.

Previous attempts at a Microsoft-branded tablet have been unsuccessful and short-lived. The most recent was killed before it even got out the gate, right around the initial launch of the earliest iPad.

If the rumors are true, this Microsoft tablet will be entering a climate of already-stiff competition. More here.

Windows 8 Has Deep Integration With Facebook, Twitter, Google

As part of its Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft has been releasing a small selection of apps for testing. One, called People, seems particularly interesting, acting as an OS-wide social and contact tool that integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Google, amongst others.

The cloud-based app is designed to keep contacts in order, sure, by syncing details from a glut of online address books. But it also lets users view and interact directly with their Facebook and Twitter accounts, retweeting posts or liking statuses, from within the app itself. The app is also designed to sync data from Exchange, Google and LinkedIn, and has a built-in conflict management system—a little like Windows Phone—which attempts to collate contact data. More here.

Shroud Your iPod Nano In This Adorable Little Black Book

If you're bored of wearing your iPod Nano on your wrist, or on your head, or wherever else, why not wrap it up in its own little handcrafted book that you can tuck away in the miniature library that is your pocket?

This adorable little iPod nano case is the smallest member of PQ's range of Little Black Books and it's rather predictably called the Littlest Black Book. It's made of a tiny wooden frame, which is leather bound, and it features a little book plate and ribbon, too. More here.

Do You Care if The Best Laptop Ever Is the Most Impossible to Repair?

The Retina Pro's unified construction not only means damage to the screen requires replacing an entire half of the computer, it means you'd have to risk destroying the entire thing to make changes. The RAM? Soldered to the motherboard. The hard drives? Proprietary and impossible to change.

With upgrading memory and hard drive space the two most common jobs you can do on a laptop, does the fact that these are now impossible make the Retina Pro less attractive to you? Would fabulous performance and the greatest screen in computing history compensate for Apple blocking you from upgrading your rig and requiring professional repairs to it? Or does it just look like an aluminum venus fly trap?

Why Smart People Are Actually Dumb

The human brain is a weird old thing. When confronted with a new, uncertain situation, it virtually always abandons careful analysis, and instead resorts to a host of mental shortcuts—that almost always lead to the wrong answer. Turns out, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to make such mistakes.

A new study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggests that you can be insanely intelligent, and still fall foul when it comes simple problems because of deviations in judgment—which are known as "cognitive bias".

To work all this out, a team of researchers form the University of Toronto gave 482 students a questionnaire of classic bias problems to complete. An example question runs along the lines of:

A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

If you're rushing, you might blurt out that the ball costs ten cents. It doesn't: it costs five. If you got it wrong, your brain made some shortcuts if thought made sense, but abandoned math along the way.

The researchers also measured a phenomenon called "anchoring bias", but what they were really interested in assessing was how the biases correlated with intelligence. So, they interspersed tests with with cognitive measures, like S.A.T. and Need for Cognition Scale questions.

Turns out that intelligence makes things worse, too. Writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology they explain that "more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots." In fact, that finding held across many different biases, and individuals who deliberated longer seemed to be even more susceptible to making mistakes. Double dammit.

So what's going on? Why are smart people seemingly so dumb some of the time? Sadly, nobody really knows. The best hypothesis yet suggests that it's tied up with the way we perceive ourselves and others. Basically, the way we process information, so some researchers suggest, makes it far easier for us to spot biases in other people than it is for us to notice ourselves making the exact same mistakes. More here.

What the Lines of a Red Solo Cup Actually Mean

Sipping too many adult beverages out of a red solo cup is a rite of passage in becoming a full-fledged human being. We've all done it. But have you ever wondered what the lines of a red solo cup mean? They're measurements for different types of alcohol.

That makes so much logical sense! A line for liquor, for wine and for a can of beer. It also makes like no real-life sense because the line for liquor is prick-specific pathetic, the line for wine would make you question why you're drinking wine out of a red solo cup and the line for beer is completely ignored, you're filling the carbonated deliciousness to the very top. Actually, let's be honest. The only line that really matters in a red solo cup is the lip line.

Anyway! The more you know. The lines have more purpose than design, grip or existing for beer pong. And even if Solo is sadly moving away from these iconic red cups for newer red cups, you can try and retroactively remember this for past house parties. More here.

Ray-Ban Foldable Aviators Make the Slickest Shades Even Better

Ray-Bans are some of the best sunglasses. The styles of are timeless and the lenses are quality. And while there have been foldable Wayfarers for years, now the classic Ray-Ban Aviators have gotten the same treatment.

A pair of these shades will run you between $195 and $295, depending on the style. Ray-Ban's been making Aviators since 1937, so they're something you can hold onto for a long time. Tom Cruise wore them in Top Gun and that was 1986, so they're not exactly going anywhere. They're coming soon on the Ray-Ban site, but in the meantime they're available in stores. There's just about nothing cooler than Aviators, and somehow now they're even better. More here.

Medieval Hoodie Makes You a Knight In Shining Cotton

One hit from a sword and you'll be dead faster than your social standing once you wear this out in public, but you won't find a more comfortable suit of armor than this plated hoodie created by Etsy seller Chadwick Dillon.

It comes complete with a fully retractable face plate and visor built into the hood, so you can be protected from attacking marauders, or just the rain—whichever happens to be your most pressing issue. Unfortunately you can't order one just yet, but once Chadwick (a perfectly matching medieval name) gets his Etsy shop in order, you'll be able to order thine self this fine garment and impress the damsels. More here.

Your DNA Changes as You Age

While our bodies age, scientists believe that our DNA at least remains constant. New research, however, reveals that, even though its sequence remains constant, subtle chemical changes occur to our DNA as we age—and it could explain why the risk of developing disease increases as we get older.

DNA is made up of four basic chemical building blocks, called adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. It's the sequences of those chemicals in a strand of DNA that determines what function a gene has, and one of the ways the resulting genes are controlled is a process called methylation. That just means that a methyl group — one carbon atom and three hydrogen atom—bonds to part of the DNA and subtly change its function.

New research, published in PNAS, however, shows that as we grow older our DNA's susceptibility to methylation changes. A team of researchers from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, extracted DNA from white blood cells of twenty newborn babies and twenty people aged between 89 and 100 years old, then compared their respective degrees of methylation.

In a newborn baby 73 percent of cytosine nucleotides were methylated, while in centenarians that figure rose to 80.5 percent. An intermediary example, taken from a 26-year-old male subject, exhibited 78 percent methylation. It's not clear why it happens, but the researchers speculate that it could be due to extremely subtle age-related changes to the DNA.

But what does it all mean? Well, taking a closer look at the samples, the researchers discovered that a third of the methylated groups which were different in the elderly compared to the young are already known to be linked to cancer risk.

If you think about the DNA strand as "hardware" and the added methyl groups as "software"—which isn't actually a bad analogy—you can think of the inappropriately placed methyl groups as software bugs that accumulate with age. It's just that, for humans, those bugs leads to increased risk of terminal disease. Fortunately, these kinds of findings should help scientists troubleshoot our internal apps. More here.

Finally a Left-Handed Person Can Feel Normal on the Internet

Left-handed people have it tough. Scissors aren't meant for them, the average mouse isn't shaped for them and gloves aren't meant for them. Everyday life has been all backwards. But it's okay! You can be normal on the Internet now with this left hand pointer icon.

Silvio Lorusso created a Chrome plugin that flips the hand cursor in Chrome (the thing that pops up when you hover over a link) from the traditional right-hand, to a left-hand. It's a quick and easy install to hold on to your sanity left-handed people. Install it here.

Apple Announces First Retina Display in a MacBook, 220ppi with 2880 x 1800 resolution

Apple just announced its next-generation MacBook Pro, and it comes equipped with a gorgeous 220 pixel-per-inch 2880 x 1800 display. That's quite a bit shy of the 326 ppi LCD on the iPhone 4S and the 264 ppi density of the new iPad's display, but it's still a massive improvement over the 1680 x 1050 pixels found on Apple's previous-generation clamshell. 

The new Retina is, as Apple marketing head Phil Shiller not-so-modestly pointed out during this morning's WWDC keynote, the "world's highest-resolution notebook display." It's also soon to be the highest-res LCD in any household, offering three million more pixels than your 1080p HDTV.

Adjustable Dividers Ensure No Book Will Ever Topple While On This Shelf

Benson's Format bookshelf uses a series ofinfinitely adjustable sliding dividers on every level to keep books upright, and to visually break up its simple form. It's great news if you absolutely hate it when books fall over, but bad news if you're into collecting bookends.

You have your choice of oak or walnut wood finishes, and a black or white lacquer if you're looking for something more modern. But the smallest version, measuring just three feet long on each side, starts at a hefty $547. And the largest version tops out at over $1,600 before customizations. But still, it's a small price to pay for peace of mind that everything on it is going to remain upright. More here.

New Windows Phone Store Lets you Wear Your 'I Heart WP' on Your Sleeve

So you love Windows Phone, but how can you let the world know? Until now, you'd either have to wave your object of desire around, or keep showing colleagues those "Smoked by Windows Phone" YouTube videos. 

Now, you can simply wear your alliance across your chest, or favorite beverage, thanks to a new CafePress store. Revealed in a Window steamblog post, the shop will let you grab mugs, t-shirts, stickers, magnets and more emblazoned with "I Heart Windows Phone" in icons. Not only that, in case all those soccer moms didn't know which side of the fence you stood, you can clear up the doubt by snagging a bodysuit for your youngest. Credit card at the ready? More here.

Are Double Ears a Genetic Disorder Or a Freaky Fashion Trend?

Whoa. It's probably still way too early on a Saturday to fully comprehend what you're seeing here, but artist Percy Lau has created this trippy earring design which makes it look like you've got a smaller ear growing off your lobe. Freaky.

You can get a pair for yourself from her Etsy store for around $40. But only if you like constantly being stared at while you go about your day, and freaking out everybody who walks by you. More here.

What Color Were Tomatoes Before All the Dinosaurs Died?

New research published in Nature suggests that the very same meteor that crashed into Earth 60 - 70 million years ago—the one responsible for wiping out all the dinosaurs—may also be responsible for the red color of today's tomatoes.

Parsing Nature's tomato genome analysis, PhysOrg reports that about the same time as the meteorite crash and the solar eclipse, the distant ancestor of the tomato plant tripled in size—an drastic and important response, as it is indicative of stressful growth conditions for plant life at that time.

The ancestor tomato, explains Rene Klein Lankhorst, "reacted by expanding its genome considerably in order to increase its chances of survival." When conditions on Earth improved again, explains PhysOrg, this ancestor of the plant got rid of a lot of genetic ballast, "but the genetic base for fruit formation had already been developed," including the tomato's signature red hue. More here.

Guy Gets Double Arm Transplant, Does World’s Best Robot Dance Move to Celebrate

I love sad stories with happy ending. This gentleman is Gabriel Granados Vergara, a 52-year-old man lost both arms below the elbows, charred beyond repair in an electrical accident. But thanks to an unnamed 34-year-old shooting victim, he got them back.

The double arm transplant was performed by Dr. Martin Iglesias at the National Institute of Medical Science and Nutrition in Mexico City. Granados, who is a government agent working for Mexico City's prosecutors' office, was very happy: "This is wonderful that after being without hands for some time, all of a sudden I see new hands."  More here.