‘Am I Going Down’ is a pretty simple app: given your departure, destination, airline and aircraft of choice, it spits out the odds of your plane turning into a fiery wreck. It’s meant to put nervous fliers at ease, thanks to the astronomic odds (one in 5.4 million for my last transatlantic flight) of crashing.

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I used to think there was no better way to kickstart my day than blasting “So Fresh, So Clean” in the shower while loofaing my shoulders. But I was wrong—turns out I could be having a multi-temperature water and steam shower experience while blasting Outkast in four-speaker surround sound with a full-on light show.

Kohler calls its new DTV+ shower system a “Digital … Read More → "Kohler’s new shower has touchscreen-controlled speakers and mood lights"

What does the internet have in common with an ant colony? More than you might think.

It doesn’t have much in common with the common ant, of course. As the anteater in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach puts it, “Just as you would never confuse an individual tree with a forest, so here you must not take an … Read More → "The independent discovery of TCP/IP, by ants"

A new electronic implant can fight bacterial infection inside the body and then harmlessly dissolve. The simple, passive device is made entirely of silk and magnesium, which are both benign, biocompatible materials. The device, which can be loaded with antibiotics, could be implanted inside the body during surgery and then wirelessly triggered from outside to kill bacteria using heat or by releasing drugs. Once its work is done, it would dissolve.
… Read More → "Silk implants fight bacterial infection then vanish"

In March, you’ll be able to control an industrial robot arm directly from a web app. The installation, called RoboChop, will be located at the CeBIT 2015 in Hanover, Germany. Four different robot arms will be given 2,000 bright yellow polystyrene blocks. What happens with those blocks will be up to the citizens of the internet.

From the web app, users will be … Read More → "The RoboChop will let you use an industrial robot arm to build furniture"

Once upon a time, the Morning Glory hot spring was deep blue in color, much like the flower it was originally named after. Over the decades, however, tourists visiting the natural attraction have changed its hue by tossing in coins, charms, rocks, and other foreign objects, which have partially blocked Morning Glory’s underground heat source and created an opportunity for new photosynthetic microorganisms that wouldn’t have been able … Read More → "So many people threw pennies into a Yellowstone hot spring that it changed colors"

These are the contents of a mysterious white bag found hidden in Neil Armstrong’s closet: Weird looking lamps, wrenches, utility brackets, sights, and a film camera that later was identified as the one that captured the famous Apollo 11’s descent on the Moon’s surface. Nobody knew about it, including his widow.

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In 2010, nine new arrivals from a Dutch safari park used an excited, high-pitched call for apples – while the locals used a disinterested grunt.

By 2013, the Dutch chimps had switched to a similar low grunt, despite an undiminished passion for apples.

This is the first evidence of chimps re-learning such “referential calls”.

The findings, reported in the journal Current Biology, suggest that when chimp grunts refer to objects, they can function in a surprisingly … Read More → "Chimps ‘learn local grunts’ to talk to new neighbours"

In this most entertaining video, a pair of robotic xylophones and a robotic glockenspiel play a rousing rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The robots, named MarimBot, XyloBot, and GlockenBot, were created by artist Eric Singer for a robotic orchestra (orchestrion) he is building for a Paris night club.
via Read More → "Two robotic xylophones and a robotic glockenspiel playing ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’"