Ed Summers, an open source Web developer, recently saw a friend tweet about Parliament WikiEdits,a UK Twitter “bot” that watched for anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from within the British Parliament’s internal networks. Summers was immediately inspired to do the same thing for the US Congress.

“The simplicity of combining Wikipedia and Twitter in this way immediately struck me as a potentially useful … Read More → "@Congressedits tweets anonymous Wikipedia edits from Capitol Hill"

It’s the attention to detail that often differentiates a good product from a great product, but designer Norihiko Terayama goes above and beyond the call of duty with his f,l,o,w,e,r,s ruler, which uses tiny dried flowers to represent the centimeter markings along its length.
via Gizmodo

… Read More → "Every centimeter mark on this ruler is actually a tiny embedded flower"

Designed by Japanese tech firm Adplus, the Elephant Steady latches onto the back of an iPhone 4S or higher (or 5th-gen iPod touch) using a built-in holder. It also has a hard-wired 3.5-mm plug, that goes into the phone’s headphone jack.

Once the Elephant Steady is powered up and its accompanying app is launched, the iPhone’s own processor and gyroscope come into play. As soon as any slight tilts or side-to-side movements of … Read More → "Elephant Steady camera stabilizer uses iPhone gyro to stay on the level"

The MIT students who hacked together a Cuisinart soft-serve machine, a Solidoodle, and a freezer to create this wonderful 3D ice cream printer have no plans to commercialize it; they just built it as a proof-of-concept. And that’s too bad, because if perfected this machine has the potential to engineer a perfect ice cream cone that’s far less likely to topple.

In its current form, … Read More → "3D-printed ice cream guarantees the perfectly balanced cone"

Commonwealth Edison will soon begin work on a new system that would keep the city’s business center, the Loop, protected during a catastrophe, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Knocking out a single susbstation — the middlemen between power plants and customers — can disrupt the flow of electricity for a huge area. But … Read More → "Chicago is installing a superconducting cable that can stop power outages in a disaster"

Exactly 45 years ago today, after months of preparation, Apollo 11 embarked on its now-legendary mission to the moon. But what exactly does it take to send three men into the great, vacuous unknown? See for yourself.
via Gizmodo

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By now, most readers know the advice cold. Use long, randomly generated passwords to lock down your digital assets. Never use the same password across two or more accounts. In abstract terms, the dictates are some of the best ways to protect against breaches suffered by one site—say, the one that hit Gawker in 2010 that exposed poorly cryptographically scrambled passwords for 1.3 million users—that spread like wildfire. Once hackers … Read More → "Mathematics makes strong case that “snoopy2” can be just fine as a password"

This is ‘Kiddie Arts’, a series of digital paintings by Dutch artist Telmo Pieper inspired by the drawings he made when he was four.
via Geekologie

Read More → "Artist recreates his childhood drawings as an adult"

The fossil of a newly discovered dinosaur has been found in China. At nine pounds and four feet long, the four-winged carnivore is believed to have been three times heavier and 60 percent longer than the second biggest four-winged dinosaur.
via The Wire

Continue reading</ … Read More → "Fossil of massive four-winged raptor found in China"

The sensors can detect a driver’s ECG—or electrocardiogram—through their clothing, even multiple layers of a suit, but are invisible since they’re stitched and integrated into the car seat’s fabric. And while most automotive fatigue-sensing systems simply alert the driver or attempt to wake them up in some way, the researchers at Nottingham Trent University in the UK envision them being used to activate a car’s … Read More → "Heart rate monitoring car seats keep you from drifting off"