Today, June 23, is National Women In Engineering Day as announced by the Women’s Engineering Society. This announcement coincides with the 95th anniversary of the founding of the Women’s Engineering Society.

The aim is to celebrate the work that women do in engineering, and to showcase the great engineering careers that are available for girls.

… Read More → "Today is National Women in Engineering Day"

It’s pretty easy to blow all your money buying stuff on Amazon (and Amazon’s new Fire Phone will make it even easier). But if you want to clear out your savings account right now in one fell swoop, here are some of the biggest-ticket items we could find in the Everything Store.

Read More → "9 of the most expensive things you can buy on Amazon"

If you’re ever short a pair of dice and an online alternative won’t do, you need no longer despair. Maker firm Intridea has created a real-world, internet-connected dice roller that can be operated via Twitter. DiceBot will roll the dice when prompted and then respond with a picture of your score.

DiceBot is, of course, an experiment and proof-of-concept rather than a practical solution. It forms part of Intridea’s exploration of … Read More → "DiceBot will roll a pair of dice for a tweet"

Here’s how weather forecasts in the United States work: The National Weather Service attaches devices that measure pressure, temperature and humidity to weather balloons that are launched, twice a day, from 69 locations in the US. This is the way it has been since, well, the 1930s.

Now, the Weather Service is finally getting better data by using … Read More → "The National Weather Service will convert airplanes to weather balloons"

Many soldiers dream of having instant cover on the battlefield, and it looks like they might just get their wish. DARPA is soliciting proposals for BlockADE (Block Access to Deny Entry), a system that would automatically form a barrier from material stuffed into a canister 1ft by 6.5ft or smaller. If US troops needed to block off an entrance or create a makeshift building, all they’d have to do is hit a … Read More → "The US military wants walls that automatically pop out of cans"

What do you do with the abandoned railways that once held the promise of trans-continental linkage and progress? Some have converted them into tourist-friendly pathways. But Mexican artists and brothers Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene decided to traverse the nearly 9,000 km of railway in Mexico and Ecuador that, in 1995, was abandoned and left to decay. But they didn& … Read More → "A artist-built vehicle designed to traverse 9,000 kilometers of abandoned railways in Mexico"

When you walk into the Shapeways headquarters in a sprawling New York City warehouse building, it doesn’t feel like a factory. It’s something different, somehow unforgettable, inevitably new. As it should be. This is one of the world’s first full service 3D-printing factories, and it’s not like any factory I’ve ever seen.

Founded in the Netherlands in 2007 as a spinoff of Philips electronics, Shapeways is … Read More → "Shapeways, the 3D printing factory of the future"

The heat in big buildings is a massive energy suck. Commercial buildings account for 20 percent of the national energy consumption—a big number on its own, but stunning when you consider that often, those buildings are half empty.

A new project from MIT’s Senseable City Lab is looking to decrease the amount of wasted energy by creating hyper-localized beams of heat. Called Local Warming, the prototype system uses LED … Read More → "MIT invents a radical new way to heat buildings: Spotlights that follow you"

The murky world of lobby groups bankrolling politicians is garnering more attention, but is there a way to find out which representatives are in the pocket without a lot of tedious research? A 16-year-old programmer has developed a browser plugin that, when you mouse-over the name of a US lawmaker, will serve up a list of which parties have donated to their campaign funds, and the quantities. Greenhouse (geddit?) is currently available for Chrome and Safari, with Firefox coming at some point in the future — although our lawyers have (probably) … Read More → "Teenager builds browser plugin to show you where politicians get their funding"

But expensive cars and private planes decked out with luxurious leather interiors surprisingly can’t hold a candle to this gorgeous interior designed by Giopato & Coombes which you’ll find in a—cottage? Nope. Try a private helicopter.

AugustaWestland had reached out to the studio to come up with a radical … Read More → "Lovely living room could end up inside a helicopter"