Davi Barker was flying from Manchester, NH when, he says, he was stopped by two men who identified themselves as “managers” for the TSA, who claimed they had seen Bitcoins in his baggage …
via Boing Boing
… Read More → "TSA agents demand bag-search to look for “Bitcoins”"
You’re looking at a rabbit’s heart beating outside the animal that once hosted it. It’s alive, pumping blood on its own thanks to a revolutionary electronic membrane that may save your life by keeping your heart beating at a perfect rate.
The thin, circuit-lined stretchable membrane has been developed … Read More → "Revolutionary membrane can keep your heart beating perfectly forever"
Your friend told you about that obscure bluegrass-electro-punk band yesterday morning. That afternoon, you ran across one of their albums at a garage sale. Wait a minute—that’s them in that Doritos commercial, too! Coincidence … or conspiracy? More likely, you’re experiencing “frequency illusion,” somewhat better known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
via Pacific Standard</ … Read More → "The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: when a thing you just found out about suddenly seems to crop up everywhere"
If you’ve solved a Rubik’s Cube so many times that it no longer offers you a challenge, maybe it’s time to try a new shape? The Marusenko Sphere puts 54 spinning and sliding pieces into a globe-shaped puzzle that comes in five different levels of difficulty.
Designed and prototyped using a 3D printer … Read More → "Tackle this 3D-printed spherical Rubik’s Cube"
How is it that the boldest criminals so often turn out to be the most clueless? James Blankenship was, it would seem, pretty sure of himself when he broke into a home outside Cleveland in broad daylight last summer. “I thought you could only be charged with burglary if you break in during the nighttime,” he reportedly told the police officers who arrested him.
Before laughing too hard, you should know … Read More → "Why people have so much trouble recognizing their own incompetence"
Mention the term “wearables” and most people conjure up a fitness-tracking watch or some kind of futuristic fashion accessory.
But wearables are much more than this.
Disabled people are increasingly relying on these gadgets to augment how they see and experience the world. On a personal note, my aunt, Wendy Poth, lost her vision when she was 7. She is currently on the waiting list to purchase OrCam’s computer-assisted vision device. These special glasses interpret nearby visual inputs, including letters, faces, objects, products, places, bus numbers, and traffic lights.< … Read More → "5 wearables that could transform our lives"
The only diving suit that lets a human reach 1,000 feet underwater was put on display at the American Museum of Natural History on Thursday. Dubbed the “Exosuit,” the system lets humans dive to regions where bioluminescent fish lurk in the darkness, with the goal of studying the fish and their environments more closely, as well as leveraging their biology for medical research.
Prior to the invention of this suit, … Read More → "The “Exosuit”: A wearable submarine for visiting deep water"
A fascinating 1893 newspaper tour of the San Francisco Mint—spotted by historian Yoni Appelbaum spotted on Twitter—takes us into the workrooms where men cut gold into strips and the adjusting rooms where ladies filed coins down to just the right size. Millions in precious metal passed through these rooms every year, and none of it went to waste, recovered, instead, … Read More → "The San Francisco Mint burned its carpets to find $3,200 worth of gold"
Drinking a lot was an early American tradition. At Reason, Stanton Peele describes one party at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia:
Indeed, we still have available the bar tab from a 1787 farewell party in Philadelphia for George Washington just days before the framers signed off on the Constitution. According to the bill preserved from the evening, the 55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 … Read More → "George Washington knew how to party hard. Here’s his bar tab."
