At the Wearable Futures conference, London designer and researcher Shamees Aden debuted a running shoe prototype that will put your worn out kicks to shame. The shoes, which he developed with University of Southern Denmark professor Martin Hanczyc, are 3D printed from a synthetic biological material that can repair itself overnight.

The running shoes … Read More → "London designer creates 3D-printed, regenerative running shoes from protocells"

Living up to its reputation of largeness, the state of Texas has now become home to the world’s largest gingerbread house. Located at the Traditions Golf Club in the city of Bryan, the larger-than-life gingerbread house measures 39,201.8 cubic feet (1,110.1 cubic meters) and officially holds the new Guinness World Record. This defeats the record previously held by the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, with its 36,600 cubic foot (1,036.4 cubic meter) gingerbread house.
via < … Read More → "Texas lays claim to the world’s largest gingerbread house"

Our cities, neighborhoods, and favorite spaces have never been quite so widely photographed before. Anyone with a smart phone now has a camera. Anyone with Instagram is a faux-fine-art photographer. And any old subject – a puddle of water, a yellow school bus – suddenly demands we capture the moment.

It seems highly likely, though, that the ubiquity of digital photography – and the weird ways we now behave because of it – may be altering how we perceive the world around us. Technology is doing this in numerous ways. Why not through cell-phone cameras, … Read More → "How Instagram alters your memory"

1. Native to the Malaysian rainforest, this orchid mantis does such a good job of mimicking local flora that it inspired Alfred Russell Wallace to propose that some animals mimic plants in order to lure in the pollinators they hope to eat.

via Boing Boing

… Read More → "Pink preying mantis disguises itself as a flower"

It took a trip to the malware research firm F Secure, but Kyllönen finally got to the bottom of it. He’d been targeted by criminals, who cracked his room’s electronic lock and installed a Remote Access Trojan on his laptop while he was playing in the tournament downstairs. Once operational, the software gave the attackers a view of whatever was happening … Read More → "Hackers broke into poker pro’s hotel room to install ‘sharking’ malware"

… Read More → "Million Short, a search engine that provides more eclectic search results by ignoring the top million sites"

Promoter Tommy Giodone calls it “the toughest sport on wool.” For the past 18 years, he’s rented ewes from ranchers and offered kids between the ages of 4 and 7 the chance to live the life of a rodeo bull rider.

The kids wear protective gear, but otherwise it’s a lot like the adult sport. The sheep are released from pens into an arena. They’ve got to hold on … Read More → "The glorious sport of mutton busting"

This is NWA 7325, a meteorite that allegedly fell to Earth in southern Morocco in early 2012. Scientists think that it came from the planet Mercury. We have about 70 meteorites from Mars and 180 from the moon. But this rare gem of a meteorite is the only one from the innermost planet.

How can they tell? The rock’s magnetism matches that of … Read More → "Scientists identify a piece of the planet Mercury for the first time in human history"

A telemarketer named Samantha West who sells health insurance may or may not be a robot, though a straight answer to that question is proving to be difficult. Time has relayed the findings of its in-house probe into the humanity of West, who’s making calls on the behalf of an insurance company based in Ft. Lauderdale that coincidentally has a non-functioning website. Unlike most robotic … Read More → "Is this telemarketer a human or a robot?"

The Super 8mm movie camera may be one of the poster children for obsolescence, but many of them were quite well-made, and are still running perfectly to this day. Designer Hayes Urban wants to get those cameras out of the attic and back into use, with his Nolab Digital Super 8 Cartridge.

Super 8 cameras, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the things, shot film that came in cartridges. Each cartridge … Read More → "Electronic cartridge lets old Super 8 movie cameras shoot video"