In an attempt to entice more people to travel on its airline, British Airways has created a couple of digital billboards to promote its ‘Magic of Flying’ campaign where footage of children pointing at actual planes flying overhead is displayed.
via Gizmodo

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Alas, there’s never been a simple way to shave complex geometric patterns into your beard without using a chalk-line tool, a protractor, and a wind sock. But modern science has changed that, because now we have the Philips Norelco Beardtrimmer Series 9000.

As you may have astutely gathered from the photo above, this is the first beard trimmer with a laser guide built into it. The above photo is also a bit misleading, … Read More → "This $100 beard trimmer projects lasers onto your face"

Though neutrinos have been known about for some time, and were detected in one isolated experiment in 1987, researchers have since only able to detect ones from within our own solar system. In an article published today in Science, researchers from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in the South Pole detail the detection of 28 of them, which they say must … Read More → "Astronomers in Antarctica find neutrinos from outside our solar system"

An undersea volcano has created a new Japanese island 620 miles south of Tokyo. The eruption took place 500 meters from the uninhabited Nishinoshima Island, one of the subtropical Bonin Islands, forming new land in an archipelago that runs along the Pacific tectonic plate boundary commonly called the “ring of fire.”

The Japanese coast guard issued a warning in the … Read More → "Undersea volcano creates new island 620 miles south of Tokyo"

The stove was created by Dutch designers Roel de Boer and Michiel Martens.

Users start by placing a log (a section of tree trunk, really) on the adjustable-height support stand, then pushing it into the cylindrical stove – presumably a small fire has already been started in there, using kindling. Once the business end of the log is in, a steel diaphragm is closed around it. From there, users just periodically push the … Read More → "Spruce Stove burns one long log, a bit at a time"

It may not be immediately clear from looking at this map, but my hunch that there’s a better way to hunt was right. There isn’t one corner of the page where Waldo is always hiding; readers would have already noticed if his patterns were so obvious. What we do see, as highlighted in the map below, is that 53 percent of the time Waldo is … Read More → "Here’s Waldo: A new mathematical strategy for locating the missing man"

Do tears of grief look different under the microscope than tears of happiness?

That’s the basis of photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher’s new project, The Topography of Tears. Over the past several years, she collected human tears – her own and others – that accompany a wide range of feelings, including elation, sorrow, frustration, and rejection. (She’s even got tears from chopping onions and those of a newborn.)
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The 2013 Maker Faire season is almost over, but not without a fair from our friends in Twente in the Netherlands. The fair is set for this weekend, Nov. 23-24.

The fair is expected to attract more than 70 makers, including … Read More → "Double Dutch: two days of Maker Faire in the Netherlands"

“Loneliest Human,” the latest edition of xkcd’s what if? 

What is the furthest one human being has ever been from every other living person?

It’s hard to know for sure!

The most likely suspects are the six Apollo command module pilots who stayed in lunar orbit during a Moon landing: Mike Collins, … Read More → "What is the furthest one human being has ever been from every other living person?"

The City of Vancouver — Canada’s only city with its own building code — is mandating that new doors be fitted with lever-handles instead of doorknobs. The move is intended to increase accessibility — a doorknob requires substantially more dexterity and strength than a lever — but it will also make things easier for people with full hands. Doorknobs will remain in use for decades in Vancouver, of course (housing stock has a long shelf-life), but over time, they will dwindle away to historical curiosities.
via Boing Boing</ … Read More → "Vancouver’s new building code bans doorknobs"