What do you do if you don’t have a breathtaking room full of ancient bones and fossils? You get yourself a 3D printer and start downloading files from African Fossils, an online archive of prehistoric East African artifacts. No pith helmet required.

With over 40 digitized fossils in their collection, you can explore 3D renders of fossils representing prehistoric animals, human ancestors, and even ancient tools. Captured using Autodesk software, an … Read More → "3D-print your own 20-million-year-old fossils"

Someday soon, liquid crystal lasers that can be printed onto product labels could join the arsenal of weapons being used to combat counterfeit goods. These lasers reflect light in a way that can distinguish the real deal from laser-less, fraudulent knockoffs.

Detecting the printed lasers is as easy as scanning a price tag at a grocery store checkout counter. Damian Gardiner, a physicist and engineer at the University of Cambridge, recently … Read More → "These printable liquid crystal lasers could be the future of anti-counterfeit technology"

According to Guinness World Records, the biggest cuckoo clock in the world is this one in Triberg, Germany. It’s a traditional Black Forest cuckoo clock design scaled up 60 times the size of the original. It weighs 6 tonnes.

The cuckoo itself is 4.5 meters long and weighs 150 kilograms. It’s made of wood and was carved entirely hand.
via Neatorama

Do you ever get tired of holding your phone to your face? How about trying to chat in loud, crowded places?

No need to fuss. Motorola’s got you covered with its latest patent application: a smartphone microphone that’s tattooed onto your neck. Just think, you could have a little piece of Google embedded right into … Read More → "Motorola wants to patent a neck tattoo that’s also a microphone"

Colonel Chris Hadfield is, by all accounts, a modern-day hero — whether he’s exposing the wonders of space to an entire generation through social media, becoming the first Canadian to command the International Space Station, or playing the first music ever recorded in space. Now, you can get an even deeper look into the life of this remarkable man in his autobiography An Astronaut’ … Read More → "An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth"

Each year, 10 million Americans pack up their lives and move to another part of the country. But where are they going? The University of Wisconsin-Madison has made an awesome interactive map that tracks the net migration to different counties across the U.S.

The map uses data sets that include age, race, Hispanic-origin, … Read More → "A map of where Americans are moving"

During the Middle Ages, monks tried to represent the pawns as citizens. The first on a2 was an agricultural worker, the second a farrier, the third a weaver, the fourth a businessman, the fifth a doctor, the sixth an innkeeper, the seventh a policeman, and the eighth a gambler.

So think about that next time you start a game with 1.e4. That’s not just a faceless pawn you’re … Read More → "Chess pawns used to have individual names"

Fascinated by the emergence of digital fabrication tools, Slovakian design student Silva Lovasová decided to explore the subject for her senior thesis. She wrote a paper exploring the technical challenges of creating copies of existing objects and the design implications of a post-scarcity economy, but figuring out how to deal with the imperfections 3-D scans bring to “flawless” fabrication machines captured her imagination.

3 … Read More → "Doll furniture blown up to life-size, using 3-D scanning"

These are color photos from the set of the original Addams Family black-and-white television show that aired from 1964-1966. The photos were taken by Richard Fish (1919-2005).
via Boing Boing

Continue reading

The work of photographer Thomas Senf is the focus of a short video hosted by The Guardian, documenting the stunning lengths he’s gone through to shoot climbers scaling frozen waterfalls at night in the mountains of Norway. The landscape is a like a chandelier lit from within—a reef of glowing ice.</ … Read More → "Climbing frozen waterfalls at night by the light of a drone"