RETROACTIVE WARNING: Spider in car picture.

In news that almost makes me glad to have a ten-year old car that’s ready to explode any minute, Toyota has recalled 870,000 Camrys, Venzas and Avalons built in 2012 and 2013 because spider webs can cause a blockage that makes the driver-side airbag deploy and the cars to lose power steering. No word what a rat’s nest could do, but my guess ends with a … Read More → "From now on I’m only biking: Toyota recalls almost a million cars because of a spider issue"

In the small Chinese town of Huayang, a car languishing in a parking lot since 2012 became so overgrown with vines that it was almost unrecognizable as a vehicle. The bizarre car-shaped bush gained notoriety on Chinese social media before finally being towed away by authorities last week. The vines proved difficult to remove, so it was towed away with the vines intact. The Chinese colloquialism for abandoned cars is “jiangshiche,” or “zombie … Read More → "Vines completely engulf abandoned car in China"

IBM has unveiled a prototype of a new brain-inspired computer powered by what it calls “electronic blood”.

The firm says it is learning from nature by building computers fuelled and cooled by a liquid, like our minds.

The human brain packs phenomenal computing power into a tiny space and uses only 20 watts of energy – an efficiency IBM is keen to match.

Its new “redox … Read More → "IBM unveils computer fed by ‘electronic blood’"

A laser first developed in the early 1990s to survey complex architectural structures in the petrochemical and nuclear industries is now being leveraged to preserve at-risk monuments— at least in digital form.

The laser sits atop a standard tripod, where it spins around sending out tens of thousands of pulses of light … Read More → "Incredible 3D scans of castles, churches, and even Mt. Rushmore"

You walk into a dark room and projected on the wall in front of you is a frenzied mass of dots. A friend walks in and the dots are connected by a wireframe body–the thing you’re watching, you realize, is a galloping horse. As more viewers trickle in, the horse continues to evolve, adding polygonal musculature and a shimmering skin. Eventually, when enough people are watching, the beast transcends its … Read More → "As more people look at this digital horse, it gets more spectacular"

3D printing is a technology that seems to have gotten a little ahead of itself—we have more 3D printers than we know what to do with, yet they often serve little purpose beyond making sad versions of model dinosaurs and pizza wedges. But the tactile art seems to have found an unlikely home in movie special effects, even amid all of the CGI.

… Read More → "3D printing loosens CGI’s iron grip on movie special effects"

Fancy coming home to find a swarm of flying mini robots doing your cleaning? That’s the futuristic picture of domestic bliss envisioned by young Colombian designer Adrian Perez Zapata, whose Mab concept has won this year’s Electrolux Design Lab competition.

Each year the Design Lab competition sees students from all over the world invited to submit futuristic and life changing appliance designs and concepts. … Read More → "Swarming robot cleaner concept wins Design Lab 2013"

Combining data from five surveys, totaling responses from about 1.6 million people, Peter J. Rentfrow and his colleagues recently published their results in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They explain:

There is overwhelming evidence for regional variation across the United States on a range of key political, economic, social, and health indicators. However, … Read More → "A map of how personality types vary across the United States"

If you think being stuck in a strange town late at night after the last bus has gone is lonely, then give a thought for the exoplanet PSO J318.5-22. Discovered this year by astronomers at the University of Hawaii, this planet was found floating through interstellar space without a parent star and is one of the smallest free-floating objects seen outside of the Solar System.
via Read More → "Astronomers find exoplanet floating through interstellar space"

How do you hide a building? It sounds like a rhetorical question, but it was the very real dilemma confronting the architects charged with building a new Maritime Museum of Denmark a few years ago. The museum, you see, is located a few hundred yards away from Kronborg Castle—which serves as the setting for Shakespeare’s Hamlet& … Read More → "A decommissioned drydock hides this museum devoted to the sea"