… Read More → "Fall, 6 month time-lapse shows changing colors of Central Park"

Major governments seem to have given up on single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes in favor of simple and reliable (but way less cool) rockets. That’s perfectly fine with U.K.-based Reaction Engines, which is working on a spaceplane of its own. The company looks to have the trickiest problem licked. Next stop, orbit.

Earlier this month, Reaction Engines performed a test of the cooling system that will allow its Sabre engine to … Read More → "Skylon spaceplane completes critical engine test"

Twenty-seven years after introducing the world’s first graphing calculator, Casio has developed its most sophisticated educational Game Boy ever.
via Gizmodo

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Welcome to this year’s Boing Boing Gift Guide, a piling-high of our most loved items from 2012 and beyond. There are books, comics, games, gadgets and much else besides: click the categories at the top to filter what you’re most interested in. Add your suggestions in the comments!

Check it out here 

We’ve got a soft spot for the Fiat 500. Its retrolicious looks and nearly square stance make it both a looker and a driver, albeit a rather underpowered one with its standard 101-hp, 1.4-liter engine. But the 500′s compact dimensions blend city car size and hatchback functionality into a package that’s more usable than the awful Smart ForTwo at a fraction of the cost of the more plush … Read More → "Fiat makes an electric 500, but it really doesn’t want to"

Just like how a rock star would hang all of his or her vinyl records on the wall, Qualcomm has a dedicated “Patent Wall” at its San Diego headquarters to show off 1,395 of its patent files.
via Engadget

More here& … Read More → "Qualcomm’s amazing wall of patents"

New Zealand-based artist Peter Trevelyan has created awe-inspiring, large-scale geometric sculptures made of extremely fragile pencil lead sticks. 

Precisely rendered, these amazing structures are made entirely of 0.5mm-thick sticks of graphite that are designed for mechanical pencils. 

Reflecting the artist’s interest in mathematics, these sculptures require not only great skills on the part of the artist, but also a lot of patience to construct.
… Read More → "Awe-inspiring geometric sculptures made of pencil lead"

Three-dimensional printing has become very sexy. It’s all over a recent issue of Wired and Chris Anderson just published a new book where 3-D printing is featured prominently. (Note: These two events are not uncorrelated.) The Economist has discussed this recently as well as have many other outlets.

And this is all for good reason. Printing in three dimensions is … Read More → "To understand 3-D printing we need to remember 2-D printing"

Bulgarian environmental artist Christo has draped an inexplicable array of landscapes and objects in a distinctive orange hue since the 1960s – but few of his installations have been as conceptually perplexing as his latest planned installation. The Mastaba is to be a permanent flat-topped pyramid of oil barrels located in the desert about 100 miles from Abu Dhabi. While oil-rich nations vie for the … Read More → "Conceptual artist Christo to build giant pyramid of 410,000 oil barrels for Abu Dhabi"

On July 13, 1978, Russian scientist Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski became the only person to ever stick his head in a running particle accelerator. A researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment on the Soviet particle accelerator, Synchrotron U-70, when he accidentally put his head directly in the path of the machine’s proton beam. He reported seeing a flash that was “brighter than a … Read More → "The man who survived a proton beam to the brain"