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New uses for it are constantly being discovered – but it’s possible that one day we’ll be able to stop mining the ore, and rely completely on recycling.

Especially if our First World reproductive rates continue below replacement level. I haven’t seen a lot of Muslims use aluminum.

Pop-Out Outlets

Aussie multimedia-electro-tool-chest

Desktop siege engines

The Bulletproof Suit

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A single layer of tin atoms could be the world’s first material to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at the temperatures that computer chips operate, according to a team of theoretical physicists led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.

Researchers call the new material “stanene,” combining the Latin name for tin (stannum) with the suffix used in graphene, another single-layer material whose novel electrical properties hold promise for a wide range of applications.

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The script for the Fox Searchlight project is being written by Tolkien “superfan” David Gleeson, whose credits include screenwriter on Irish movies Cowboys & Angels and The Front Line. Gleeson has an eventful life to pick through: Tolkien lived through both World Wars, serving as a signals officer during World War I, and training as a codebreaker in Britain’s Bletchley Park during World War II, before crafting the world of Middle Earth and populating it with elves, orcs, and dwarves.

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If that’s what you want to do, of course — and can afford to travel to Krakow.

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Fidel Castro shares at least one belief with the majority of Americans: He is convinced that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was not the work of a lone gunman, but was the culmination of a broad conspiracy. According to a recent Gallup poll, 61 percent of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in Dallas 50 years ago. But Castro suspects that Oswald might not have been involved in the assassination at all. Here is what he told me–to my great surprise–over lunch one day in Havana: “I have reached the conclusion that Oswald could not have been the one who killed Kennedy.” Castro is of course a confident man, but he said this with a degree of surety that was noteworthy.

There you have it — straight from the horse’s ass mouth.

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Sign me up.

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No, it doesn’t involve a torque wrench. I think.

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Microsoft’s former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold loves both science and food, a combination that resulted in Modernist Cuisine, a six volume foodie encyclopedia that’s now available in a digital form exclusively as an iPad app.

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MIT researchers published a paper in Nature Communications today detailing an unusual manufacturing technique that could help the batteries edge closer to being ready. Each time a lithium air battery charges or discharges, it needs a location for electrochemical reactions to take place. Nanowires — tiny wires the width of a red blood cell — do the job nicely, but generally need to be manufactured at extremely high temperatures with dangerous chemicals.

The researchers found they could make the nanowires at room temperature by relying on an unexpected ally: genetically modified viruses. The viruses capture metal molecules from water and build them into the long nanowires with spiky surfaces. The spikes create a greater surface area than the smooth, industrially produced nanowires have, which creates more area for electrochemical activity to take place. This allows faster charges and discharges.

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While printers that work with multiple materials already exist, Shapeways has yet to offer printing services that utilize them. Weijmarshausen said file formats are not yet standardized enough and user-friendly software needs to appear. But the appeal of printers that mix materials with incredible precision is great, as they would give rise to totally new textures and lend objects new properties.

“That capability, we as humans, have never had,” Weijmarshausen said. ”You don’t just design a product, you design a material.”

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Great news.

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If I ever win the Lottery, I’m going to start using shaving soap. Just because.

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The men waited until the hottest part of the day before launching the chase over a distance of four miles (6.4km).

The cheetahs got so tired they could not run any more. The villagers captured them alive and handed them over to the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Climbing Wall Treadmill

Tub Spout Cover

Build Your Own Car

Reinventing the Wheelchair

Healthiest and unhealthiest breakfast sandwiches

Paper Log Maker

Emergency Multifunction Hammer

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While everyone has been focused on the Obamacare and Iranian-nuke debacles, the Kurdish region of Syria declared itself autonomous, which combined with the autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq and the large Kurdish region in Turkey, may mark a significant step towards the establishment of a Kurdish state.

Since the Kurds are not in conflict with Jews (and generally are quite friendly towards Israel), Kurdish national aspirations don’t get much attention at the U.N. or elsewhere. No one much cares that Kurds, a truly distinctive cultural identity who number several times the “Palestinians,” do not have a nation of their own.

This could get interesting.

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Amazon has announced a partnership with the US Postal Service that will see the retailer deliver packages on Sundays from now on. The program is rolling out first to customers in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, but the company plans to extend it to cities including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Phoenix in 2014.

This sort of thing is why I own Amazon stock.

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Hunger makes the best sauce, goes the maxim. According to researchers at Yale Medical School, it may make quadratic equations and Kant’s categorical imperative go down easier too. The stimulation of hunger, the researchers announced in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, causes mice to take in information more quickly, and to retain it better — basically, it makes them smarter. And that’s very likely to be true for humans as well.

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“No-till farming” sounds pretty dull at first. The term basically describes ways to grow crops each year without disturbing the soil through tillage or plowing.

But it’s an important idea. Plowing and tillage are major sources of soil erosion around the world — they were key factors behind the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. What’s more, churning up all that soil can release a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, helping to warm the planet. So, since the 1980s, more and more American farmers (and policymakers) have started taking no-till farming seriously.

The purpose of tilling the soil is to kill the weeds that would otherwise crowd out the new grain or whatever it is being planted.

The advent of new herbicides such as atrazine and paraquat in the 1940s and 1950s allowed farmers to kill weeds without plowing up more soil. And the invention of specialized seeding equipment in the 1960s allowed farmers to plant while barely disturbing the soil. Various federal government subsidies for soil conservation also gave farmers incentives to switch practices — particularly after the 1985 farm bill. So did higher oil prices.

Of course, the downside of that is you’ve got people bitching and moaning about using chemicals in farming. But there are ways around that, although a lot of farmers just don’t want to put in the effort that it takes.

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Now, let’s watch Greenpeace and similar eco-Nazis try to shut them down.

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With the help of computerized eye trackers, new research finds that at least 50 percent of people can see the movement of their own hand even in the absence of all light.

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HMS Ocelot, an Oberon class diesel-electric submarine, was launched from Chatham Dockyard in 1962. After spending nearly 30 years in commission with the Royal Navy, she paid off in 1991 to make way for the short-lived Upholder class.

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Well, some do, anyway — hopefully not the same ones that are shilling ‘climate change’ for the U.N…..

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On Friday, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the birth control mandate in Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services regulations under Obamacare. The court said that religious business owners could not be forced to buy contraceptive coverage for their employees. Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote, “The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase; instead, it occurs when a company’s owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan.”

Reverse Microwave

Best Ice Cube Tray

The FreedMan Chair

Turn your iPhone into a high-power digital microscope for around $10

From Paper to Book – the perfect SWPL product

HotLogic Desktop Oven

Slovakian Flying Car

Splash Chopping Board

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We have the technology. (Good luck getting it past the building code inspector, though.)

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More locovore tribulation.

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The way the internet currently works, content is mostly delivered to client devices such as PCs and smartphones from powerful computers called servers, which are generally housed in data centers. This represents a centralization of computing power and storage that some argue is becoming outdated, what with the beefy processors and (sometimes) capacious storage devices we carry around in our pockets these days.

The Cambridge University prototype would represent a dramatic revamp of that way of doing things. Part of a wider EU-funded project called Pursuit, the putative protocol operates more like the popular filesharing mechanism BitTorrent, in that users share information directly with one another, rather than through a server. Simplistically put, Person B might receive content from Person A’s device, then become a source for that data so Person C could then download it, and so on.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

As your arteries pump blood, it causes tiny movements in your eardrum at a frequency of about 1Hz. Using the earphones’ speaker as a microphone, the software can detect and interpret this movement to determine your pulse rate.

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Rjukan, home to about 3,500 residents and situated about 70 miles west of the capital, Oslo, has installed a trio of giant mountaintop mirrors to focus light into the valley town’s square during the cold (and dark) winter months.

Good to know that somewhere has enough money to spend on such a project. I am somewhat surprised that, being NPR, they didn’t root out some homeless or oppressed people and bemoan how that money could have been better used for a soup kitchen or something.

Pocket Watch Flip Phone

Samurai Sword Kitchen Knife Set. I am not making this up.

The World’s Best Backscratcher

Shredder scissors. I am not making this up.

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Squaring up in one corner is Old Fold Manor golf club, which sits on the 1471 battlefield – and wants to dump thousands of tons of rubbish on it.

Of course, in America it would long since have been confiscated by the Federal government and turned into an Historic Monument site under the National Park Service.

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Based on mathematical models derived from these data, the scientists found that every animal took an average of 21 seconds to relieve itself, despite bladders that varied in volume from 100 milliliters to 100 liters.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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It’s long been known that sleep, much like eating or breathing, is a vital process for humans and animals. Insufficient shut-eye in people impairs cognition, curbs energy levels, and has been linked to a bevy of illnesses. But while scientists have explored myriad mechanisms that might explain why sleep is so critical, they’ve yet to come up with a firm answer. Now, new research offers yet another compelling theory: sleep allows our brains to clean themselves up.

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If you’re interested in doing that, of course. Pretty soon we’ll just be able to 3D-print a faster horse.

New Ostrich Pillow

Arthritis Pain Relieving Lamp

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• This kind of thing never used to happen. Actually, it used to happen all the time. What’s unusual is the quiet stretch since the last shutdown, when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were facing off in 1995. Before that, there were 18 shutdowns in 19 years as various Congresses and presidents squabbled over raising the national debt limit. My personal favorite is the one in 1982, when Congress didn’t feel like working late to pass a spending bill the night before the new fiscal year started. The Republicans were all going to a barbecue at the White House, while the Democrats had a $1,000-a-plate fund-raising dinner to attend.

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MIT researchers recently pulled on a piece of cracked metal so hard that they expected it to break apart. Instead, something unexpected happened: The crack healed.

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A prototype of a 3D printer that makes pizza showed up at the SXSW Eco conference in Austin this week. The pizza isn’t quite at the stage where it can make a pizza from scratch, but it is capable of extruding dough, sauce and cheese and in a pizza-like shape and then cooking it. NASA is interested in the technology, which could allow astronauts to choose from a greater variety of meals and cut down on waste.

We have the technology.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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 Conventional parking garages are inefficient. They require ramps, driving lanes, room for doors to open and close, and significant chunks of concrete and metal between each level. AutoMotion Parking Systems, a builder of automated garages and the company behind the Brooklyn project, will do away with all of this, replacing those bulky and disorienting double helices with a half-dozen 200-foot-long bays, each lined on both sides with car-size cubbies stacked three to five high. Via five automated hoists, vehicles will be whisked on metal pallets from the entry rooms to their temporary homes and back again. “It’s like a vending machine for cars,” Ari Milstein, executive director of AutoMotion, says.

We have the technology.

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Why take a chance? That’s all I’m sayin’….

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In a research paper published recently on Arxiv, a team from Rice University laid out the molecular schematics for Carbyne, aka linear acetylenic carbon. A supermaterial first theorized in 1967, its legitimacy has been disputed for the last 40 years. This time around the team figured out how to successfully synthesize and stabilize it at room temperature.

The paper goes on to describe the remarkable atomic chain of Carbyne – a microscopic lattice similar to that of its close cousin, diamond. Carbyne, however, has a Young’s modulus 40 times that of diamond, making it the world’s hardest material. With extensive applications in nanotechnology, it could completely change the way scientists view systems with nanomechanical bases. The polyyne family has a new heavyweight champ.

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Take a portrait from history, add modern clothes — hilarity ensues.

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Our smartphones share one thing in common with many animals: they have internal compasses that can orient themselves to the Earth’s magnetic field. And just as animals can detect local variations in that magnetic field to find their way around, our phones’ digital compasses can do the same. Structures and even furniture within buildings such as metal shelves naturally produce those geomagnetic anomalies, and by logging those anomalies on a map, they can be used to pinpoint a device — and its owner’s — exact location indoors.

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University of Adelaide researchers plan to publish a paper in Carbon that details how they vaporized plastic grocery bags to make the carbon nanotubes. Like just about everything, plastic contains carbon, which was freed when the bags were vaporized in a furnace. The researchers also placed a sheet of material in the furnace. The carbon grabs ahold of the material and builds itself into the long, one-atom-thick cylinders that make up carbon nanotubes.

Gotta love Australians.

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Beats me. But I’m sure George W Bush is to blame.

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After decades of losing out to foreign rivals, U.S. manufacturing of toilets is making a surprising, if modest, comeback—mostly under foreign ownership.

An under-appreciated indicator of economic health.