Read it.

Forget Whole Foods. The Germans have created a store with eco-conscious customers in mind. Well, at least in Berlin—the newest home of Original Unverpackt (Original Unpackaged). You won’t find any paper or plastic bags here—or any kind of bags for that matter. This new grocery store creates zero waste by allowing customers to purchase exactly how much they need, reducing waste in their homes.

Original Unverpackt doesn’t carry any products under popular brand names; instead, they carry mostly organic products. Original Unverpackt stocks their shelves using a bulk bin system with an assortment of fruits, vegetables and grains. Even shampoo and milk are dispensed from refillable containers according to Salon.

Salon? Better get a second source to confirm.

Read it.

“This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible,” said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. “From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension.”

Read it.

The ideal airplane doesn’t need a runway. Since Kitty Hawk, the standard design of a fixed-wing airplane assumes the plane will build momentum and lift by accelerating along an open stretch of land (or sometimes sea), and will need to land by decelerating along a similar smooth path. To free airplanes from runways, they need a different way to get airborne, and in this concept vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) plane from XTI aircraft, promises just that: a business-sized five passenger plane, with tilt-rotor engines that let it fly like a plane but takeoff and land like a helicopter.

The video is mostly fluff. Feel free to ignore it.

The Denver-based company proposed TriFan 600 plane will seat five passengers, as well as a pilot. They envision an airplane that can travel up to 1,200 miles, with a maximum speed of 400 mph and a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. Three ducted fans will lift the airplane into the sky in about 90 seconds, and then two of those fans will tile from parallel to perpendicular, propelling the plane forward in the air, no runway required. A sliding door will cover the third fan, so that it doesn’t interfere with the aerodynamics of the plane in flight.

AllTopRated.

Wallet Ninja Pro 26-in-1 Multitool.

Microfiber Waterproof Pet Car Hammock.

BullseyeBore. I could use one of these; I can’t drill a hole straight to save my life.

Furoshiki Shoes.

High Tech Ice Cream Scoop.

Read it.

The first three-dimensional computer model of how a solid tumour grows, mutates and evolves has been developed by scientists who say it will help them to understand how lethal cancers develop resistance to drugs and chemotherapy.

A mathematical construction of the complex evolution of a cancerous tumour has already pointed to the most dangerous tumour cells being those where the DNA mutates in such a way that the cells break away to move around the body, the scientists said.

Read it.

Researchers at the US Mayo Clinic demonstrated a method to turn cancerous breast and bladder cells benign, according to their study published in the Nature Cell Biology.

The study, which although in its early stages has been hailed by cancer charities as “crucial”, works by focusing on the PLEKHA7 protein that clumps healthy cells together.

Led by Panos Anastasiadis, researchers found that when the usual sequence of cell regulation is disrupted, cancerous cells quickly occur and multiply out of control, but by adding mircoRNAs molecules scientists were able to prevent cancer.

Read it.

We need more recessives.

Read it.

Scientists in the US have found a way to take carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and make carbon nanofibres, a valuable manufacturing material.

Their solar-powered system runs a small current through a tank filled with a hot, molten salt; the fluid absorbs atmospheric CO2 and tiny carbon fibres slowly form at one of the electrodes.

…

“Until now, carbon nanofibres have been too expensive for many applications,” he told journalists at the autumn meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.

Carbon nanofibres are already used in high-end applications such as electronic components and batteries, and if costs came down they could be used more extensively – improving the strong, lightweight carbon composites used in aircraft and car components, for example.

Schrade Tactical Pens. One of these babies could save your life.

Hexayurt.

SpinChiller.

The Egg Calculator.

H0w to Build Your Own Cotton-Candy Machine. If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

GarlicShaker. Billed as ‘the iPhone of garlic peelers’. “Hey, Siri, peel me a clove.” Unlikely.

Turn the Apple Watch Into a Pocket Watch. More here.

All-Terrain Electric Skateboard. Supposedly.

Fold-Out Paper Sofa.

PotatoParcel. If you’re Irish, come into the parlor.

Bacon Scarf.

Stain Devils.

OnHub.

Read it.

US scientists have identified the chemicals responsible for the mosquito-repelling activity of sweetgrass, a plant traditionally used by some Native Americans to fend off the bugs.

Read it.

Rumpelstiltskin may have been able to spin straw into gold, but even he couldn’t pull carbon fibers from thin air. Yet that’s exactly what researchers at George Washington University have managed to do.

Led by Stuart Licht, researchers have created a solar-powered process that can turn carbon dioxide, a gas that contributes to climate change, into solid carbon nanofibers.

Read it.

Read it.

A superconductor that works at room-temperature would make everyday electricity generation and transmission vastly more efficient, as well as giving a massive boost to current uses of superconductivity such as the enormous magnets used in medical imaging machines.

Read it.

Researchers at MIT and Samsung have built a battery that eschews the use of liquid electrolytes in favor of a solid state substance that offers some serious benefits.

Most commercial lithium-ion batteries use a liquid electrolyte to transport charged particles and provide power. But there are problems with this – the liquid degrades over time, and if the battery leaks there are serious safety issues.

“All of the fires you’ve seen, with Boeing, Tesla, and others, they are all electrolyte fires,” said Gerbrand Ceder, visiting professor of materials science and engineering at MIT.

“The lithium itself is not flammable in the state it’s in in these batteries. [With a solid electrolyte] there’s no safety problem — you could throw it against the wall, drive a nail through it — there’s nothing there to burn.”

Read it.

Your DNA, like that of everything else on the planet, is made of four nucleotides: A, C, G, and T. These are like a blueprint that your body reads to produce 20 different amino acids, which combine to make up the proteins that enable everything your body does, like repairing damaged cells or breaking down food.

Last year, biotech startup Synthorx announced that it had pushed the limits of biology by adding new building blocks to a bacteria’s genetic code. Now they’ve gone a step farther: those engineered bacteria have created a well-studied protein that has an added function, according to a press release the company issued yesterday. This could be the first step towards the discovery of new, more effective drugs and vaccines.

Synthorx added two more nucleotides, X and Y, to a bacteria’s DNA. These combine with the other four to make up to 172 different amino acids—over eight times the 20 commonly found in nature. These can combine to make an enormous number of proteins never before seen on Earth.

Read it.

For reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, a promotional video for a University of Alabama sorority that depicts the girls dancing in bikinis—and doing other stereotypical sorority stuff—provoked an internet backlash against its supposedly anti-feminist content. But that’s not all: the backlash itself has also earned its own backlash.

As you might have guessed, Donald Trump is somehow involved.

Read it.

Read it.

From Business Insider, which (despite its name) is neither from Business nor from Insiders.

Greycork – Upgrade Your Living Room.

Tactical Can Cooler. One of these babies could save your life.

Picnic Backpack.

GoSun Stove.

Navion. More here.

Meat-Patterned Rug. For when you really hate your spouse’s dog.

True Utility Keyring System.

Read it.

Police said they are still trying to figure out where the bar comes from and how it got into the Koenigssee lake, a popular tourist destination near Berchtesgaden on the border with Austria.

SECRET NAZI GOLD! Well, it could be….

Read it.

If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps, then that shape is said to tile the plane.

Every triangle can tile the plane. Every four-sided shape can also tile the plane.

Things get interesting with pentagons. The regular pentagon cannot tile the plane. (A regular pentagon has equal side lengths and equal angles between sides, like, say, a cross section of okra, or, erm, the Pentagon). But some non-regular pentagons can.

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

Read it.

‘Black leaders’ finally get a clue. About time, too.

Free Your Feet by Putting Super-Strong Socks on Them. You first.

Jawhorse.

Zip Line Kit.

The GrOpener.

Cantilever Flatware.

Read it.

The Lifestyle Home Elevator from U.K.-based Terry Lifts is an impossibly clever home-help device for old folks or for anyone who can no longer use the stairs.

But better than the product itself is the Reuters news report about it, which is just about the most English thing you’ll see today. To watch it is to enjoy wall-to-wall carpeting, mugs of tea placed artfully in the shot, and highly inaccurate references to both Star Trek and Doctor Who.

Read it.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the main component of our genetic material. It is formed by combining four parts: A, C, G and T (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine), called bases of DNA combine in thousands of possible sequences to provide the genetic variability that enables the wealth of aspects and functions of living beings.

In the early 80s, to these four “classic” bases of DNA was added a fifth: the methyl-cytosine (mC) derived from cytosine. And it was in the late 90’s when mC was recognized as the main cause of epigenetic mechanisms: it is able to switch genes on or off depending on the physiological needs of each tissue.

In recent years, interest in this fifth DNA base has increased by showing that alterations in the methyl-cytosine contribute to the development of many human diseases, including cancer.

Today, an article published in Cell by Manel Esteller, director of the Epigenetics and Cancer Biology Program of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), ICREA researcher and Professor of Genetics at the University of Barcelona, describes the possible existence of a sixth DNA base, the methyl-adenine (mA), which also help determine the epigenome and would therefore be key in the life of the cells.

Read it.

The cornerstone of treatment, anti-retroviral therapy, kills the virus in the bloodstream but leaves “HIV reservoirs” untouched.

The study, published in PLoS Pathogens, showed the drug was “highly potent” at reactivating hidden HIV.

Read it.

ACROSS the highway from the lawns of Nairobi’s Muthaiga Country Club is Mathare, a slum that stretches as far as the eye can see. Although Mathare has virtually no services like paved streets or sanitation, it has a sizeable and growing number of classrooms. Not because of the state—the slum’s half-million people have just four public schools—but because the private sector has moved in. Mathare boasts 120 private schools.

This pattern is repeated across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. The failure of the state to provide children with a decent education is leading to a burgeoning of private places, which can cost as little as $1 a week.

The parents who send their children to these schools in their millions welcome this. But governments, teachers’ unions and NGOs tend to take the view that private education should be discouraged or heavily regulated. That must change.

Read it.

A paper published today in the British medical journal Lancet reports that the vaccine, which has been tested in Guinea since March 2015, has shown extraordinary results so far, with 4,123 people voluntarily vaccinated and all safe from the disease.

Read it.

If, of course, you still use shoe laces.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Apart from human uses, corn makes up the majority of feed for livestock. At one point, over 95% of the feed grains grown in the United States were based on corn. It’s no surprise then that in 2015 alone, some 89.2 million acres will be grown in the United States. This represents around 40% of all the corn grown worldwide.

But corn has seen a decline due to a number of factors. Crops have been hard hit by climate change. Higher temperatures have led to decreased yields and less overall abundance. As a result, the value of corn has dropped since 2012. This has put additional pressure on farmers, suggesting they may have to forego corn and look to other crops to maintain viability. This could harm corn stocks and hinder food security.

There may be an answer to the corn dilemma, but to find it, one has to look not in the prairies but the sea. Within the salty brine are algae. These microorganisms, once believed to be primordial plant species, are nutrient-making machines. They are known to produce high levels of antioxidants and also a variety of essential fatty acids. Some companies have even seen their algal-derived products make it to market.

Hmm. Kelp-fed beef just doesn’t have the same ring, somehow.

Read it.

Shucks, I could have told you that.

A new study into causes of the scarcity of women in technical and scientific fields says that it is not discrimination by men in the field keeping the ladies away. Nor is it a repugnance felt by women for possibly dishevelled or unhygienic male nerds.

No, the reason that young women don’t train in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) areas – and thus, don’t find themselves with jobs at tech companies, in IT etc – is quite simply that they mostly don’t know enough maths to do those courses.

“It is all about the mathematical content of the field. Girls not taking math coursework early on in middle school and high school are set on a different college trajectory than boys,” says economics prof Donna Ginther.

Ginther and a colleague, Shulamit Kahn, examined statistics on young women’s maths qualifications and mathematical requirements for college courses in America. Put simply, they found that absence of women studying a given course can be accounted for simply by the fact that most young women don’t know much maths.

Cubrick cabinet.

Tactical Baby Carrier.

Read it.

The world’s first malaria vaccine has cleared one of the final hurdles prior to being approved for use in Africa.

The European Medicines Agency gave a positive scientific opinion after assessing its safety and effectiveness.

Read it.

Read it.

Air-filled (pneumatic) tires give our vehicles comfortable, cushiony rides. (Thanks tires, we appreciate that.) Looking at it from another perspective, pneumatic tires are containers of pressurized gas that are being subjected to constant abuse, and when something happens to them, it can result in a situation that falls somewhere between a minor annoyance and a deadly catastrophe. We’ve ridden on these things for about 130 years now, and while they’ve improved substantially since John Dunlop invented them to keep his kid from getting headaches while riding his bike, it seems that we can still do better. Hankook is trying to make better happen with a consumer-oriented airless tire.

Slapsee Sunglasses. These are very clever.

Make Your Own Pocket Laser Engraver. When tattoos just aren’t narcissistic enough.

Thermos Stainless Steel Can Insulator.

Transparent Padlock to practice picking locks.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

“In some way, it seems trivial, but a reason why chins are so interesting is we’re the only ones who have them,” says Nathan Holton, who studies craniofacial features and mechanics at the University of Iowa. “It’s unique to us.”

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

Read it.

I’m pretty sure that putting a purring cat on an injury is beneficial.

Read it.

St Swithin’s day if thou dost rain, For forty days it will remain

St Swithin’s day if thou be fair, For forty days ’twill rain nae mare

Read it.

One of Guinness World Records’ more unusual awards was presented at the National Maritime Museum yesterday. After a 100-day trial, the timepiece known as Clock B – which had been sealed in a clear plastic box to prevent tampering – was officially declared, by Guinness, to be the world’s “most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air”.

It was an intriguing enough award. But what is really astonishing is that the clock was designed more than 250 years ago by a man who was derided at the time for “an incoherence and absurdity that was little short of the symptoms of insanity”, and whose plans for the clock lay ignored for two centuries.

Read it.

The US Navy is planning to stop using crewed fighter jets in the coming years, according to Navy secretary Ray Mabus, turning instead to uncrewed aerial vehicles and drones to perform missions at sea, on land, and in the air. Speaking at the Sea-Air-Space 2015 conference on Wednesday, Mabus said that the currently used F-35 Lightning fighter “should be, and almost certainly will be, the last [crewed] strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”

Well, that will certainly save a lot of money.

Read it.

The US Navy is developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, that can be launched from a cannon and “swarm” in a co-ordinated attack.

…

Wings unfold once the drones are in the air and then they can fly in formation.

…

US use of military drones has attracted criticism from human rights groups, who say that despite their highly targeted nature, innocent non-combatants are often killed in the process.

Innocent non-combatants are almost always killed in a war. Why this should come as a surprise to these people escapes me. But we live in a time where much less of that goes on, by orders of magnitude.

Tabletop Charcoal Grill.

Emergency Wrist Flotation Device.

Tactical War Hammer. Don’t know what I’d use it for, but I want one.

Survival Shoelaces.

Read it.

Read it.

Make funny home video?

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Read it.

Owls have an impressive superpower in silent flight, made possible by specialized wings and feathers that disperse the sound of air rushing past them. Now an international research team says they have taken a tip from owls that could eventually lead to turbine blades and jet aircraft that produce significantly less noise.