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+24 +1
Who Made That Ice Pack?
Physicians have long made use of the medicinal powers of cooling. Hippocrates wrote that cold water is to be applied “when there is a hemorrhage, or when it is expected.” During the French Army’s ghastly retreat from Moscow in 1812, Napoleon’s surgeon in chief, Dominique Jean Larrey, used ice and snow to numb soldiers before field amputations.
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+15 +1
How to Make Your Dumb AC Smart
Because with summertime in full swing across the northern hemisphere, you’re going to need every ounce of cool air you can get.
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+1 +1
Edison - Fun robotics for tomorrow's inventors
Edison is a programmable and LEGO-compatible robot that is tackling the high cost of entry level robotics; it has recently launched on Kickstarter, and is available for just $39 AUD ($37 USD) and less than $30 AUD ($28 USD) for a class pack of 30.
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+18 +1
Paper USB Business Card Lets You Track Usage
The humble business card still hasn’t been killed off by digital alternatives. Being handed a piece of dead tree with contact details printed on it in ink arguably increasingly stands out in an age when digital data is so cheap and mutable.
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+20 +1
Siri’s Inventors Are Building a Radical New AI That Does Anything You Ask
When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity.
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+19 +1
Salmon cannon fires 40 fish a minute
Salmon live interesting lives: they are born in fresh water, then migrate to the ocean, where they grow to maturity, returning back to fresh water to breed, sometimes hundreds of kilometres, navigating obstacles along the way -- including swimming up waterfalls. And not just any freshwater will do, either: salmon return to the very spot they were born to lay their own spawn.
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+16 +1
The Engineer of the Original Apple Mouse Talks About His Remarkable Career
Jim Yurchenco was responsible for squeezing the guts inside the impossibly slim Palm V. He helped build the mouse for the Apple Lisa, which was significant in that it was the first mouse ever used by regular people. He was the first full-time employee at the company that would become Ideo, the massively influential design firm. But before all that, he was a sculptor.
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+19 +1
World's most notorious patent troll company lays off 19% of workforce
Intellectual Ventures, the world's most notorious patent troll company, has laid off 19% of its workforce.
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+17 +1
The Chairless Chair, an invisible chair that you can wear
It's like a chair that isn't there, but magically appears whenever you need it. It's called the Chairless Chair and you wear it on your legs like an exoskeleton: when it's not activated, you can walk normally or even run. And then, at the touch of a button, it locks into place and you can sit down on it. Like a chair that is now there.
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+21 +1
The Cutting-Edge Butter Knife of Your Dreams Is Finally Here
Sliced bread is synonymous with innovation, but really, how wonderful is it if a chilled pat of butter can trash a piece of pumpernickel toast? Fortunately, a trio of Australian designers—Craig Andrews, Sacha Pantschenko, and Norman Oliveria—have come together to revamp breakfast with a new knife/grater combo that can transform a densely packed brick of butter into easily spreadable strands of creamy delight.
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+18 +1
Good-bye, Dry Cleaning. Hello, Self-Cleaning Cashmere
Researchers in Hong Kong have developed a nano-coating that cleans fabric when exposed to light
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+16 +1
Physicists Close In on ‘Perfect’ Optical Lens
Researchers are making progress toward a “perfect lens” that will be able to resolve an organelle assembling a protein or a virus attacking a cell.
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+16 +1
Yale professor makes the case for Supercool Metals
Someday, digital citizens around the world may have a Yale professor to thank for the supercool, extra-durable case protecting their smartphones.
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+18 +1
The House That Spores Built
Phil Ross may have discovered the building material of the future. It's sturdy, resilient, and environmentally sustainable—practically inexhaustible, in fact. It can withstand everything from extreme temperature to a hail of bullets, and once it’s no longer useful, it can be easily composted. There's only one problem: Some people might not be ready to live in houses built from fungus.
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+20 +1
Hollow Flashlight Runs on Your Body Heat
Remember that potato clock you made for your high school science fair? Apparently, the bar has been raised quite a bit. Ann Makosinski, a 15 year old student from Canada, made a flashlight for her science fair project – a flashlight powered entirely by the body heat of the hand holding it.
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+1 +1
Denmark Scientists invented a New Material which can suck and release Oxygen in a room when needed.
Now you suddenly needed to vacuum all the oxygen from a room which caught fire and all you have to do is to place the "unnamed" material in the room and it will suck all the oxygen. Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have synthesized crystalline materials that can bind and store oxygen in high concentrations. Just one spoon of the substance is enough to absorb all the oxygen in a room. The stored oxygen can be released again when and where it is needed.
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+16 +1
This New Oxygen-Hoarding Crystal Is the Future of Breathing Underwater
It only takes about 10 liters of a newly-developed form of crystalline cobalt salt to steal the air from a room, or at least the 21 percent or so of that air comprised of oxygen. Given the right conditions, with the temperature and atmospheric pressure just so, it could take as little as seconds for the material to do its work. Then, by gently heating the material or subjecting it to low surrounding oxygen pressures, the material can be prompted to release its O2 payload back into the air.
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+21 +1
Nobel Prize for physics goes to inventors of low-energy LED light
An American and two Japanese scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for inventing a new energy-efficient and environment-friendly light source
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+19 +1
A Start-up Has Invented Veggie Burgers That ‘Bleed’
A biochemist named Patrick Brown has come up with yet another alternative strategy to produce entirely meatless hamburgers that look and taste very much like meat. That's one above, looking sufficiently burgerlike; it's even got that pristine medium-rare thing going on. Patties now being made by Brown's Impossible Foods are suffused with something called heme, it turns out, a molecule that comes from the roots of nitrogen-fixing plants but has the iron-tinged character of hemoglobin.
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+4 +1
The Undiscovered World of Thomas Edison
Historians, sorting through a treasure trove of Edison's papers, are discovering revealing details that enrich our portrait of one of America's most accomplished inventors
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