Sandro Engel and Holger Michel are interaction design students at HAWK University, a college in Hildesheim, Germany. They wanted to discourage people from running across busy streets. So they found a way to make waiting at a traffic light fun, rather than annoying. Their solution was to build a simple video game into a traffic light.
Engel and Michel call the game STREETPONG. It only works when the crosswalk is closed. Players on opposite sides of the street use a touch screen to maneuver boards back and forth, bouncing the ball toward each other.
According to some medical researchers, there's good reason to think so. Hypothetically, gene therapy could reduce or limit fear and subsequent trauma from terrifying situations. Geneticists have found that a particular mutation in the BDNF gene results in timidity. Certain drugs can reduce a fearful response to trauma. In the future, if such drugs are given immediately after a traumatic event, they may prevent post-traumatic stress disorder. Bret Stetka writes in Scientific American:
Raül Andero Galí, a research associate in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University, thinks BDNF-based approaches hold promise in understanding and treating anxiety. Only small amounts of BDNF make it across the blood-brain barrier, so at the moment there is no therapeutic role for the compound itself. Yet Galí’s work has shown that a compound that mimics the effects of BDNF in the brain successfully helped mice get over fearful associations—specifically a sound paired with a foot shock. The prospect of BDNF gene therapy is also being investigated. […]
Galí has also shown that a drug that blocks the activity of the Tac2 gene pathway, which is also thought to play a role in fear extinction, reduces the consolidation and storage of traumatic memories in mice, suggesting a possible therapeutic role in post-traumatic stress disorder. “PTSD it is a unique psychiatric disease because we usually know when it begins,” Galí says. “We could potentially give drugs shortly after trauma to prevent it.”
These are Milli Chairs, a novel design by Duffy London. They're made to resemble millipedes. They don't move (although that would be a nice feature), but they look like they're ready to crawl right over you!
They're easy to adjust. The back becomes the bottom and vise versa by flipping them over. I suggest collecting and arranging a bunch of them. If you get 54 Milli Chairs, you can simulate the Illacme plenipes, a millipede with 750 legs.
In The Godfather, Michael Corleone murders two enemies, then flees from New York City to hide in Italy. He goes to the a small town in Sicily and meets a pretty woman named Apollonia. He approaches her father at a bar and asks for permission to court her. You can watch the scene here.
The merc with a mouth is finally coming to the big screen. Ryan Reynolds, the actor who briefly played Deadpool in the 2009 movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine, will reprise the role in a feature-length film about our favorite psychopath.
To mark the occasion, Uproxx rounded up photos of 41 fantastic cosplays of Deadpool, including him as Sailor Moon, the Eleventh Doctor, Groot, and a French maid. The photos are divided into 2 posts, which are here and here.
Preach on, robot! Kids of all forms, organic and metallic, don't understand how fortunate they are. Back in my day, when a robot tried to kill me, it was only after I had walked to the robot factory uphill both ways in the snow. And when a robot tried to strangle me, I respected it. That was a robot trying to do quality work.
The news broadcasters later explained that the graphic shows the image of John Wayne as a default setting. They neglected to upload a photo of escaped prisoner Michael Fleet before displaying it on live TV.
Davide Michieletto and Matthew Turner are researchers at the University of Warwick in the UK. They're scholars in the field of polymer rings, which are strands that become easily tied together. Michieletto and Turner used the shape of these ring polymers to design a new type of pasta.
They call it anelloni, which is related to the Italian word for "ring." When cooked, anelloni clump together. It becomes enormously difficult to eat a single noodle, just as it is difficult to separate individual ring-shaped polymers.
An architect, an engineer, a ninja turtle, a painter--Leonardo da Vinci did it all. He applied his mind to every field of study available to him. You can get a sense of that from a to-do list that he jotted down sometime in the 1490s. Scholars found it in one of his surviving notebooks. Pictured above is an artistic representation of it by Wendy MacNaughton. In a 2011 article on National Public Radio, Robert Krulwich argues that Leonardo's scattered attention teaches us something about how we less ingenious people can improve our minds:
"We live in an age that worships attention," says my friend (and Radiolab colleague) Jonah Lehrer. "When we need to work, we force ourselves to concentrate. This approach can also inhibit the imagination. Sometimes, it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain."
That ability to let go, float free, does seem like an essential part of a creative mind, not just in giant ones. Those of us who make our livings closer to the ground, have to do it too. In his forthcoming book, (coming to bookstores this Spring) Jonah mentions a study by Dr. Holly White, then at the University of Memphis, and her colleague Priti Shah, of the University of Michigan. […]
Minds that break free, that are compelled to wander, can sometimes achieve more than those of us who are more inhibited, more orderly, the study suggests. Or, as Jonah chose to put it, there are "unexpected benefits of not being able to focus."
Like a lot of people known for a pretty face, Marutaro is trying to break into the music world. But he doesn't perform rock or pop. He's a smooth jazz piano player. Can you dig it?
You shouldn't kill us because we're quiet and probably won't get in your way. But if you must kill an introvert, then Justin Hall's methods are foolproof. There's only one thing worse than getting stabbed or poisoned: talking to strangers.
I've never been to New York City, but I hope to visit someday. I've already picked up some of the rules of etiquette, such as to keep walking while you're on the sidewalk and don't try to start conversations with strangers.
Before I go, I'll also re-watch this helpful guide. What does it mean to ride the subway? Johnny T, one of the puppets on the Glove and Boots show, explains:
Think of the subway as going to a party at a stranger's studio apartment at 7 in the morning with 800 other people who all hate each other.
It's the worst party ever. But people go to it every day without killing each other by getting it over with as quickly and as quietly as possible.
It’s called the ButtKicker. The device attaches to your couch. When the screen shows an impact—say, two hockey players slamming into each other—the ButtKicker shakes. It lets you feel the action while you watch it.
It’s now set up at the SAP Center in San Jose, California—the ice hockey arena that is the home of the San Jose Sharks. The side panels of the rink have 76 built-in sensors. When a player hits that wall, people can feel the impact through their ButtKickers.
Would you like to own a sword? Of course you do! Everyone wants—shoot, everyone needs—at least one sword. This lady in the Austin, Texas area owns over 100 of them. She wants to part with this beauty because it’s haunted:
This sword is from the 1700s. I got it at an antique store in my memaw's home town back in 1984. The person who sold it to me told me to be careful because there is a 90+% chance that it is cursed. Since it's been in my house my life has descended into pure chaos. My knitting group came over and they all said they could feel a strange energy in my sword room (I have a collection of over 100 swords. This is my only haunted sword). Since i got this sword, about 3 times a week a crucifix will fall off of my wall for no reason. I am 76 years old. I cannot have this cursed item in my house anymore. Please take it off my hands!!
It’s not that bad, but she’s tired of having to perform Constitution saving rolls every 10 rounds.
Should you dress like a Tumblr member or a LinkedIn member? That all depends on the context. Dress up as the right social network for the occasion. Fashion photographer Viktorija Pashuta shows you how with her project called What If Guys Were Social Networks.
With each model, Pashuta tried to express the matching personality:
Even though they share very similar functions and features, each social network has its own character and style: Facebook depicted as casual, Twitter as classic, Pinterest as creative, LinkedIn as Business, Instagram as vintage, Flickr as artsy, Tumblr as hip and Google +as innovative.
