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an 8 minute "lively" infographic movie about the progress & problems of globalisation. enjoy the people-based bar & line graphs, & top-view world maps.

[links: youtube.com (English) & youtube.com (German)]

see also 1 take shot trampoline video clip.

Shai Agassi says his electric cars can save the world. People are listening.

There’s a lot to chew over in Wired’s profile of Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur engaged in an audacious experiment to electrify an entire nation’s transportation system, and in the process rewrite the automotive industry’s business model.

The nation in question is Israel, with Denmark and Hawaii possibly to follow. Agassi’s idea is that electric cars should be sold on a subscription model, like cell phones, with fees used to underwrite a network of intelligent electric outlets that ensure batteries are always topped up.

The world's leading certification system for sustainable architecture is set to undergo its most sweeping changes in 2009. The proposed revisions encourage designs that would reduce a building's impact on global climate change.

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, commonly known as LEED, has become the standard for green building design since the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a nongovernmental organization, crafted the rating system eight years ago. Architecture that voluntarily improves energy efficiency, water conservation, and indoor air quality has surged in popularity in the past two years, especially in Europe and major U.S. cities.

Just back from Manifesta. The seventh edition of this touring art biennale is held in Trentino-South Tyrol, in N-E Italy. The food over there is definitely Italian but with a crispy teutonic twist, so are the people and atmosphere. To make things even quirkier for visitors, the exhibition is split over several locations, most of them in derelict ex-industrial buildings (how fashionable!) at the outskirts of the small towns that host the event.

Inside the ex-Alumix factory. Photo credit: Andrea Pozza

In the spirit of the back-to-school season, this week we highlight a few products to help keep you organized and productive as you resume your routine.
It's no secret that LED technology is paving the way for a brighter, more energy efficient future for lighting. Within the past several years, designs for LED lamps have come a long way and prices (for the most part) have come down significantly. Below is our selection of the best task lamps currently on the market, each of which will make office overtime a little easier on the eyes.

Balmuda Highwire

According to a 200-year-old family legend, Bettye Kearse - an African American - is the direct descendant of James Madison.  Madison, of course, was a founding father and fourth President of the United States.  As the story goes, he fathered a child name Jim with a slave cook named Coreen.  For the past 4 years she and genetic genealogist Bruce Jackson of the Roots Project have tried to use DNA to prove or disprove a story passed through 5 generations of the family.

Email addresses that begin with letters towards the end of the alphabet receive less spam than those starting with letters towards the end, says Richard Clayton at the University of Cambridge.He looked at more than half a billion emails that arrived at one UK ISP over an eight-week period. After ignoring addresses that appear to be out of use, he showed that for those beginning with A 30% of messages are spam. Someone with an address starting with Z gets a smaller proportion - 20%.The exact reason for the difference is unclear. Clayton thinks it is down to spammers attempting to guess addresses.

Sony has a great new ad campaign for their digital audio players, created by Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney, helmed by art director Eron Broughton. The agency took Sony's earphones and literally mapped out the subway systems of London, New York and Sydney, mimicking a traditional subway map. It's a simple idea but powerful in its execution, giving Sony a much-need dose of coolness. Now all Sony needs to do is apply that principle to its actual products.

Ubiquity, an experimental extension to Mozilla Firefox, lets people substitute simple text commands for complex Web tasks such as putting links to maps in e-mail messages.

The commands that users type in Ubiquity, such as "map" and "e-mail," find resources on the Web and can gather information from those sources in one place. (Source: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150343/mozilla_extension_would_tap_into_typed_commands.html)

Energy Storage and Power, a new company, plans to use wind turbines to produce compressed air that can be stored underground or in tanks and released later to power generators during peak hours. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/nyregion/26wind.html?ref=environment)

Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, says that distributing induced pluripotent stem cells to researchers around the world will advance the study of degenerative diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes. (Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/21307/?a=f)

The normally developed visual system quickly becomes engaged to process touch in response to complete loss of sight, researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have found in experiments with Braille tests.

The speed and dynamic nature of the changes they observed suggest that rather than establishing new nerve connections -- which would take a long time -- the visual cortex is unveiling abilities that are normally concealed when sight is intact.

These principles may also apply to other sensory loss, such as deafness or loss of function following brain injury. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news139028746.html)

The new Google Suggest feature aims to help users to better formulate queries, reduce spelling errors, and save keystrokes by suggesting queries as uses type letters and words.

The suggestions are based on an aggregate of Google searches. Yahoo Search Assist and Microsoft Live Search offer similar services.

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574B100555BF2.html)

21% of 193 traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicines bought on the Internet from US or Indian sources contained high amounts of lead, mercury or arsenic, with some heavy metals deliberately added, Boston University School of Medicine researchers have found. (Source: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn14608-ayurvedic-medicines-laden-with-toxic-heavy-metals.html?feedId=online-news_rss20)

National Institute of Mental Health scientists have created a "BTBR" strain of mice with autistic-like behaviors, using an extra human gene thought to be involved in the condition.

The mice show symptoms normally used to diagnose human autism: repetitive behavior, restricted social interaction, and certain sound behaviors.

The mice may help scientists study the complicated genetics of autism.

(Source: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn14607-autistic-mice-offer-hope-of-genetic-clues.html?feedId=online-news_rss20)

Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Foundation could receive a grant of up to $1.5 million from a student group that has applied to American Express for an "Undergrads Fighting Age Related Disease" project -- if the project gets more than 2000 votes by September 1 (anyone can vote).

Instructions are on the Methuselah Foundation website.

The Methuselah Foundation's SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) research program addresses the main types of cellular damage underlying most age-related diseases.

Lee Dorsey has a stable of hits unlike most other New Orleans artist. He's solid gold.

From a partnership with Allen Toussaint, who seems to be an architect of half of the music that came out of city in 1960s, Dorsey enjoyed many many hits, often with the Meters as his backing band.

Before his career took off as a singer he was a light heavyweight boxer in Portland (after the war) and he also ran a car body repair shop in New Orleans. Hmmm useful information overload.

Lee Dorsey - My Old Car
Brought to you by Jukebox Joints

US Americans do, according to Christoph Bartneck at the Technical University of Munich. He thinks that crossing the uncanny valley - overcoming the revulsion we feel towards robots that are almost, but not quite, human-like - is something that a society does together.Bartneck showed Japanese and US citizens a number of photos and asked them to rate them for likeability. Some of those showed the faces of real humans, some showed human-like androids, and some were simply photos of robot pets.

This week Cool Hunting brings you a feature per day to focus on the back to school season. Each day we will highlight a different aspect of getting back to work to uncover some products that could help to keep keep you organized and productive.

Everyone needs a good bag to tote their belongings. In fact, we're a bit obsessive of which bags we use here at the office so we only saw it fitting to kick off the back to school season with our selection of bags to transport all those books, clothes, pens, pencils, laptop and whatever else you carry around with you.

Patagonia Lightwire 25

Believe. DVDs coated with a layer of genetically-altered microbe proteins could one day hold terabytes of information, says a US-based researcher, reporting his findings at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane recently.

Venkatesan Renugopalakrishnan, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Florida International University and an internationally recognized expert in protein structural biology and engineering has invented a next-generation means of storage technology that dwarfs current technology.

Renu (as the professor is known) and his team at BioFold Inc., a California-based firm that he founded in 1999, in collaboration with FIU and other corporate labs, are designing a single-layer DVD that can store up to 198 gigabytes of data – more than 20 times the capacity of a dual-layer DVD-9. The technology will be able to store even up to 50,000 gigabytes (about 50 terabytes), he says.

Researchers from Monash University have designed a sponge-like chitosan biopolymeric nanoparticle "trojan horse" particle that protects antioxidants from being destroyed in the gut, ensuring a better chance of being absorbed in the digestive tract.

The longer-term aim is to include similarly treated nanoparticles into food items. (Source: http://www.physorg.com/news138871826.html)

In the WINSOC project, European and Indian researchers are applying principles learned from living organisms to design self-organizing networks of wireless sensors suitable for a wide range of environmental monitoring purposes,robust against node failures and capable of being implemented on large scales.

They developed mathematical models of biological systems and translated them into algorithms to determine how the sensor nodes should interact with each other, using self-organization. The sensor nodes communicate with their neighbors to arrive at a consensus on what has been sensed. The network then finds the best path through the available nodes to relay this information to the control centre.

(Source: http://www.physorg.com/news138892683.html)

an interesting news article about the distribution of world records in sporting events & the recent 200m sprint at the Olympic Games in particular. the story links to several interactive graphs that highlight the lack of a normal distribution, as outliers are more prevalent due to the extreme tails of highly selected samples, where usual statistical patterns rarely hold.

In conjunction with Creative Time, Playing the Building is a project by David Byrne in which he turns a 9,000 sq. ft abandoned room in the Battery Maritime Building into an instrument. Through the use of an antique pump organ, controlled devices create sounds with only what is afforded by the building's infrastructure, including heating pipes, metal beams and pillars.

Trying to romance your lady? Forget about roses and wine. She already knows you’re a geek so use some gadgets while you romance her.

It’s a tough call as to whether or not she will find these wine shaped usb speakers romantic or not. Who knows how a woman thinks. But just imagine a candle light dinner with this pair of wine glass speakers on the table and some soft music. They feature 2.1 channel subwoofers and who knows you might get lucky. Just be careful that you don’t pour wine in them. $21.99.

SourcingMap via Slipperybrick

several design for a bathroom based on pixel drawings made out of classic 4 by 4 inch colored tiles. the one based on a subway map seems quite infosthetic.

[link: blogs.nytimes.com|thnkx Remy]

By Ezra Natalia

By using the mass production techniques of industrial chemistry on a much smaller scale Sarah McLellan and Kristina Ortega are able to create one of a kind pieces of jewelry for their new line named Mctega. Inspired by their pre-med educations and organic chemistry more specifically, the duo use materials known for their ubiquity to handcraft necklaces that are both creative and surreal. From animals gilded in gold, to chunks of crystal and amorphous glass-like plates with colourful hexagons, prices range from $92 to $325.

We recently caught up with the duo to ask them a few questions about their line and how they got started.

What are you listening to right now?
We are watching the Olympics! That is all we have been doing for the past week and a half. No music... Were obsessed!

I’ve been into skateboarding for about a decade and mustaches, well...not quite as long. The latest project by artist Lawrence Melilli makes a great combo of the two.

Although you might have seen this around a bit, we love Melilli's current series of hand painted skateboards which all feature a distinct and classic ‘stache. Available as a one-off, each mustache is retired once it's been painted. They make for a humorous decorative piece but shaped from Canadian Maple wood the deck offers a pretty good ride too.

Finalizing our coverage of Nike Sportswear's launch activities we bring you a walk-thru of their new store in NYC, 21 Mercer. Richard Clarke, Global Creative Director for Nike Sportswear, talks to us about the brand as expressed thru this space, the product collection and the their ongoing artist collaborations.

Heat haze usually blocks your view of distant objects. But a new kind of binoculars use it to see further than possible through clear air.The Super-Resolution Vision System (SRVS) is funded by the US military research agency DARPA. It exploits the fact that the distortions of heat haze can fleetingly act like a lens, magnifying a clear view of objects behind it.The SRVS binoculars automatically collects those "lucky regions" when trained on shimmering air. They can then be digitally stitched together into a single continuous view with more detail than possible without heat haze.

Organic and sustainable foods have firmly positioned themselves in kitchens across the globe. When it comes to green cooking equipment, however, there's plenty of room for improvement. One step in the right direction is the Eco Chef Frying Pan. It's made from 99% recycled aluminum which conducts heat faster than conventional pans, decreasing heating time by 20%. It also features a non-stick surface that doesn't employ any harmful chemicals (most notably the harmful carcinogen PTFE that's found in Teflon-based cookery), and features a bamboo handle.

And in other news, Jeff Koons has painted a boat. Apparently he
based this design on a WW1 camouflage pattern. Looks like Lego to me. It was commissioned by art collector Dakis Joannou. Make of it what you will...

When the world's most desirable confection meets some of the finest spirits, it's bound to be a successful combination. Case in point, Les Shooters from Montreal's first chocolate lounge and boutique, Suite 88. The shooters, which appear to be average, conical truffles are actually chocolate containers filled with an assortment of 12 different liquors.

To take the shooter, first bite the tip off before drinking it like a tiny flask. The remaining chocolate serves as a sweet chaser that both contrasts and compliments the strategically paired liquor.

Beyond the Valley have rented this extra shop just behind Carnaby Street for 10 days. It's a sale shop as you can see. They have an interesting idea though. On the first day, this Friday (22nd August) everything will cost £30, then each day everything will drop by £5 per day until they run out of things.

By Juliet Kinsman

We assume that many of the athletes and some spectators will be doing a bit of travel outside of Beijing after the Olympics. A three hour drive southwest of Shanghai on the outskirts of Hangzhou, we recommend staying at Fuchun Resort if you're in the area. Pronounced 'Foo-choo-win,' it's the ultimate antidote to bright lights and big cities.

From the makers of one of the original energy drinks comes Red Bull Simply Cola, a new cola with a twist. It's the first major brand extension for the company and they're setting it apart from other similar soft drinks and from Red Bull itself by taking pride in being "strong and natural." We were pleasantly surprised by just how different from its cousin it is.

Without taurine or any other secret formula, Simply Cola is more about taste than it is about partying all night long. Using all-natural ingredients (the caffeine is even extracted from coffee beans) and plant extracts — including kola nut, cacao, ginger, vanilla, cardamom, cinnamon, lemon, lime and coca leaf to name a few — it has a complex spiced flavor with that classic cola taste.

There's two different camps in cycling. The first seeks out every new, high-tech toy they can attach to their carbon fiber frame, while the other takes the opposite approach, stripping off anything that's not vital to its performance. These fixed-gear purists shun derailleurs, brakes and anything else that obscures the clean geometry of the bicycle frame.

You've seen the Speedo LZR-Racer and its effect on Olympic swim times, but the Lunocet Monofin promises to have an even greater effect on swimming speeds. Although it will most likely never be allowed in competition, it represents another product design that is sure to change the swimming experience.

Yesterday, Microsoft finally released the first public version of Photosynth, software that meshes many photos of the same place into a 3D landscape. There are already several synths on the Photosynth website - to view them you'll first need to download the software there. You can upload collections of your own photos of a place and have them get the Photosynth treatment. The video below gives you an idea of what you can expect.Impressive though this week's public release is, there's a lot to look forward to in the future.