Together, the Jerry Seinfeld Calendar and Pimsleur’s Graduated Interval Recall, create a method for improving the ways we learn.

The Electrolux Design Lab is a global design competition for graduate and undergraduate industrial design students to showcase innovative ideas in household appliances.

The tinkering that we now only associate with technology and machines, is emerging within the fields of genetics and biotechnology.

While two industrial air-conditioning units churn all day and night at the back of this New York restaurant, the windows and the door are wide open letting the hot summer air in. I actually went in and complained last night about it and the manager gave me a crappy answer that the windows were open because some customers think it’s warm in there and others think it’s cool. I challenged him on this and he shrugged.
We seem to be so infatuated with the sustainability behind the food we eat these days but not so interested in how poorly those serving [...]

Although there have been plenty of reports linking cellphone usage to such things as brain tumors, a recent Australian study found a different kind of hazard related to mobile phone use in children.
The Mobile Radiofrequency Phone Exposed Users Study (MoRPhEUS) analyzed the cognitive capabilities and mobile phone use of 317 children ages 11-14. The young people who used their phones more often- with the setting that completed words automatically (predictive texting), completed tests quicker, but with a larger number of mistakes.
Epidemiologist Michael Abramson, who performed the tests for Monash University in Australia, told ABC Science that the results showed predictive [...]

Italian scientists are currently developing wood-based bone implants for animals and humans that may assist neighboring bones to heal quicker and with more support than the artificial ones available today, which are often made from metal and ceramic materials.
Wood appears to be a reliable substitute because of its close resemblance to the physical makeup of real bone. There is also the common problem of metal/ceramic implants contributing to complications in the healing process of the surrounding bones. Wood has the ability to do what materials such as titanium can’t- meld with living tissue.
This new method has not yet been cleared [...]

When we were on Valencia in San Francisco a couple of weeks back, PSFK popped into Dave Eggers’ Pirate Supply Store and picked up a copy of Essentially Odd. This book is a catalog of all the fantastic products that have been created to aid education programs at the 826 National Stores across the US
Essentially Odd offers a behind-the-scenes look at the innovative design that takes place at our chapters across the country and features more than 150 pages of color photos of each 826 chapter’s storefronts and products, along with notes and commentary from the product designers.
We rifled through [...]

Artist Jonathan Harris has just announced the release of an interesting project he’s been working on over the last two tears with Sputnik, Inc., a NYC-based nonprofit dedicated to documenting, archiving and disseminating ideas that are shaping contemporary culture. Named Sputnik Observatory, the project is a fascinating collection of inter-connected video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology.
As one might expect, the conversations are organized into typical categories such as speaker name and subject matter, but what makes this site’s design a bit more revelatory than the standard fare, is extra functionality that enables users to easily navigate [...]

Virgin recently broke ground on the site of their spaceport in New Mexico. In less than 20 months, the company hopes to construct a 3000 ft runway and facilities called Spaceport America to act as the launching pad for Virgin Galactic and other space-bound flights. The BBC has this report on the project that had been designed by Lord Foster:

A quick look at the stats and figures on the site provides some interesting reading about how the new site plans to use sustainable methods to offset some of its carbon footprint:
• Earth Tubes under the earth berm to cool the [...]

Even as consumer camera drop in price and rapidly increase in quality, none of them could compare to the system researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles are developing.  They are working on an imaging system that utilizes “supercontinuum laser pulses” to capture incredibly fast moving events such as neuron communication.
The system, dubbed Steam (Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging), creates a shutter speed equivalent of half a billionth of a second through a speedy laser pulse and captures 6.1 million images a second. The research team is continuing to work on this project to hone the quality of [...]

Magnus Larsson, a student at the Architectural Association in London, has devised an ambitious plan to create a 6,000km long sandstone wall across the Sahara Desert. The wall would provide refugee housing, and act as a barrier against the further spread of the desert. If that doesn’t sound fantastic enough, Larsson plans to create this wall by seeding the Sahara with bacillus pasteurii, a microorganism that solidifies loose sand into sandstone. The microorganism will act as a kind of huge, living 3D printer, manufacturing a new landscape over thousands of years.
[via BLDGBLOG]

Bustbright has put together an impressive collection of science and tech ads from magazines of the 50s and 60s.  Check out the full Flickr set here.

Blood shortages for transfusions may become a thing of the past if a revolutionary (and controversial) process being developed by British scientists works out.
The news was released yesterday that a team of researchers are on target to create unlimited quantities of “synthetic” human blood from embryonic stem cells. The goal is to obtain the cells from donor embryos that have the rare, but universally compatible O-negative blood type. Once the cells are brought into the laboratory they can be multiplied indefinitely. While the benefits of this plan are obvious – including the fact that this blood would be free of [...]

The movies aren’t usually considered a sensory experience, despite several historical attempts at scented cinema dating back to 1916. But soon you may be able to actually feel what’s going on in the movies – perhaps a Michael Bay explosion or an Angelina Jolie drop kick…or even better, to experience a real emotional reaction based not just on what you’re seeing in a movie, but on on actual physical stimulus.
Researchers at Phillips Electronics just debuted a jacket lined with 64 vibration motors at the 2009 World Haptics Conference. As described by Paul Lemmens, a Philips senior scientist, the jacket is [...]

Wired points us to some exciting news on the nanotechnology front. Teams at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Berkeley have had success in developing two new nanotech materials which promise to increase the functionality (and shrink the size) of these atomic level machines.
Wired explains:
Two U.S. teams have developed new materials that may pave the way for ever smaller, faster and more powerful electronics as current semiconductor technology begins to reach the limits of miniaturization.
One team has made tiny transistors — the building block of computer processors — a fraction of the size [...]