Ah, batteries. They always die sooner than you think, right? Not this one! Called Karpen’s Pile, this battery has been working uninterrupted since the 1950′s. That’s 60 years of charge! The perpetual motion machine was built by Vasile Karpen and it should have stopped working decades ago. But when a Romanian newspaper went to check out [...]
Peter Jalowiczor is a gas worker from South Yorkshire, England. He’s also the discoverer of four giant exoplanets, according to the University of California’s Lick-Carnegie Planet Search Team. But he’s not an astronomer and he doesn’t even have a telescope.
No one’s going to be calling Nokero out for falling behind. Just a few short months after revealing its first commercial light bulb for developing nations, the outfit has now rolled out a second version, the predictably titled N200. This guy strikes a vastly different pose compared to the original, with the LED enclosure hanging on a [...]
Until now, all other artificial heart transplants were just temporary relief. A 15 year old boy from Italy became the first person to receive a permanent artificial heart, due to the Duchenne syndrome which was wasting his muscles away. It was this syndrome which meant he couldn’t receive a heart transplant, causing doctors in Rome to insert [...]
Last week, Facebook added feature that allowed users to ignore friend requests without rejecting them. It seems, though, that it also acts like Twitter’s “follow” feature—the requesting user sees the requested user’s statuses, but not the other way around. In a strangely unpublicized move, Facebook has replaced the “Ignore” button with a “Not Now” button [...]
You may already be aware of the practice of “card skimming,” wherein thieves use hidden cameras and magnetic strip-readers to steal ATM customers’ PIN number and card information. Here’s a fascinating video taken from one of those hidden cameras.
Windows only: Freeware utility The Handy Start Menu organizes the applications in your Start Menu into categories automatically, so you don’t have to deal with organizing everything yourself.
This colossal star nest 5000 light years away, in the Sagittarius constellation, is the heart of the Lagoon Nebula. Now, imagine you could operate the Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys like a gigantic DSLR camera with telephoto lenses. If that would be possible, this is how the zooming on this titanic dust and gas cloud would [...]
A bartender in London observed to Times writer Harold McGee that watered down cocktails could actually smell stronger than stiffer ones. Drinks like water and whiskey are far from uncommon, but in addition to cutting down the alcohol’s bite, the water also intensifies the drink’s aroma.
A 17-year-old boy from Australia claims he inadvertently triggered a chain of events that led to thousands of people being affected by a Twitter security flaw yesterday. But it all may have been started by a Japanese developer a couple of hours earlier. Pearce Delphin, or @zzap on TwitterTwitter, says he exposedthe security flaw by tweeting a piece of [...]