Tim Cook has confirmed that production of one of the existing Mac lines will move to the US, wholesale, in 2013. The news has made it on to Bloomberg Business week, and will be confirmed in a TV interview with Tim Cook which will be aired on NBC tonight. More »
Every building material has a theoretical limit which it can’t be used beyond: at some point, the weight of material above is enough to crush what’s below. Now, a team of engineers has worked out that limit for Lego—and it’s surprisingly high. More »
Most foods deteriorate over time, but bread’s a major culprit, often going stale after just a couple of days. Now, though, a US research company claims to be able to make your loaf stay fresh for up to 60 whole days. More »
How’d you like it if you could fold up your entire house and store it in a shipping container? Well, that’s basically what artist/architect Adam Kalkin recently did with the creation of his Push Button House. It’s like a Transformer, but in shipping container form.
The 8-foot-wide, 20-foot-long house has 5 rooms inside of it, and starts out looking like an ordinary shipping container. But with the push of a button, the house comes to life, with a complete kitchen, dining room, bedroom, living room and library hiding inside.
A series of complicated hydraulics and carefully placed objects ensure the house and its contents fold up perfectly into itself.
The interior is all done up in a shiny white lacquer finish for show, but I suppose it could be built out with any design. This is actually the second Push Button House designed by Kalkin, and is much more complex and advanced than the original.
The home was recently shown in an exhibition for Italian coffee company illy caffè. Here’s a video from SPACEStv showing off the build process and engineering behind the Push Button House. If you just want to jump to the transforming house part, skip to about 10:40 in the video. (Note that there is some NSFW language in the video clip.)
Gotta love the part at the end where Kalkin admits he doesn’t even know what a Transformer is, despite the fact that he just built one.
Sure, the concept is pretty impractical and anything that’s not glued or bolted down would immediately fall all over the place when its folded up, but it’s still an impressive design.
Google’s working on building a new kind of mobile search tool, one which pre-guesses what you’re likely to be looking for and pings you a little update before you ask. Sort of like a clairvoyant butler arriving with a bacon sandwich when you need it most. More »
Take the blood of a freshly slaughtered animal. Mix thoroughly with preservatives and sand, pour into square molds, and bake for one hour. Allow to cool—then build your home from the result. No, really. More »
Using public Wi-Fi is a hit-and-miss endeavor: sometime’s its perfect, at others it’s bogged down so much as to be worthless. Fortunately a team of researchers has hit on a solution that can improve throughput by 700 percent—and because it’s software-based, it won’t even need any new hardware to have us all contentedly online. More »
How will the billion people who still use older 2G cellphones use them to pay for goods, just like people with smartphones equipped with near-field communications (NFC) wireless links? One answer is to place a tiny 2G base station at the point of sale so that those older non-NFC phones can also make a short-range transaction securely. More »
When Zac Vawter lost his right leg in a motorbike accident, he thought he’d never walk properly again. Now, he’s managed to use a bionic limb, hardwired into his nervous system, to climb 103 flights of stairs in the annual SkyRise Chicago skyscraper climbing contest. More »
Scientists have developed a way to manufacture a new breed of computer chips that use carbon nanotubes in the place of silicon. More »
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