The Left Coast Lifter sits docked in Hudson Harbor after its trip through the Panama Canal, coming to New York from San Francisco. Nearly 30 stories tall and able to lift up to 1,900 tons, the Left Coast Lifter now waits for construction work on The New NY Bridge to begin. [Photo by Nicholas Stango]
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Plants that eat metal sound like a biological impossibility. But these hungry little guys exist, sucking tiny bits of toxic metal from the soil. They don’t just clean the Earth, either—they can actually mine bits of gold and nickel for use by humans.
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There’s something about looking at these photographs of Australian salt mines that… I don’t know, they’re like a visual chill pill or something. Photographer Emma Phillips snapped these beautiful shots in the Nullarbor Plain of Western Australia, but they look like a landscape from outer space.
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What to do with an environment-wrecking molecule like carbon dioxide? The gas behind global warming and ocean acidification enjoys a pretty rough reputation these days, but scientists have been working on ingenious ways to put carbon dioxide to good use. A little electricity, it turns out, can transform the waste gas into raw material for making plastic bottles, antifreeze, fuel, and more.
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Machines: They make stuff. Lots of it. Hundreds of millions and billions and hundreds of billions of things over and over again forever. Watching them work is positively hypnotic. And we’ve got the GIFs to prove it.
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The CSX Northwest Ohio Intermodal Terminal is not a film set from the next Star Trek, but a logistics hub through which nearly 50 million tons of freight passes every year.
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After the Thames River weaves eastward through London, it widens into an industrial landscape of factories sretching out into the English Channel. London-based photographer Alice Gur-Arie has documented this landscape in her series Passages: Industry on the River Thames, a collection of beautiful black and white photographs depicting the hulking structures that rely on the river for survival.
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Economic news has felt bleak for years now. And every time things seem to pick up there’s something like Detroit’s bankruptcy looming as a reminder that times are still tough. But we know that there is some recovery going on and this infographic shows the sectors that have momentum.
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We’ve all spooned grub into our gaping maws at one point or another, but how about spooning a new soul into the vacant husk of American manufacturing? That’s what Spuni is doing with just a bright idea and hip-tastic technologies like crowd-funding and 3D printing. The New York Times dug into the story of Spuni’s ascent, and how it’s feeding an industry, spoonful by spoonful. More »
So, Amazon has a reading platform called Kindle. Goodreads has a platform that makes fairly excellent suggestions when it comes to reading materials. You probably see where this is going. This evening, Amazon announced that it was acquiring one of the more popular reading recommendation engines, and while the outfit isn’t making clear what it plans to do with the technology, it shouldn’t take a scholar to see how it’d bolster Amazon’s Kindle reader line as well as its array of Kindle apps. (What’ll happen to Shelfari, however, is perhaps a bigger mystery.)
Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle Content noted that “Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world — together, we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike.” It’s entirely likely that this will add another social angle to the Kindle framework, further establishing an ecosystem where friends could see suggestions based on what they’re independently reading through their own Kindle accounts. The companies are expecting the deal to be finalized in Q2, which suggests that we’ll see a proper integration just as back-to-school season begins. Right, guys?
Filed under: Amazon
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