Over the past 50 years, the government space agency has built an awful lot of stuff for, well, space. But with its $17 billion annual budget, it has also done quite a bit of research and development in other areas, and even its space gear managed to influence so many other things down here on earth.
This is story about a man who created—and wore—a fake, bleeding uterus made out of a bladder and goat’s blood. This is also a story about an inventor breaking profound taboos to revolutionize the lives of women. Either way, how a school dropout in India came to invent a cheaper way to make sanitary pads is a tale at once weird and inspiring, as chronicled in a recent BBC article.
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If you’ve ever ridden a Citibike (or any similar bike-share bicycle) you know: those suckers are heavy. And, if you’ve ever ridden up anything near an incline, you know that heavy bikes absolutely suck on hills. Wouldn’t it be great to just push a button instead?
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You might not expect the United States Patent and Trademark Office to be as excited about the Winter Olympics as it is. But this month, office is releasing historic patents that reveal how winter sports emerged. So, who invented the snowboard?
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A new invention filed by Apple with the US Patent and Trademark Office is so simple but clever that it’s amazing it’s not been done before: Cook & Co. suggests that it could insert doctored or pre-recorded images into FaceTime chats on crappy connections to keep the conversation smooth.
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Visions of the future from the past always serve as an endless source of comedy. Look how dumb we were! Look how silly those people look! Look! Look! It’s completely true. Our imaginations of the future are rooted in the limits of today which typically makes it an awful thought exercise. So in a few years, we’ll look back at 2013 and poke fun of ourselves. But in the mean time, let’s laugh at the 1930’s and 1940’s for these ridiculous inventions.
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Products that are meant to serve the world’s neediest often have trouble taking off, despite their creators’ best intentions. What keeps these helpful inventions from becoming blockbusters?
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Patents celebrate the human spirit of innovation, and new patents are a constant source of inspiration. But sometimes you come across some patents that seem a little… evil. Here are nine real-life patents that will make you despair about the human race.
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Whoops, wish we could take that one back. This TED-Ed animation video teaches you the history of gunpowder. How it began as a Chinese invention for immortality, how it works in fireworks and how it morphed into the world destroyer and creator it is now. Watch it, you might learn a thing or two.
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For as far back as we are able to look into the prehistory of the human race, music has been a crucial part of the life of humans. Some scholars even speculate that human music may have come before language. From the beginning, people living in little groups sang and danced to self-made music. Drums and pipes were readily developed, and even today they can be found in use, still often hand-made, in every culture anywhere in the world where simple communities gather for group celebrations.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
