You can even use the $199 Microsoft Band to buy drinks at Starbucks.
Microsoft on Thursday debuted a connected activity-tracking wristband with a heart-rate monitor that can track sleep and fitness data.
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Daily Archives: October 30, 2014
Psychedelic Ant Farms Designed To Raise Money For Charity
These ants are mindlessly burrowing for a cause.
Although they used to be filled with soil or sawdust, newer ant farms use an edible semi-transparent gel, which serves as both nutrition and medium of travel for the ants trapped inside. Most of that gel isn’t eaten, but instead pushed aside as the trapped ants endlessly burrow to an intended destination they’ll never reach.
via Co.Design http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fastcodesign/feed/~3/_2WiPYAkRAI/psychedelic-ant-farms-designed-to-raise-money-for-charity
Cool, Weird Halloween Costumes You Can Pull Out Of A Printer
It’s not too late to get a Halloween costume. You can print out these low-poly masks at home.
Need a last-minute Halloween costume? Print yourself out one of these beautiful papercraft masks.
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What The Great Pyramid Looked Like More Than 4,000 Years Ago
The Great Pyramid used to be so shiny, it glowed.
Go to the pyramids at Giza today, and you’ll see pollution blackened steppes surrounded by smog and sand. Some 4,000 years ago, the pyramids looked much nicer: They were covered in polished limestone, resembling brilliant lightforms dropped into the desert from the sky.
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It’s Melting! A Life-Sized House Made Of Wax
Alex Chinneck, master of architectural illusions, has created a two-story house made of 8,000 wax bricks.
British artist Alex Chinneck has a knack for creating surreal, reality-bending inversions of urban architecture, like a seemingly slouchy brick facade and an upside-down building. He’s at it again for London’s annual Merge Festival, where he has created a life-sized building made entirely of wax.
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Design Porn For Air Traffic Controllers
From ATL to TPA, the Airport Runway Collection lets you admire the intricate pattern of your favorite airport as seen from above.
There are few areas of design so important to get right as that of the airport runway. They host millions of flyers every year, but most of us never get a really good view of the system set up to make sure that the 100-ton behemoths dropping in and out of the sky never collide.
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A Portrait Of London’s Diversity, Drawn From Languages Spoken Near Tube Stops
Tube tongues!
London, like any big city, is a melting pot of languages and cultures. Oliver O’Brien, a researcher in University College London’s geography department with a zeal for visualizing information about the London Underground, has extended his already data-rich interactive map of the Tube to show where exactly residents speak languages other than English primarily, based on subway stops. (Earlier this year, a similar project attempted to visualize the languages spoken around New York City, though it wasn’t nearly as easy to read.)
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MIT Visualizes What Robots Are Thinking
Want to know what’s going on inside that robot’s brain? MIT researchers are trying to show us.
Robots make thousands of tiny decisions a second, but they don’t emote or verbally communicate. So when a Roomba turns 90 degrees in the middle of the room, we’re only left wondering why and if something is broken.
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Read About How Hotels Get You To Reuse Towels. Everyone’s Doing It
Researchers have figured out how to create (almost) perfect towel reuse signs by exploiting a common human foible.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency started a program to reduce hotel water consumption called the H2Otel Challenge. In addition to installing new equipment, such as water-efficient toilets, faucets, and shower heads, hotels are encouraged to give guests the option of reusing their towels and sheets with those little signs that have become ubiquitous across the United States. You know, the ones that look like this:
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Why Are Victorian Houses So Creepy?
Frank Lloyd Wright, the Addams Family, and Hitchcock: How Victorian architecture became the default haunted house.
Americans have a very specific idea about what makes a house look creepy. If you search for “haunted house” on Google images, only one type of architecture appears in the first 25 images: a Victorian mansion.
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