Roger Shawyer claims to have developed a spacecraft engine that turns energy into thrust with no moving parts.

Sounds like a dime-a-dozen nut case, except that he's a respected space engineer. And he has a working prototype.

It sounds to me like it violates the conservation of momentum, but my understanding of microwaves is not so good. Anyway it's a pretty good article from the New Scientist.

The Boston Globe has an article with 32 pretty amazing microscopic photos.

Early next year UPS will be testing seven hydraulic hybrid delivery trucks - diesel trucks with a hybrid drive system that uses a fluid pressure differential to recycle braking energy.

I just thought this was cool because I've never even heard of this technology and it's already being deployed.

A really cool blog from the Royal Academy of Art at The Hague. Check it out for consistently rad and interesting postings about new interactive design ideas and products. I recommend starting with this one.

A Hermes Birkin handbag sold for $42,500.00 to an unidentified buyer...

As you will see from looking at the two screen shots of the sale, at the bottom of this post, there are a lot of Hermes handbags for sale...

Basically explains why you should never discuss politics or religion


“The heart has reasons that reason does not know,” -Pascal

An excellent podcast, featuring interviews with scientists in several fields and an outline of what we should expect and not expect of the 44th President on issues such as embryonic stem cell research, global warming, education, and the space program.

Gore's plan to have America running on 100% clean energy in just 10 years.

The Italians make Our CrownVictorias look indeed Black and White.

"Don't even think about trying to outrun the cops in Lazio, Italy... the boys in blue are rollin' in a 560-horsepower Lamborghini Gallardo that'll do 203"

Finally the guilty party for "Acts of God" is almost held accountable...

What would you do with thin and bendable luminescent lights attachable to any fixture?

Check out this Russian programmer's progress into his 3d engine for Flash.

A new pet store just opened in New York... and it's a little different!

Somebody's photo travelogue of their tour of the Chernobyl disaster area. A true post-apocalyptic wasteland.

He used Craigslist to recruit a bunch of decoys, pepper sprayed an armored car driver, and escaped with a large amount of money in a getaway inner tube.

Rogue employees at Absolute Poker and UltimateBet have been systematically cheating at online poker for the last 3 years, "winning" about $10 million from suckers.

How do you make the crazy crazier? Tell them they're wrong. A number of studies have shown that corrections to political misinformation helps further spread the belief in that same misinformation.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley have decided to pull the plug on investing and transition to deposit-taking lenders. Evidentaly they think the model is 'fundamentally broken', and it only took them $700 billion to figure that out.

"Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, commissioned a survey of over 500 economists to find out which candidate for President of the United States would be best for the economy long term."

These two are pretty trippy, this is the first time I've seen something like this. Check it out.

SanDisk announced that they will start to sell full albums on microSD cards. There's a lot of talk as to whether or not this will actually take off, but at least someone's thinking about way to try and evolve the model. I think more interesting is the agreement that they have to distribute not just MP3's, but at a higher bitrate (320kbps) than what I've seen commonly available.

A recent interview with Bill Maher cutting through the bullshit and talking sense. The interview centers around the upcoming election, the economy, Iraq and Afghanistan.

They don't hate us for our freedom, they hate us for our air strikes.

You may remember the twisted films of Pes from this post. Now Pes is back with a new film about making spaghetti!

This is a lecture by Mark Miodownik, Head of the Materials Research Group at King’s College London. It's a 45 minute MP3 in which he walks through the entire process of making a cup of coffee, starting with the fruit on the tree.

Here's the direct download link for the MP3.