flickering pictures

Sweden’s Flygbussarna bus company has built a 300-ton “bus” out of 50 crushed cars, to highlight the fact that each of its buses can potentially take 50 cars worth of emissions out of our air. They’re calling it a bus, but it’s really more a rectangular heap of twisted metal, with wheels tacked on […]

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So there’s this guy with a broken foot in New York who has been hobbling around town on crutches, and who’s fed up with perfectly healthy people who refuse to give up subway seats reserved for people with limited mobility. He’s so fed up, in fact, that he started taking their pictures and posting […]

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The constant hijackings off the Somali coast aren’t really news — or rather, they’re news that everyone else is already reporting, and I don’t usually go into that sort of thing here.
But every time I hear about one of these hijackings, I wonder why people keep sailing their tankers and transport ships into the most […]

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Boasting an impressive 51.7 mpg (21.97km/litre) in city driving, the Tata Nano might be the cheapest and cleanest production car in the world. And at $2,000 apiece, India’s roads are going to see a lot of them.
The Nano has five seats, a maximum speed of 60 mph (about 97km/h), twice the fuel efficiency of […]

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The very neat Guide to Sleeping in Airports provides detailed info on the varying levels of comfort, cleanliness and security guard grumpiness at airports around the world, as well as tips for hassle-free napping.
The Guide also ranks the airports for hospitality, and there seems to be a distinct leaning in favour of Asian airports over […]

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This portable laser-generated bike lane is the neatest simple idea I’ve seen in a while. But is it for real, and is it for sale?
From Yanko Design:

Only a small fraction of streets have dedicated bike lanes, and with an installation cost of $5,000 - $50,000 per mile, we shouldn’t expect to find them everywhere […]

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Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius.
And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore.
From the Times of India:

The […]

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I’m not usually this philosophical in the morning, but watching this video I kept thinking about how incredibly neat it is that humans have created a new circulatory system for the Earth, with ebbs and flows regulated by the planet’s rotation. There’s something beautiful about this.
It’s also instructive to see that Africa, with its […]

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Space elevator: a proposed megastructure designed to transport material from a celestial body’s surface into space as a way of non-rocket spacelaunch.
Picture a super-strong ribbon thinner than a sheet of paper, one metre wide and long enough to wrap two and a half times around the world. Now picture it extending into space, the […]

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Gas prices through the roof? Trust a practical country to come up with a practical solution.

From the Times of India:

The engines of the buses have been tuned to allow a maximum speed of 60 km only, an official said here on Wednesday.
The tuning of the engines would give 0.40 km mileage per litre. “The […]

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