Brainicane

Twenty million children in West Africa are due to be vaccinated during the next three days in a major effort to eradicate polio.

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Health and Medicine. Comments: None

Photos: Planar.
Argentine designers Pablo di Muzio, Lucila Flombaum and Natalia di Muzio have created Planar, a line of bags and home accessories that take advantage of local materials and are built with patterns that create minimum waste.
Click through to see how the bags are cut in the extended….

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Design and Architecture. Comments: None

After we got all worked up like AP on Shepard Fairey it was pointed out that we don’t actually OWN the word TreeHugger, that artists Agnieszka Gradzik and Wiktor Szostalo have been building these sculptures of branches, leaves and vines for years, and frankly, they are just cuter than we are. …

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Design and Architecture. Comments: None

Image via greenline
This shot of the burned-out Koolhaas-designed hotel in Beijing caught an interesting subject in the foreground: a hundred cooling towers on the roof of a neighbouring building. What do they do? They take the heat generated within the building by lighting, equipment and solar gain and pump it out into the atmosphere. Think […]

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Design and Architecture. Comments: None

Image via Tropolism
It was going to be a looker, Santiago Calatrava’s 150 storey Chicago condo. No matter that a building that high makes no sense, that it is an incredible waste of material build that high, that the elevators have to be more like rockets to get you up to your apartment, and just pray […]

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Design and Architecture. Comments: None

Image by The Technium
If you’re prepared sharpen your shoehorn on what exactly appropriate technology is, one need look no further than this delightful little number on the Amish from Kevin Kelly over at the Technium. For The Some drenched in The Twitter, this nifty set of ideas might be considered to be horse-and-buggy […]

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Design and Architecture. Comments: None

Pneumatic Hybrid Cars
Engineers have been looking for ways to use compressed air to save fuel for a long time. Turbochargers and superchargers can do that when you use them to downsize a vehicle’s engine, but an even better system that offers bigger improvements and fewer downsides is under development at the Swiss Federal Institute of […]

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Cars and Transportation. Comments: None

Broken Vélibs in Paris (Sybil Star on Flickr)
Eighteen months into a wildly successful launch, the Parisian bike-sharing program Vélib - a portmanteau of vélo (bicycle) and liberté (freedom) – has run into serious problems with theft and vandalism of the bikes. Launched in 2007 as part of an effort to “green” Paris, now over […]

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Cars and Transportation. Comments: None

image via Boston Globe: President Obama reading note in Fort Meyers
I know, we are doing a lot of Obama quotes as he sells his stimulus plan. Send us a Republican saying something sensible about the subject and we will quote it too, I promise. But first catch what the President said in Fort Myers:
So transportation, […]

Posted on February 11th, 2009 under Cars and Transportation. Comments: None