It’s like something out of science fiction or a horror movie or both: in order to facilitate transplants, we can now keep human hearts alive and beating and toasty warm inside a special electromechanical box full of fresh blood.
via This is a human heart, alive and beating, in a box | DVICE.
Maybe Steve Jobs was on to something when he refused to hide away his disappointment or displeasure. That, at least, is the takeaway of a new paper by Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Their first experiment was straightforward, demonstrating that anger was better at promoting “unstructured thinking” on a creativity task, at least when compared to sadness or a neutral mood. The second experiment elicited anger directly in the subjects, before asking them to brainstorm on ways to improve the condition of the natural environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.
Every website needs a favicon, if for no other reason than to avoid littering your server logs with 404 errors. If you still haven’t got a favicon on your site, check out Faviconist, a new favicon generator from developer Michael Mahemoff.
via Faviconist: Create Beautiful Favicons with HTML5 | Webmonkey | Wired.com.
Between science fiction fan art and historical Victorian remodeling, this turn-of-the-(20th)-century Craftsman-style home was radically remodeled into a blend of new-age fantasy and original reality.
via Steampunk House: Retro-Futuristic Victorian Interior Refab | Designs & Ideas on Dornob.
As more and more graphic designers and illustrators gain web design skills, illustrations can increasingly be found on the web. UK designer Mike Kus showcases his 10 favourite examples of websites using illustration to enhance the user experience.
via 10 beautiful examples of illustration on the web | Feature | .net magazine.
We don’t know if Transcend is dabbling in voodoo these days or what’s going, but somehow the company figured out a way to cram 2TB of storage into a container that’s about the length of a USB thumb drive and only slightly thicker than a penny. Some of the credit also goes to Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), which co-developed the ‘Thin Card’ device.
via Maximum PC | Transcend Shoehorns 2TB of Storage Capacity into USB 3.0 Thumbstick.
Responsive design is no longer just something you’ll find on the portfolio websites of the designers and developers who pioneered the idea. These days using media queries to adapt to varying screen sizes is well on its way to being a mainstream design goal.
Head over to a responsive design showcase like Media Queries and you’ll find plenty of “real world” websites — like Opera or Arizona State University — using media queries to build responsive websites.
via Build Faster Mobile Websites with ‘Adaptive Images’ | Webmonkey | Wired.com.
Researchers at UW-Madison have been working on an energy harvester that they say can deliver watts of power. And not just one or two watts, but up to 10 or 20. This is a huge amount of power to get from a “free” energy harvester; we’re talking thousands of times more powerful than the current generation of pizeoelectrics. An iPhone, for example, typically consumes under five watts. This means that 10 watts could power two iPhones, and 20 watts could power four of them! Four iPhones! Imagine the possibilities!
via Liquid metal shoes harvest massive amounts of power | DVICE.
The Phantom v1610 has the ability to shoot up to 1 million frames per second, a speed so high that it allows the camera to create videos of real world slow motion events that are so otherworldly they appear dream-like. Additionally, the camera can capture HD footage at 16,000 frames per second and boasts a whopping 96 gigabytes of internal memory.
via Fastest camera in the world shoots one million frames per second | DVICE.
But there’s one story, perhaps, that’s piercing because it portrays the exacting nature of Apple’s former CEO. Vic Gundotra — the man behind Google +, the company’s entree into social media — posted a story about an interaction with Steve Jobs.
He writes that on a Sunday morning in 2008, he received a call during a religious service. He didn’t answer, but Jobs left a message saying he had something “urgent to discuss.” Gundotra returned his call almost immediately:
via A Shade Of Yellow: Steve Jobs And Attention To Detail : The Two-Way : NPR.