Project Monsoon  Clever Colorful Street Art That Only Appears When It Rains

Welcome to a three part series of kitchen appliance design using unconventional and sustainable materials. 

Part one of the series is a toaster designed using steam-bent bamboo plywood, glass toasting trays, a 2″x1″ touchscreen and quick-cooling coils embedded within the glass toasting trays. Gone is the bizarre popup mechanisms of toaster’s past – the toaster features wide, easy access slots. The heating coils feature quick-cooling technology and the UI tells the user when its safe to grab their toasty treats. Bamboo and glass are both sustainable and renewable and the design uses no plastic and minimal metal.

(via Bamboo and Glass Toaster Design)

Emily, a process engineer at GE Aviation in Auburn, AL is all suited up to remove a print from a Direct Metal Laser Melting machine. These machines additively manufacture metal components for CFM’s best-selling LEAP jet engine, printing in 20 micron layers — roughly 1/3 the width of a human hair.

Well I’M ready for the holidays. 

I always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it.

Bill Gates

A Tree of Life For 2.3 MILLION Species! 

This week, scientists released this massive tree of life showing the evolutionary relationships between 2.3 million different species, encompassing every scale of life from bacteria to blue whales. This massive undertaking combines more than 500 previous trees into one, the result being the largest and most complete tree of evolutionary relationships as we know them today. 

Like evolution itself, this diagram will continue to evolve as scientists fill in gaps and uncover more detailed information on the genetic relationships of Earth’s various species, but it’s not too shabby for a first draft. You can read more from Rachel Feltman at The Washington Post.

This type of wheel-like diagram is called a Hillis plot, one of my favorite ways of illustrating the tree of life. I’ve even found one drawn on an actual tree:

“I think” we’ve come a long way since Darwin’s original 1859 sketch in On The Origin of Species, don’t you?

Byzantine 'flat-pack' church to be reconstructed in Oxford after spending 1,000 years on the seabed

Centuries before the Swedes started flat-packing their furniture, the Holy Roman Emperor Justinian had his own version, sending self-assembly churches to newly conquered parts of his empire.

Now one of the “Ikea-style” churches, which spent more than 1,000 years on a seabed after the ship carrying it sank, is to be reconstructed for the first time in Oxford.

The Byzantine church will be on display at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology as part of the exhibition Storms, War and Shipwrecks: Treasures from the Sicilian Seas, opening in June. 

Paul Roberts, co-curator of the exhibition, said: “Everything in the exhibition will be from under the sea. It’s very different from what’s been done before. Read more.

700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative

Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived—but who?

Stone tools found in the Philippines predate the arrival of modern humans to the islands by roughly 600,000 years—but researchers aren’t sure who made them.

The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino’s limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino’s ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.

But the age of the remains makes them especially remarkable: The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old, with researchers’ best estimate coming in around 709,000 years old. Read more.

A Smart Menstrual Cup That Tracks Your Period And Makes Sure You’re Healthy http://ift.tt/1Ltl8JD

A new online platform to promote women’s economic empowerment is here! UN Women and the Government of Canada recently launched an online platform, the Global Knowledge Gateway for Women’s Economic Empowerment, which aims to re-vitalize women’s economic empowerment by building connections, and providing users with tools and resources necessary to be empowered. Get the link to this exciting new initiative here: www.empowerwomen.org