… features a unique interlocking cylindrical shape and […] is created from around four recycled PET plastic bottles. The shape incorporates a great deal of air; thereby providing the thermal and sound insulation.
Besides their potential use as architectural components, they can be fitted with LED lamps in their cavities to provide mood lighting, or be used as plant pots. All good stuff, for sure – I’m all for reusing stuff we usually throw away -but one can’t help but feel that they’re going to look rather unfashionable rather fast, like last season’s rave club decor. Few things age as badly (and obviously) as architecture. [image borrowed from linked GizMag article]
Here’s some cheery news to balance out the doom’n’gloom of publishing industry lay-offs and bookstore chain incompetence. According to a report from the United States National Endowment for the Arts, 84% of readers who read material online or downloaded from the web are still reading printed books, and furthermore the absolute number of literature readers in the US has grown by 16.6million; this is the first increase in over two decades, and reflects a rise much greater than simple population expansion. Something to smile about, no? [via Mediabistro/Galleycat; image by shaycam]
The team has not yet taken the final step of putting the whole thing into action with a genuine Storm Worm botnet in the wild. From a legal point of view, that could involve many problems. Any unauthorised access to third-party computers could be regarded as tampering with data, which is punishable under paragraph § 303a of the German Penal Code. That paragraph threatens up to two years’ imprisonment for unlawfully deleting, suppressing, making unusable or changing third-party data.
Second Life may be off the headline radar now the hype has died off, but there’s still plenty happening there if you know where to look. The latest genre author to appear in-world as a public speaker (following after such luminaries as William Gibson, Charles Stross and Terry Pratchett) is Kim Stanley Robinson, who will be donning the form of a coyote while he gives a presentation to Second Life’s transhumanist clade, Extropia. [via NewWorldNotes]
Robinson’s appearance is scheduled for this coming Saturday, 17th January, at high noon Second Life Time/PDT; full details at the Extropia Events blog (to which is also due the credit for the screenshot of Robinson’s coyote avatar, Stan Shackleton).
It’s a nuisance, but researchers are closing in on it. In fact, they think the tooth will probably be the first complex organ to be completely regenerated from stem cells. In part this is because teeth are easily accessible — say ahhhhh. So are adult stem cells, found abundantly in both wisdom and baby teeth — no embryos required, and your immune system won’t reject your own cells.
Nobody is predicting when the first whole tooth will be grown in a human, although five to 10 years is a common guess.
Only a decade to wait, then. But knowing dentists, they’ll probably still find a reason to assault your dignity, pain threshold and wallet all at once. Not that I’m bitter or anything. [via SlashDot]
Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
One of the less-feted stars of this year’s CES was the POLLI-Brick, an example of how recycling might be used to make something useful. The POLLI-Brick is an oddly-shaped plastic building block which…
Here’s some cheery news to balance out the doom’n’gloom of publishing industry lay-offs and bookstore chain incompetence. According to 
Once again, the physical space in which you can expect (or even hope) to avoid being relentlessly marketed at contracts in a dying spasm… that’s right, not even your car is a scared space any more, as
Second Life
Another year, another “regrow your own body parts” story, this one coming from the ever popular domain of dentistry (