Ideas Generator
Nose to Tail Tattooing
Here’s a night class I’d like to try… Will Smith went to a tattoo parlour in London’s East End to be taught how to tattoo by world-class tattoo artist Mo Coppoletta. Wisely banned from trying his inept hand at tattooing a real person, he’s given a hunk of pig skin to practice on (much as […]
Why We All Want to be Millenials
We All Want to Be Young is a film that is the result of several studies by Brazilian behavioural science and consumer research company BOX1824, and it does an excellent job of tracing the history, and future, of teens (and those who aspire to be like them). We All Want to Be Young from box1824 […]
Parkour at the Olympics
Shouldn’t parkour be an Olympic sport by now? I’m thinking freestyle and synchronized… And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Watch the 3Run showreel: Hat tip: three billion
Classic Cars
Louwman Museum in The Hague, Netherlands houses a collection of 230 vintage and classic cars, from a 1875 horse-drawn steam fire engine to a 1914 Dodge Type 30 and 1949 Ferrari. See the cars and read more on Coolhunting.
Kenny Lao’s New Bathroom Project
Kenny Lao, founder of Rickshaw Dumplings, star of an MTV special, one of Inc Magazine’s 30 under 30, and Crain’s 40 under 40, has a problem: he doesn’t like the bathroom in his apartment. So Architizer, the social networking site for architects decided to help him out, by running a design competition to make over […]
NY Slums
Village Voice reporter Elizabeth Dwoskin writes a moving and shocking account of how people in NYC are living in damaged, rotten and dangerous apartments where gangs move in and middle-aged women sometimes step up to fight for their building and its community, while rich landlords inhabit luxurious offices in Manhattan and the city department tasked […]
The Human Library
The global Human Library project allows ‘readers’ to borrow ‘human books‘, the idea being that they will be introduced to people whom they wouldn’t normally meet and are able to ask the kind of questions they might not feel comfortable asking a stranger. The aim of the project is to bring communities together and break […]
Speed Yoga
Want to feel bad about yourself? Watch this:
Privates on Parade
In an attempt to preserve the modesty of travellers passing through body scanners, security expert Stephen Russell has invented underwear that blurs a persons genitals without compromising airport security. He partnered with Betabrand who recently advertised for “50 intrepid travelers to test-pilot prototypes of our Privates as part of our Privates Alpha Group. This elite, […]
Just Buy This One
Need a new TV or camera? Check the reviews on Amazon, pore over Which? reports, ask friends for recommendations, traipse around the shops on Saturday afternoon comparing prices… Exhausting. Justbuythisone.com takes the legwork, and guesswork, out of buying new gadgets by aggregating 1.3 million customer reviews from across the web and suggesting just one camera, […]
Need Some Space? Head to Niue
Niue, an ex-colony of New Zealand, has the world’s smallest population (if you discount Vatican City), at about 1,400. There are another 48,600 native Niueans scattered around the world, who left the Pacific island to escape the struggle against poor soil, lack of resources and a parliamentary system that has one MP for every thirty […]
Feel No Fear
A rare genetic genetic disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease destroys the brain’s amydala, and produces people who feel no fear in dangerous situations. One woman studied by scientists had felt no fear in everyday situations, for instance when public speaking, nor in more dangerous ones such as being threatened with a gun. Scientists did everything they […]
Twitter Yourself a Private Flight
When a group of Dutch party promoters and DJs wanted to get to the Ultra Music Festival in Miami on 21st March, 2011 they realized there was no direct flight. So DJ Sied van Rieland and filmaker Wilco Jung used Twitter to ask KLM why not. Instead of being fobbed of or treated to a […]
Socially Networked Newborns
The New York Times picked up on a survey by BabyCenter.com, which revealed 50% of mothers in labour updated their Facebook page or sent texts and 72% of births were announced via text and/or Facebook status. Read more of the findings here.
Teaching Kids Financial Literacy
Mint.com, an online personal finance software service, has teamed up with Scholastic to develop an interactive game and produced classroom materials to help children understand budgeting and financial planning. Students who use the material will learn how to set goals and budgets with real life examples, such as getting a babysitting job to save for […]
What Does a Viral Video Look Like?
Rubber Republic has compiled a list of attributes of the most viral advertising videos of 2010. It shows that Facebook is increasingly driving the spread of viral videos, parodies are popular and series do keep people engaged with the ad (and the brand). Read more on Rubber Republic (actually presented in an attractive and easy […]
Crowdsourced Cancer Treatments
You’ve heard of Creative Commons; here’s Cancer Commons. Modern medicine believes that cancer isn’t one disease, but “hundreds or thousands of rare diseases”, which makes it nigh on impossible for a physician to prescribe exactly the right treatment for each patient. And traditional drug therapies are tested on randomized heterogeneous study groups, which means they […]
Ancient Aboriginal Astronomers
Archaeologists have fond a type of stone circle 80km outside Melbourne that is aligned to a summer sunset and is dated to greater than 10,000 years, which is much earlier than Stonehenge or the Pyramids. It suggests that Aborigines were studying the stars much earlier than previously known. Read more on PSFK.
Sniffer Mice
Next time you see a mouse run through the airport cafe, don’t be alarmed – it’s probably just on its lunch break. Mice are being trained to sniff out drugs and explosives on passengers and cargo. The mice are put in a box close to where passengers walk. If they smell a banned substance they […]
Think Smarter: Daydream
An article in Scientific American explores the relationship between daydreaming (or the brain at rest) and IQ, and asks whether one is most “like oneself” when concentrating on something or when the mind is wandering. It also suggest that autism might be linked to reduced neural connectivity, whilst schizophrenia can be linked to an excessive […]
Philanthroper
Philanthroper is a non-profit site that features a different charity every day and asks donors to give just $1. A running total at the bottom of the page shows how much has been donated, and how much time is left to donate. At the moment they can only take donations from people with US bank […]
Keep an Indian Girl in School
Seven out of ten girls in India fail to make it all the way through the school system. The Girl Store has been set up to help people buy school supplies that will help keep the girls in education. A number of girls are featured, along with their school needs – pencils, backpacks or clothing. […]
Multicultural Twitter
According to Iconoculture, African Americans represent 25% of Twitter users, and their conversations can often dominate the trending topics. And they get heard – when CW cancelled the popular drama The Game, BET noticed all the complaints on Twitter and picked it up (along with all the loyal viewers).
Need to buy a gift but all out of ideas?
15Gifts is a site that helps take the leg-work, and guessing out of shopping for gifts. You enter in the person’s sex, relationship to you, age, interests and price range and the site suggests 15 presents that have been selected from independent and quirky online stores. The best bit is that if you don’t like […]
Little Magic Stories – Interactive Holograms
Chris O’Shea is an installation artist who has designed a holographic projection system with the aim of encouraging computer savvy kids to gain confidence in drawing and telling their own stories on stage. The kids draw props and characters which then float alongside them and react to their movements in real time. The system uses […]
Prison Reads
Flavorwire has compiled a list of ten books written about the prison system, either as inmates or staff. The list includes: Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg Memoirs from a Women’s Prison by Nawal el Saadawi Read the full list on Flavorwire. […]
Internet Wishlist
The Internet Wishlist, is a repository for your wishes for all those apps you could really do with, but don’t yet exist (as far as you know). The current list includes: “I wish there was a website where non-profits could ask for what they need and people could work for them from home.” “I’d like […]
Black at Sundance
According to NPR, the 2011 Sundance festival was an outstanding one for black filmmakers, where there were more films by, or about, black people than at any time in the history of the festival, which started in 1978. Shari Frilot, senior programmer at Sundance, attributes it to filmmaking becoming less elitist and equipment more accessible, […]
Asda Dating
Walking down the the aisle with your beau takes on a new meaning when the aisles are stocked with potatoes and floor cleaner. Supermarket chain Asda has launched a new online dating website, claiming that “the supermarket has overtaken the pub and the internet as the nation’s number 1 spot to find love”, and that […]
Punchdrunk in Chelsea
Punchdrunk the imaginative London-based immersive theatre company has upped sticks for NYC, and set up home in an abandoned hotel in Chelsea. The McKittrick Hotel was built to be New York’s most luxurious hotel, but it was closed down 2 days after the start of WWII (and six weeks before it opened). Now it’s home […]
No Right Brain Left Behind
No Right Brain Left Behind is an innovation challenge designed to give US children the creative tools they need to solve modern-day problems. Run in conjunction with Social Media Week 2011, creatives from ad agencies, design and innovation companies had five days to come up with ideas and submit them to the No Right Brain […]
Talent: Past Preservers
Are you looking for talent? Someone with a passion for history and archaeology? Past Preservers was founded by archaeologist Nigel J. Hetherington to provide historical and archaeological consultancy and professional support to the media industry, and their website has a (small) number of showreels of potential hosts partaking in derring-do. Rich Blundell from Past Preservers […]
Martian Summer
Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mission by Andrew Kessler is his offbeat, warts-and-all account of the summer he spent inside NASA as they prepared for a mission to Mars, after he secured unprecedented access to 130 of the world’s best scientists. The book is published on 15 […]
Stress ‘Rewires’ Cells
A team of scientists in the United States, South Korea, and Switzerland has uncovered a vast, complex network of 160,000 genetic interactions within yeast cells that changes dramatically when the cells are subjected to stress. The “rewiring” of this genetic network is much more extensive than scientists previously thought. About 70 percent of the genetic […]
Are Copy Editors Becoming Extinct?
Has commerce and marketing taken priority over careful crafting and editing of books? It’s a question asked, and discussed at length, by Alex Clark (and some more by the many people leaving comments). Rather inevitably, there appears to be an error the text that hasn’t been picked up by the copy editor. Can you spot […]
Hand Held Eye
Munivo is an ergonomic sensor, designed to fit in a blind-person’s palm, that can help alert them to obstacles by the use of small balls that move on two axes to tell them which way to walk. Read more on Behance.
Fantastic Factology for the London 2012 Olympics
Fantastic Factology has been gathering facts from the public about “surprising things in life” – the best will be engraved onto plaques sited on benches around the 2012 London Olympic site, which will (hopefully) be visited by “generations of future visitors”. You can see some of the facts on the Fantastic Factology website. It seems […]
Head Cam Horror
Artist Wafaa Bilal is undertaking a year-long project which involves taking a photograph every minute. That may sound like it requires an extreme amount of commitment, but he’s taken it a step further by having a camera inserted into the back of his head (in a body piercing studio). Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, his body […]
My Perfect Life
LA-based comedienne Molly Erdman has a nice line in catalogue criticism. On her website, Catalog Living, she posts photos of impossibly tidy, stylish and serene living spaces and then skewers them with a barbed description. See them here.
The Secret History of Board Games
Ever wondered who came up with the world’s favourite board games and where they got their inspiration? For example, Anthony Pratt, a WWII fire warden, thought up Clue/Cluedo during Nazi air raids, and originally called it Murder! And it turns out that Monopoly looks suspiciously like a board game patented by a Quaker woman 3o […]
How to Win a Scratchcard Lottery
Wired tells the story of Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto who worked out how to spot which lottery scratch cards were winning cards. But when he reported his findings to lottery organizers he found it difficult to get them to take him seriously – until he sent them a batch of unscratched […]
Has Your Facebook Profile Been Hacked?
In the Face to Facebook project 1 million Facebook profile photos were stolen and sorted by their facial expressions – smug or mild, for example. 981 British women are deemed to have ‘sly’ expressions. The profiles were then uploaded on a specially built dating website, sorted by their expressions. It’s not identity theft, say the […]
360 Degree Vision for Troops
US Troops might soon be able to have eyes in the back of their heads (much like your mother) as the Pentagon is on the look out for 3D computer enhanced imaging systems that will track missiles and recognise objects on the battlefield. Do you have such a thing? Read more on PSFK.
Google Body
Move over Grey’s Anatomy – Google Body has arrived. Those clever Google people have created an online anatomical model (cleverly only available in certain browsers, including surprise, surprise, Google Chrome) that you can interact with to peel back the layers of skin and flesh to reveal and explore bones, muscles and nerves. Try it here. […]
The Streets: Computers and Blues Interactive Video
Mike Skinner of The Streets has released an interactive video – in which you choose what the protagonist does at certain junctures – to promote his latest album Computers and Blues. See it here.
Walking Proud in East London
The marvelous Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow has been marking the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual History month with a series of oral histories from people in the LBGBT community in East London. See what they think about whether the battle for equality has been won. Hat tip to the brilliant Walthamstow Scene
Bored of Your Diet? Try Nutrigenomics
According to Iconoculture, “more than half of U.S. consumers like the idea of using their genetic makeup to tailor-make dietary advice”, (via Datamonitor). The name of this new trend? Nutrogenomics: not one to trip off the tongue… Read more on Wikipedia.
Move Over Top Gear, You Big Girls’ Blouses
RAF wing commander Andy Green is used to travelling at speed, but he’s planning to go where no-one has ever gone before. He’s hoping to set a land speed record of 1,000mph. There will be so much to concentrate on (not to mention the massive G-forces) that he will have to drive the Bloodhound supersonic […]
What Are the Seven Wonders of Your World?
We’re used the hearing about THE seven wonders of the world, but what you you choose to be the seven wonders of YOUR world? Travel writer Colin Thubron includes the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul; the Olympic State Park, Washington, USA; Samarkand, Uzbekistan and his back garden. Read more on More Intelligent Life.
Why You Need a Vacation… or Not
It’s been suggested that getting away from it all is good for boosting creativity; it allows the mind to wander and make new and unexpected connections. However, experiments seem to prove that just pretending to be somewhere else can help spark new ideas. Read more in Wired
