Santa Monica-based studio David Hertz Architects has recently completed the Wing House project.

Located on a 55-acre property in the remote hills of Malibu, California, this contemporary residence is built from a decommissioned Boeing 747!

As its name suggests, the roof of the residence is made of the plane’s wings. According to the architect, “the main residence uses both of the main wings as well as the 2 stabilizers from the tail section as a roof for the Master Bedroom.

The Art Studio Building uses a 50-foot long section of the upper fuselage as a roof, while the remaining front portion of the fuselage and upper first class cabin deck is be used as the roof of the Guest House.”

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Traveling the 515 km (320 miles) from Tokyo to Osaka by Shinkansen bullet train currently requires 2 hours and 25 minutes (and costs a small fortune, too). Come 2045, travel between Japan’s two largest metro areas will take just over one hour, following the launch of the country’s longest maglev track, which just received construction approval from Tokyo.

The nine trillion yen project (approximately $112 billion) was first proposed in the 1970s, but was tabled indefinitely due to its astronomical costs, most of which stem from an extensive network of tunnels that will represent 60 percent of the route. You’ll be able to get your Japanese Maglev fix beginning in 2027, when the Central Japan Railway launches its high-speed route between Tokyo and Nagoya.

One notable neighbour to the west is already operating its own maglev train. China’s Shanghai Transrapid has been blasting riders to Pudong airport since 2004, and once achieved a top speed of 501km/h (311 mph). The country is also constructing a 1000km/h vacuum-based train that it plans to launch within the next few years. Yup and we still don’t have trains…

SOURCE via Environment News Service

If it weren’t for a book’s worth of confirmation text from Nokia, we’d swear the N950 was just as much a unicorn today as it’s been every day prior. Even now, the developer version of the newly-announced N9 is coming to us sans imagery, with only a scant few hardware specifications to piece together something of an image in our minds. Needless to say, this MeeGo-based device won’t ever be widely available, but those interested in breaking out the code can look forward to a 4-inch TFT LCD (compared to the N9′s far superior 3.9-inch AMOLED), an identical 854 x 480 screen resolution, a “different” 8 megapixel physical camera, a different location for said camera, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a slightly less sensitive magnetometer. It’s also devoid of an NFC module, and the 1320mAh battery falls a bit short of the 1450mAh cell tucked with the downright delectable N9. Nokia’s not hesitating to remind us that the N950 units that do ship will be of “beta quality and come without any warranty or support whatsoever.” Don’t even front — you’re still buying one.

SOURCE via Nokia

Besides announcing their MeeGo N9, the gang from Espoo also announced a nifty new portable speaker to complement its slice of MeeGo. Called the Nokia Play 360, this little barrel of omnidirectional audio streams music from your phone via Bluetooth. It also makes the pairing process easy with NFC — a simple tap of your N9 or Nexus S to the speaker gets the tunes flowing. Not only that, when you get two of these sound boxes together, they sense each other through NFC and switch your sound to stereo. So, what’s the price of such aural enjoyment? It’ll cost you €149 ($213) when it ships in Q3 of this year.

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We’ve already seen Symbian Anna begin shipping on the Nokia X7 and E6, but this little lady is about to become much more ‘common’. Nokia has announced it will begin distributing its latest OS on the N8, E7, C7, and C6-01 — all beginning next month. Unfortunately, if you’re among the millions who already own one of these handsets, you’ll have to wait until August for an OTA or PC-assisted update. Not like there’s any rush, seeing that Symbian will be kicking until 2016 and all.

SOURCE via Nokia

Stephen Elop said that Nokia would unveil its first MeeGo device this year, and he just made good on his word with the N9. The N9 is a solid slab of 3.9-inch AMOLED screen (854 x 480) sans a keyboard or physical switches of any kind (well, aside from that oh-so-necessary volume rocker and camera button). The phone comes with 16GB or 64GB of onboard memory and 1GB of RAM wrapped in a polycarbonate shell that’s colored all the way through, so dings and scratches won’t show — unless the wounds run deep, of course. An OMAP3630 1 Ghz processor does the computing while a PowerVR SGX530 GPU is around for graphical grunt work. Connectivity comes courtesy of quad-band GSM and penta-band WCDMA radios, plus Bluetooth 2.1, NFC, and GPS. There is also a dedicated camera button for the 8 megapixel wide-angle shooter, which is capable of aperture F2.2 for low light picture taking and true 16:9 720p video recording. Oh, and it’s an AF shooter, not EDoF.

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Kinky news we have here today. It is official, cars rule. We love driving them, talking about them, working on them and we even love having sex in them. According to a U.S. Sex Census produced by none other than Trojan condoms, automobiles are the most exciting place to have sex. Trojan surveyed 3,000 adults (across two studies), and 48 percent of those polled felt that having sex in a car was more exciting than doing the deed in:

• Someone else’s bed (33 percent)
• The woods (27 percent)
• The beach or sea (23 percent)
• A hot tub (22 percent)

Check out the USA Today link for more interesting sex survey results from Trojan, and don’t forget that parking brake…