Volcanoes are incredible sights on their own—but toss in a stupendous sunset, and you’ve got yourself a photo, homie. This shadow scene looks like the world turned upside-down.

What you’re seeing here is just the shadow of Mount Rainier cast up upon low clouds. No magic, no strange natural phenomenon. Just a fantastic find by photog Nick Lippert. Half apocalyptic, half idyllic.

In a move that can be simultaneously described as puzzling and pragmatic, Microsoft has decided to bring its Bing for Mobile app to Android and iOS before launching it on its very own Windows Phone platform. The company announced the release in a blog post this week, highlighting the app’s most noteworthy features, including a revamped maps module, a new deals service and real-time transit feeds. Interestingly enough, Redmond also based its app on HTML5, rather than Silverlight, in the hopes of providing greater continuity across mobile browser and app interfaces. Only at the very end of the post did Microsoft mention Windows Phone 7: “We’re working to release the same consistent experience for RIM and Windows Phone 7 devices in the future, and will share more details as they become available.” At first glance, this decision may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but it also makes a lot of sense, considering the fact that Android and iOS comprise the bulk of the consumer market (and, of course, the fact that Bing is already integrated within Windows Phone 7). It appears, then, that Microsoft is simply trying to get Bing out to the widest initial audience, which seems pretty logical.

SOURCE via Bing

Winter is right around the corner, and if you own a motorcycle and live in a part of the country that endures freezing temperatures, rain and snow this time of year, you’re likely also staring at a long, painful stint out of the saddle. The good news is that time keeps on slipping into the future, and spring is but a skip down the calendar. Fortunately, we have the power of the internet to help scratch the riding itch during the dark months. Scott Toepfer has finally released his short film, “It’s Better in the Wind,” and the 15-minute clip spends time following three riders as they explore the world on a trio of vintage customs.

Toepfer himself rides an old Yamaha XS650, and the machine consumed a number of mechanical pieces during the months that it took to shoot the film. While Toepfer relied on plenty of digital equipment to capture his scenes, he also turned to a classic Super-8 as well. The finished product is perfectly cool, and makes us pine for another road trip. Hit the jump to check it out.

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Taken with a beer can that has been converted into a pinhole camera, this image compresses three months into one instant.

The glowing paths show how, from our point of view, our closest star’s travels across the sky change with the seasons. Variations in cloud cover cause the gaps in the silvery trails that form each day.

Justin Quinnell left the “can cam” near Antony Gormley’s The Angel of the North, the iconic 200-tonne, 20-metre-tall steel structure near the A1 road just outside Gateshead in the north of England.

After three months, Quinnell removed the photographic paper the can contained, which now held a negative latent image of the apparent movements of the sun, which are caused by the Earth spinning on its axis. “The image forms with time, like a suntan,” he explains.

The paper was then scanned into a computer and the image inverted using software to create the positive version shown here. This type of photography is known as solargraphy.

The highest path represents the sun’s “peak”, when it appears highest in the sky, which takes place on 21 June in the northern hemisphere. After this day the trails grow shorter and climb lower in the sky, revealing the approach of winter.

Together, the 23.5-degree tilt in the Earth’s axis and its revolution around the sun are what give us our seasons. This striking image illustrates these changes and reveals the passage of time.

The quest for ever-better lightweight manufacturing materials has led one electric vehicle builder to consider using woven bamboo fiber and vegetable resin in the place of costly carbon fiber or heavy fiberglass. The material is already being put to use in the surfboard industry, and Greg Abbott, a guy who spends his days converting internal-combustion vehicles to EVs, says that in the future, EV kits may have bodies that use bamboo for their body structure. Abbott says the material is strong enough to fall somewhere between fiberglass and carbon fiber on the strength-to-width ratio scale.

Bamboo has a number of fairly obvious appealing traits as a manufacturing material. The crop is quick-growing, stout and easily replenished, which makes it inexpensive as well. The plant is used in everything from flooring to textiles, paper and water processing, so the thought of turning to bamboo for car bodies isn’t that far-fetched.

SOURCE via GOOD

Video gamers may have opened the door a new AIDS drug. Researchers at the University of Washington challenged gamers to play Foldit and come up with the structure of a retrovirus enzyme – a task scientists could not solve over more than a decade. Well guess what? The gamers did it did it in three weeks.

“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” said Firas Khatib of the University of Washington Department of Biochemistry. The enzyme in Foldit has a critical role in how the AIDS virus matures and proliferates, the research group said. There have been efforts to develop AIDS-fighting drugs that block these enzymes, but it was unknown so far what the retroviral enzyme looks like.

Foldit was created by computer scientists at the University of Washington Center for Game Science in collaboration with the Khatib’s lab. “The focus of the UW Center for Game Sciences is to solve hard problems in science and education that currently cannot be solved by either people or computers alone,” said director Zoran Popovic, associate professor of computer science and engineering.

The solution of the virus enzyme structure, “indicates the power of online computer games to channel human intuition and three-dimensional pattern matching skills to solve challenging scientific problems.”

According to Popovic, the game required gamers to learn real-world modeling problems and ended up engaging the public in scientific discovery. “The ingenuity of game players,” Khatib said, “is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

Popovic noted that Foldit provides evidence that games can “turn novices into domain experts” and the same approach is currently used “to change the way math and science are taught in school.”

SOURCE via University of Washington

Not too long ago, Dyson surprised us all with its striking bladeless fan. Now, the company is moving into the space heater market and has introduced an impressive but pricey one based on the same principal as the Air Multiplier fan.

Those of us not blessed with grace, poise, balance or hand-eye coordination are all too familiar with the bumps, scrapes and burns that come with being so damned clumsy. However, a brand new space heater from Dyson could mean less burns for those of us that find staying upright and keeping our hands away from scalding hot objects difficult.

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