See-Through Smart Phone

This looks sweet.

Fire Extinguished By Sound

DARPA has developed a method of flame suppression that uses sound waves. Below is a video demonstration. Here is a link to the Wired article on this new tech.

Travel Photo(s) of the Week

Georgia based photographer David Smith created this beautiful time-lapse video using over 30,000 photos of the many cities that he visited throughout Europe.

A 320 Square Foot Container Guest House

Here's a neat little container home in San Antonio, Texas that I found on LittleDiggs.com. It's missing a kitchen, but other than that it's pretty complete. I especially like the green roof.

The Ecology of Disease

This is from Sunday's New York Times. It seems that as we mow down the natural world it is fighting back. 60% of the infectious diseases we contract come from animals we have domesticated. Many of the worst of them - AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme - have reared their ugly heads as we push further into natural habitat.

“Any emerging disease in the last 30 or 40 years has come about as a result of encroachment into wild lands and changes in demography,” says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth.

Now, with project called Predict, "experts are trying to figure out, based on how people alter the landscape — with a new farm or road, for example — where the next diseases are likely to spill over into humans and how to spot them when they do emerge, before they can spread."

And it isn't just human health that is effected. World Bank predicts that a severe flu pandemic could cost the world economy as much as three trillion dollars.

College Students Design $20 Digital Stethoscope That Can Diagnose Pneumonia

This from Good.is......

"Every year 2.1 million children around the globe die from pneumonia...making it the number one killer of kids under the age of 5... In the developing world, the infection is either not diagnosed or diagnosed too late for antibiotics to help...Those diagnosis challenges could disappear thanks to the StethoCloud, a custom built stethoscope and mobile phone app system that analyzes a person's breathing to determine if they have pneumonia."

"The StethoCloud is the creation of four students from the University of Melbourne—Hon Weng Chong, Kim Ramchen, Mahsa Salehi, and Andrew Lin—for Microsoft's student innovation competition, the Imagine Cup."

"The mic captures the sounds of the person breathing and the app uploads the recording onto cloud servers. Then the app analyzes the breathing patterns, makes a diagnosis according to the standards of the World Health Organization—either the subject has pneumonia or doesn't—and then presents the user with the appropriate treatment plan."

Thanks to Liz Dwyer for reporting on this.

Fun Time! Pee Wee Does Batman!

Moyers and Company

I have always believed that Bill Moyers' career as a journalist was in some way paying penance for his involvement in the 1964 presidential campaign in which he was responsible for an anti-Goldwater ad that featured a nuclear bomb going off. Since then he has done remarkable work.

My first real taste was his six part interview with Joseph Campbell, "The Power of Myth." After that I found the PBS special (and accompanying book) "A World of Ideas." Both my wife and I were very disheartened when he decided to stop producing "Bill Moyers Journal."

But now we have him back with "Bill Moyers and Company." I won't go into a long explanation of his show here. I will offer a video selection and let you explore the links on your own.

Teen Shames Seventeen Magazine To Stop Photoshopping

This in from good.is. Julia Bluhm of Waterville, Maine was tired of opening up her issues of Seventeen Magazine and only seeing perfect images of girls retouched with Photoshop. So what did she do? She started a  Change.org petition and got over 86,000 signatures.

"Here's what lots of girls don't know: those pretty women that we see in magazines are fake," Bluhm said on Change.org. "I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls. On a daily basis I hear comments like: 'It’s a fat day,' and 'I ate well today, but I still feel fat.' To girls today, the word 'pretty' means skinny and blemish-free. Why is that, when so few girls actually fit into such a narrow category? It’s because the media tells us that 'pretty' girls are impossibly thin with perfect skin."

Because of Julia's activism, Seventeen Magazine has agreed to stop using digital tools to alter the images of their models.

I agree. Let's stop lying to our children about who they are and who they should be.

Travel Photo of the Week

Tiger's Nest Monastery, Bhutan