Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.
The holiday shopping season kicked off on Friday, and Inhabitat is here to help you get through the shopping madness with our carefully curated Green Holiday Gift Guide. With over 200 inspired gift ideas, we’ve got something for everyone on your list; from gadget geeks to green thumbs, crafters to hostesses, parents to kids. And speaking of unique gift ideas, here are some weird ones we saw this past week. Toilet company Kohler is behind one of the strangest products to cross our inbox in recent weeks: a smart toilet seat that can make your poop smell like avocados. Seriously. For the person who can’t live without the internet, there’s Lantern — a tiny solar-powered device that brings connectivity to off-grid areas. And Balance Edutainment has created the world’s first interactive pajamas, combining organic and fair trade cotton PJs with a mobile app and books for children.
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There are certainly ways to play classic Game Boy titles on modern TVs, but many of them involve emulators. What if you have the real system in your hands? That’s where the crowdfunded Hdmyboy project might just save the day. The project lets you modify the original Game Boy (thankfully, in a non-destructive way) to put its video on any HDMI-equipped display. If you’ve ever wanted to play Link’s Awakening on your big-screen set, it’s now relatively trivial. The Hdmyboy even works with a NES controller, so you can relive your childhood from the comfort of the couch.
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Your graphing calculator may not be getting much use these days now that other mobile devices can do the job, but it still has a few tricks up its sleeve if you’re willing to do some tinkering. Christopher Mitchell’s latest project, ArTICam, lets you turn a TI-83 Plus or TI-84 Plus calculator into a selfie-oriented camera. The mod mostly requires a Game Boy Camera and a programmable Arduino board like the Uno. After a little bit of wiring and some (thankfully ready-made) code, you can snap self-portraits with a calculator command. The 128 x 123 grayscale pictures you take won’t win photography awards, but that’s not the point — this is more about having fun with gadgets that might otherwise sit in the closet gathering dust. Hit the source link if you have the gear and want to give ArTICam a whirl.
[Thanks, Christopher]
It’s no surprise that ridesharing outfits like Lyft and Uber are disrupting the taxi business through lower pricing and technological advantages. However, it’s now clear that these app-based upstarts are also hitting taxis where it really hurts: the value of owning a taxi service. A New York Times analysis reveals that the prices of medallions, which are necessary to operate taxi fleets in numerous US cities, have plunged sharply in the past year. In Boston, Chicago and New York City, the price of a medallion has fallen between 17 to 20 percent. Ridesharing is affecting how often cities and owners can sell medallions, too. Philadelphia is cutting prices just to sell these items at all, and half of New York’s recent sales (a mere 10) were foreclosures — the former owners just couldn’t afford to stay involved.
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Well, would you look at that: scientists have discovered that DNA can make it through the hellish ordeal of atmospheric re-entry after all. German and Swiss researchers dotted a rocket’s grooves and screw heads with fragments of genetic blueprints to see how they’d fare in situations that could’ve led to the appearance of life on Earth. Scientific American notes that the 13-minute rocket trip might not perfectly represent how DNA might actually travel from one celestial body to the next (that’d be by meteor), but there is purpose here. What the experiment suggests is that even if the meteor’s been scorched, that the material can survive at higher temperatures than previously expected, and as such this paints a better picture of just how resilient DNA is. What’s next? Pushing the limits further and seeing exactly what it takes to kill the double helix — we’re pretty sure at least one rock band is itching to find out.
[Image credit: Getty Images/OJO Images RF]
If you’ve been intrigued by the hack that took down Sony Pictures’ computers, you’ve probably wondered who the self-proclaimed culprits, the “Guardians of Peace,” might be. Are they disgruntled employees? Social activists? According to Recode sources, Sony is worried that they’re actually North Korean cyberwarriors. The company and its security consultants are “actively exploring” theories that an outfit in China breached the network on North Korea’s behalf. Investigators haven’t confirmed anything, but they also haven’t ruled out the Korean link so far.
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So you’ve finally recovered from Thanksgiving dinner, only to realize that you missed out on some hot Black Friday deals. Are you stuck paying full price for your gifts? Far from it — a whole host of stores are participating in Cyber Monday, a second round of (usually online-only) sales that are frequently as tempting as what you saw just a few days earlier. There are some particularly juicy bargains this year, ranging from surprisingly affordable 4K TVs and smartwatches to gigantic game console bundles. Check out the gallery below to see some of the bigger Cyber Monday deals we’ve spotted so far, and be sure to let fellow readers know about other bargains in the comments!
[Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
Some mornings, you wake up, walk outside and breathe in a hearty lungful of dirty, smog-heavy air. It’s almost tasteless, but it can still wreak havoc on your respiratory conditions. What if you could avoid those nasty, unseen pockets of nasty air? That’s sort of the idea behind the TZOA, a Kickstarter project that bills itself as the world’s first wearable enviro-tracker. The tiny, round tracker has sensors that keep tabs on air quality, UV light, humidity, and temperature — all of which feed data to a companion smartphone app to quantify the environment around the wearer. The user can then see get a quick look at the quality of the local air and upload the data to create a crowdsourced pollution map of their town.
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When we talk about the idea of video games as art, we typically mean as art unto itself — but what if a video game was a companion piece to an existing piece of art? And what if that work was over 100 years old? That’s the idea behind Tate Worlds, a free modern art-inspired Minecraft map pack. The project uses Mojang’s endless open-world game as a vehicle for exploring paintings and sculptures in the Tate collection, pitting players against challenges with thematic ties to specific works of art.
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When the European Union first put the “right to be forgotten” into effect, it didn’t really give search sites much help. Should search listings disappear simply because they’re embarrassing? What if you’re a notable figure? At last, though, there are some clearer answers. The European Commission has published guidelines that tell search providers how to handle your takedown requests. For the most part, the recommendations line up with what Google has been doing so far. Websites have to balance your privacy demands against the public’s rights; a search firm can pull details of your personal life, for instance, but it can refuse to hide criminal convictions or your official work record.
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