Rotelle For Better OLED

Physicists from University of Utah have created a new organic rotelle-shaped molecule called "pi-conjugated spoked-wheel macrocycle" that increases the efficiency of LEDs by emiting light in random directions unlike the polarized one-direction in conventional LEDs that traps much of the light within the LED. These more efficient OLEDs (organic LEDs) will lead to products that will consume much less electricity which in turn will increase battery life for phones, and bring down the price of OLED products - TVs, light bulbs....

Stairway to Itself

The very prolific German artist Olafur Eliasson's 9 meter high endless stairway sculpture 'Rewriting' is in exhibition in Munich, Germany. Simply ravishing...

* Costume Party For One

Today I took advantage of the Free Museum Day and visited one of the lesser know smaller museums in Los Angles. FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising) Museum is located in Downtown L.A. with a constantly changing exhibition of costumes from movies and TV shows, as well as real clothing from different periods in the past. Among the exhibited costumes were samples from House of Cards (one of my favorites), Game of Thrones, Behind the Candelabra, and Downtown Abbey. The other collection was women's evening clothing from 1920s by designers like Coco Chanel, and accessories. 

Social Benches

Not all of Danish artist Jeppe Hein's Social Benches are sittable, but are certainly conversation pieces to socialize over. Here's my favorite:

The Armstrong Limit

The Armstrong Limit is the altitude beyond which humans cannot survive without a pressurized suit. Above this 12-mile limit, water boils at body temperature!

Circuit Playground

Founded by a female MIT engineer, Adafruit is an electronics company with a variety of products for everyday use, and educational programs for teaching electronics. Their YouTube webseries called Circuit Playground is designed to teach the very young kids the basics of electronics by keeping their very short attention span in episodes that are only a few minutes long. They even have plush component toys to go with the webseries. I bet even adults can expand their knowledge on electronics by watching these videos.

Come Rain Or Shine: PhotoFlow

PhotoFlow is yet another brilliant design by a company out of Mexico City called NOS, that harvests both sunlight and rainwater. Most of the world's developing countries are located around the equator where there is an abundance of both and a constant need for electricity and potable water. The solar panels are coated with an antireflective adhesive to prevent energy loss and the water tank is covered inside with a bacteria & fungi controlling coating to keep the water potable.

The Deadroads

I love the the way the Canadian band The Rural Alberta Advantage's songs sound like they were recorded around a bonfire on a beach some happy summer night, rather than a studio. Enjoy!

TasteBuds

I found a new and interesting way to expand my horizons. Tastebuds FM! ;)

Iridic Granules

"Holy Cow" was what I said when I saw the picture below. I should've said "Holy Llama"!! Yes, you are looking at an extreme close-up of a llama's eye. The ruffles you see are called Iridic Granules, and they act like built-in sunglasses providing extra protection from the glare of bright lights hence reducing eye-strain. Brilliant!

Cleanliness Is Morality

Today's learning came from Japan about something, I strongly believe, can be and should be employed by all of humanity. Most Japanese schools do not employ janitors and encourage students to clean up after themselves to help them associate cleanliness with morality.

Jenica On A Mission

My friend Jennifer - the owner of Jenica Skincare products - has a golden heart and is doing something amazing. Please click on this link can to help her to accomplish her mission to help humans and animals alike. I love her products and services she provides and I travel great distances every few weeks to enjoy her cheerful company. I recommend everything she offers! Here's my most favorite product by her:

* GMCN Spokesbaby

It was late evening on the Sunday before Labor Day in 2010 when the "newly trained and certified me" reported at the Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery for my very first volunteer shift. The receptionist buzzed me in, and took me to the room where the paid state employees were getting ready for the evening shift. They all warmly welcomed me, and one of them asked how I felt about taking care of little babies. Even though I had never changed a diaper up until that moment, I confidently told her that I was perfectly fine. She went into the next room, and came back with 4-week old beautiful baby boy D, and gently lowered him into my arms. For the next 4 hours, I fed, burped, changed, and rocked baby D to sleep. I was incredibly lucky for he was well tempered and mostly quiet, always watching me with his big brown eyes, his tiny lips on the verge of a smile. 

The hours quickly passed by and only when he finally closed his eyes to fall into deep slumber in my arms in a rocking chair, I felt overcome by an strange feeling I never felt before. I asked baby D "where is your mother?" to which he quietly stirred and sighed in his sleep. This was the last long weekend at the end of summer when families did something together with their children, and here was this beautiful child along with 15 others in this shelter in the care of loving strangers. I put him in one of the empty cribs, lifted and secured the side, and looked around the room where 3 other little ones were also sleeping in other cribs, and the state employee was filling up the forms for each one of them. 

That first shift and the following 6 shifts I've completed at GMCN during the two months before I left for my new life in California, were life-changing in my rapidly changing life that year. I was a mother to someone every time a pair of those little arms were held up from those beds calling out to their mummy, and I picked them up wiping away their tears, holding them tight in my arms, and whispering quietly "shhhh ... it will all be alright", hoping that maybe - just maybe - I can leave a warm spot in their little hearts to trust that there are good people out there, and they can become one of them.

GMCN is very unique in the services it provides, and is truly relying on donations made by caring people. There is no other like it across the country (please click the link above to learn more about it, and maybe donate goods or money or your time). They recently moved to a better location to the south of the Twin Cities, and this week they are running a contest to choose a "spokesbaby" to appear in TV commercials to get more people's attention. Please click HERE to navigate to their facebook page, and help them choose a spokesbaby to spread the word. My fair warning to you: it is very hard to pick one of those cutie pies! :)

Dolphin Boat

At Innespace Productions, the designers have created the ultimate 3-D aquatic experience machines. The Seabreacher is a single-seat watercraft that is fully capable of diving and jumping out of water at speeds reaching up to 55mph. Each of the three models is made to look like a dolphin, shark, or killer whale. I think I want one!

Liow Glow

Glow is Jon Liow's low-cost and simple light source creation for the developing world. It contains phosphorescent powder that soaks up daylight and releases that light in dark environments. And while you are on Liow's website, check out his other elegant and minimalistic designs like the time-keeping Ambigu. Genius!

Gearbones

Tiny bones with trochanters that are shaped and work like gears in the nymphs of a common insect - Issus Coeleoptratus,  found in Britain help this species of planthoppers to, well, hop plants very efficiently. This is a perfect example of something we thought to be a human invention for so long that already exists in nature.

Dreaming Faeries

In Bruno Torfs' sculpture garden tucked in a hidden rainforest in Australia, you find yourself looking at magical creatures that make you feel like they will disappear if you touch them. Born in South America, Torfs traveled the width and the length of Europe, and finally settled down in Australia to release the beautiful creatures out of his mind into the arms of nature. This sculpture garden just got added to my mile-long list of places to see...

De

The Glass Kiss

The haunting video made by IlSignoreNeoo for the even more haunting music The Kiss by Philip Glass is a perfect marriage of sight and sound.

Ocean Trapped In Stone

Ethiopian Welo Opal is a recently discovered very bright and spectacular opal. A large majority of this gem is hydrophane meaning if it is soaked in water the base color can become clear increasing the play of color or it can sometimes vanish. It almost looks like an ocean trapped inside a clear stone.

Loopwheel

Loopwheels are the latest great invention to make bike riding less bumpy and fun. Invented by the British mechanical engineer Sam Pearce, Loopwheels have the suspension inside the wheel buffering the variances on the road hence sending less vibration to your hands and the rest of your body. Brilliant indeed!

Forms In Nature

Inspired by the drawings of German naturalist Ernst Haeckel, two Danish artists created a chandelier that magically turns any room into a forest. Thyra Hilden and Pio Diaz's creation while may be scary to some, paired with the sound of rain and thunder can become a sanctuary to others.

Underdogs, Misfits, And The Art Of Battling Giants

On October 1st of this year, a new book from one of my favorite writers will hit the shelves. "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants" is Malcolm Galdwell's latest book on how sometimes the weak defeats the strong, how our perception of success is affected by our culture. 

Epic Miscalculation

You'd think an experienced architect of massive buildings would learn from his previous mistakes and would not build towers with parabolic reflective surfaces that would create death-rays of focused sunlight torrid enough to set things like luxury cars on fire. Well that is exactly what happened with Uruguay born architect Rafael Viñoly's latest skyscraper in London. Although he blames it on the unexpected number of sunny days in London due to global warming, he should stop following the building trend he started, and do more simulations before building fire-breathing dragon's of buildings. No?

Relax On A Cloud

Award winning designers David Koo and Zheng Yawei have created the ultimate sofa concept for relaxation. Cloud is a levitating ultra-soft cushion over a magnetic force base that is bound to revolutionize our living spaces.

Voynich Manuscript

 Voynich Manuscript is a hand written and illustrated codex in a language that is not known to this day. The carbon dating performed on the manuscript put it in the early 1400s. Until recently some scholars claimed that it was all gibberish, but this year (2013) scientists from England and Argentina published a paper documenting their identification of a semantic pattern in the writing, suggesting that it is a coded message still yet to be decoded. 

Making Things Is Important

American Made Movie is about how America is becoming more and more a customer to other countries with the offshoring of manufacturing, and how important it is to make things to keep the innovation within the country. This movie is currently in select theaters with very limited engagements.

Insolite Portrait Génétique

We all very obviously look like our immediate family members, but I did not realize how freaky and riveting it would look when half-faces on fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, siblings and cousins were blended until I saw Ulric Collette's photography.

Librophile

My dear reader friends,

Whether you like to read ebooks or listen to audiobooks, please pay a visit to Librophile website, and you are sure to find at least one among the many in their library of free books that you always wanted to read.

Kindest Regards,
Ayse

I Am A Wonderous Rock

I found the Secret Language website on my birthday weekend that says "the extremely capable people born on August 30 are rock-solid where their strengths are concerned".  It also recommends that I meditate to "the only rule—is the exception". I found most of what is presented on this site very applicable to me...

* Musée Mécanique

If you are ever in San Francisco and have time to visit Fisherman's Wharf, make sure you make time to visit Musée Mécanique - a privately owned collection of over 200 coin operated arcade games from the 20th century. I personally guarantee you that you will have a blast with a handful of change and get a good workout. Even better if you go with a good friend that you can beat at Mechanical Boxing, and then let them beat you at Foosball, Air Hockey, and Ms. PacMan!