It’s hard to imagine an airplane being something so simple that you could build one with parts from your local hardware store, but apparently the Pietenpol has the blueprint to make it work. And they’ve been making it work since 1928.

It all started when Bernard Pietenpol, with only an 8th grade education, set out to make the “common man’s airplane,” which is known as the AirCamper:

During the Great Depression, Bernard H. Pietenpol, with no more than an eighth-grade education, designed a “common-man’s airplane” built with scavenged and hardware-store parts. Today his son and grandson carry on his legacy, and his airplane’s simple design enjoys a popular following among people of all ages who share his dream of flight .

Check out more of the AirCamper in the video below, which is a trailer for a larger documentary about the craft.

Boing Boing, via MAKE

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Does the iPad come close to the techno-slabs we’ve admired in countless sci-fi movies? Some of us think so, while others don’t. Go ahead, answer that question, even if you haven’t held the iPad in your hands. Then come back a year later after you’ve laid hands and eyes on one, and agree or disagree with your former self.

Vimeo, via Gizmodo

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Straight from the designer who brought you the digital bra and musical panties, here’s the Sound Reactive Nightgown. We’re not sure if this is an art piece or tech demo, but when you yell, speak or make noises in the vicinity of this dainty garment, it starts lifting up provocatively. This could be a solution to that age-old problem accompanying the phrase, “We never talk any more.”

Why does this exist? Well, one reason is to show how Flexinol works, that shape memory alloy that returns back to its original form when stimulated. Is there some parallel in the natural world? Oh, we get it, it’s a “think piece.” Or maybe there are other uses for this tech. Ponder this over the weekend.

Meanwhile, hey! Check out this bizarre video. Hey!

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Now you can add ultra-realism to your home basketball games or impromptu wrestling matches with this McGregor Multisport Tabletop Scoreboard. It even lets you count fouls, indicate who gets the next possession on a jump ball, and of course keeps score and times the game.

Now all you have to do is add the remote control for another $48, and get an impartial ref who can call fouls and operate the scoreboard. You’d better be pretty serious about all this, because this baby sells for a cool $333.

Opentip, via Red Ferret

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Genetic engineering is coming to the forests.

While the practice of splicing foreign DNA into food crops has become common in corn and soy, few companies or researchers have dared to apply genetic engineering to plants that provide an essential strut of the U.S. economy, trees.

[More]

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We hope y’all enjoyed our live tweets covering the Apple iPad event on Wednesday. As promised, we’re giving away an 4GB iPod Shuffle to one of our faithful followers — none other than Regina Wysocki (@regwysocki)! Congratulations to Regina; we’re going to send that Shuffle out to you right away. Don’t let it talk back to ya.

Thanks to everyone who followed, retweeted and replied to our feed during the iPad event. Or anytime for that matter. Stay close to our Twitter feed for more chances to win. Winning is fun.

DVICE Twitter Feed

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Psst! Want the best mouse in the universe for a price that’s a steal? The Logitech MX 1100 is an $80 mouse, but the company is now selling MX 1100 mice for $37. The catch? Logitech says they’re brand new and in perfect condition, but their boxes are “dented.”

Whoa. We love this mouse, especially its hyperscrolling capability that lets you go from top to bottom of a huge document at blazing speed. Highly recommended, especially for $37. Just enter the coupon code logi_mx1100_12910 on the Logitech website, and it’s yours. Last we checked, there were still some left.

Logitech, via CrunchGear

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Buildings are getting higher, and nobody wants to stand around waiting for an elevator. Hitachi aims to fix that with its latest elevator, a 40.26 mph rocket that’s the fastest in the world.

It’s installing the new 1,080 m/min lift in the 698-foot G1Tower, a building constructed by Hitachi in Hitachinaka City, Japan specifically for testing elevators. The tower’s construction will be completed in April.

The new elevator goes so fast it needs its own air pressure control. Maybe they could use one of these in the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (formerly Burj Dubai). But maybe not, the Burj’s elevators are almost as fast, flying at 40mph. Time for a race.

Via JCN Network

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Behold the hilariously named White Goat (no relation to your humble narrator) we told you about last year, a paper-hungry machine that poops toilet paper. In development for years, now it’s about to actually go on sale. Or so they say.

Pop in 40 sheets of regular paper, and a half-hour later, out comes a roll of toilet paper. It’s pretty cheap, too, costing about dime per roll to perform this alchemy. But wait a doggone second. The machine itself costs $100,000.

What were they thinking? At an average cost per roll of about 60 cents, our calculations show you’d have to crank out 200,000 rolls of TP before it pays for itself. Maybe this is an early April fool’s joke? No. Here’s the video proof:

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Controlled nuclear fusion just got a whole lot closer to reality. This week, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory fired up 192 gigantic lasers to a mind-boggling level of 1 megajoule for the first time, approaching the hellish situation needed to ignite a controlled nuclear fusion reaction for the first time.

Now that they’ve broken the megajoule barrier, when will they reach that elusive goal of creating the first human-controlled sun? Could be as early as this summer, when they start shooting this immense energy at targets consisting of pencil-eraser-sized gas-filled capsules.

Keeping things under control, the scientists hope to start the fusion reaction with these uber-lasers, taking out many times more energy than they put in. After that, they need to make this practical enough to place on the back of a Delorean, and voilà! Mr. Fusion!

Physorg, via Fast Company

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Trains are an integral part of American history, and, until the turn of the 20th century, they were the main mode of long distance transportation for most people… hence the reason why owning all four railroads in a Monopoly game is awesome. But trains aren’t what they used to be, at least in this country. [...]

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Trains are an integral part of American history, and, until the turn of the 20th century, they were the main mode of long distance transportation for most people… hence the reason why owning all four railroads in a Monopoly game is awesome. But trains aren’t what they used to be, at least in this country. We lack a real, innovative, high speed train system.

That might just change though as the Obama administration announced $8 billion in grants to over a dozen states to build, upgrade, and otherwise improve rail systems. But is it going to be enough?

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Last week I talked about how fast is fast enough, and that one of the easiest ways to save fuel was by simply going slower. Well rejoice! Apparently all of America heeded my advice, and American drivers, on average, drive below the posted speed limit.
Ok, obviously this has nothing to do with me. According to [...]

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Last week I talked about how fast is fast enough, and that one of the easiest ways to save fuel was by simply going slower. Well rejoice! Apparently all of America heeded my advice, and American drivers, on average, drive below the posted speed limit.

Ok, obviously this has nothing to do with me. According to Tele Atlas, the mapping unit of GPS maker TomTom, anonymously collected data from millions of GPS devices shows that most Americans are driving under the speed limit. So why don’t I get that feeling when I am on the highway?

According to an Autocar UK story, Tele Atlas says that no state tops 70 mph as an average highway speed. The fastest highway in the country is the stretch of I-15 between Utah and Nevada, with average speeds of 77.67 mph, even though the speed limit is 80 mph. This baffles me. I-15 is a road that pretty much runs through mostly desert. Why wouldn’t you go the speed limit?

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This clever little portable freezer is able to keep your food nice and cold as long as its charged up. And since it’s got a couple of solar panels in the top, it can get charged far away from any outlet.

The panels can also flip over to act as lights, in case you need to brighten up your campsite. It can also juice itself up by plugging into the cigarette lighter in your car. Pretty clever stuff.

Via Yanko Design

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Now here’s a clever way to make guns safer: only allow them to work for the right person. This new Armatix .22 comes with a custom wristwatch. When the gun is within a few inches of the watch, a green LED on the back lights up, meaning it’s armed and ready to fire.

Put it in someone’s hands who isn’t wearing the watch, however, and the LED turns red, indicating that it cannot fire. I can see this becoming a standard feature on police weapons, ensuring that no danger comes from their guns if they fall into the wrong hands. Cool stuff.

Via Danger Room

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Earth’s stratosphere is a cold, dry place, above the troposphere–the bottom layer of the atmosphere we breathe on a daily basis. Ruled by winds and hosting everything from bacteria to long-distance jet travel, about the only way that water gets into this high-altitude layer 10 kilometers above the Earth’s surface is when it billows up from the humid tropics, rising from the troposphere via the atmospheric interface known as the tropopause. But since 2001 there has been less water vapor in a narrow, lower band of the stratosphere thanks to cooler temperatures in the tropopause, and that may just be holding back global warming at ground level, according to new research published online in Science on January 28. [More]

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Sure, 3D TVs aren’t available yet, nor are 3D Blu-ray discs. But hey, if you’re in the market for a new Blu-ray player, you might as well buy one that’ll work with that stuff when it does eventually roll out.

Samsung’s BD-C6900 (catchy!) is the company’s first 3D Blu-ray player, and you can now pre-order it for yourself on Amazon. It might seem silly now, but if you every want to get on board with 3D in the home, it’ll be even dumber to have to buy another Blu-ray player in 18 months because you didn’t right now.

Amazon via Engadget

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In October 2009 the government of Italy announced that a wreck discovered off the southwestern tip of the country is the Catania , a passenger vessel sunk during World War I–and not the Cunski , a cargo ship loaded with radioactive waste, as alleged by district authorities from nearby Calabria. Few locals are reassured, says Michael Leonardi of the University of Calabria. He and others maintain that the putative Cunski is still out there and is just one of numerous ships full of poisonous garbage that a crime syndicate has scuttled in the Mediterranean Sea. Such a startling allegation, if true, would not only damage the tourism and fishing industries along this idyllic coast but also compromise the health of Mediterranean residents.

Processing and safely storing waste from the chemical, pharmaceutical and other industries can cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per ton–which makes illegal disposal highly profitable. According to the Italian environmental organization Legambiente, some waste shippers that have operational bases in southern Italy have been using the Mediterranean as a dump. While acknowledging that “no wreck has yet been found that contains toxic or radioactive waste,” physicist Massimo Scalia of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, who has chaired two parliamentary commissions on illegal waste disposal, argues that other vidence makes their existence “beyond reasonable doubt.”

[More]

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Max is a cute little chap with some of the most amazing markings. He isn’t very happy in kennels and desperately needs a new family of his own. He is a sweet loving dog who adores people, including children, and gets along with other dogs. He would make a wonderful addition to the family!

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This week’s obsession with all things touch interface enabled may have obscured the fact that there are still some left who prefer the tactile comfort of the QWERTY keyboard. South Korea-based Mobience has come up with a new solution designed to address the needs of those smart phone users longing for traditional button inputs.

The smallQWERTY keyboard is a concept design the company came up with to wirelessly connect and input text into your touch interface smart phone. No technical details have been released regarding how the system works, but you can see video of the device in action here.

Via Aving

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