EA is using one of the coolest marketing gimmicks I have ever seen to promote Mass Effect 3. The company has taken copies of the game, attached them to weather balloons, and then sent the weather balloons way up into the Earth’s atmosphere. The balloons will be launched in New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Berlin, London, and Paris.

If you’re in those cities and can find the balloons once they come back to earth, you get keep the copy of the game. How bad would it suck if you found the balloons only to discover it was the wrong format for your console? Each of the games has a GPS tracking device and the fans can track where they land using the Mass Effect website and then go find a copy.

Via SlashGear

Via ~EvidencE~’s photostream.

Via core77.com.

Sludge power:

MIT scientists have developed new battery technology that lets you fill a battery with goo instead of throwing it away or recharging it when it’s drained.

The black goo, called Cambridge sludge, works just like a normal battery. The goo is a liquid suspension that has charged particles and flows like quicksand. There is a positive suspension on one side and a negative suspension on the other. A current is generated when the charge moves from one goo to another through a thin membrane.

Link and words via Gizmodo.

From ScienceDaily, the study looked at the risk factors given by two large DTC companies, deCODEme (Iceland) and 23andMe (USA):

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests give inaccurate predictions of disease risks and many European geneticists believe that some of them should be banned, the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics heard May 31. In the first of two studies to be presented, Rachel Kalf, from the department of epidemiology at Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, will say that her research is the first to look at the real predictive ability of such tests, the results of which are available directly to an individual without having to go through a healthcare professional.

See Also:

• Your Personal Genetics Analysis

Needless to say, the ability to photograph barcode-less items in the real world and get instant information on them could be huge, a sort of away-from-a-home-computer Google. What remains to be seen is if Sony can bring it to the masses in a palatable format and, of course, what Google will counteroffer if SmartAR takes off.

Video and words from core77.com.

From CrunchGear:

Designed and manufactured by Polymer Vision, the screen can be rolled and unrolled 25,000 times. The question, obviously, is why would you need a rollable display? Well, as ereaders become ubiquitous the need for them to be almost indestructible. I could see a day when kids get their own ereaders for the nursery a la the Diamond Age. Interestingly, Polymer Vision isn’t the company of note when you think of e-ink displays so either they will license this technology or they could start taking more and more market shares from leaders like Eink.

Some gorgeous video via io9.com, eight minutes of time-lapse sequence taken inside and outside of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.

Via ~EvidencE~’s photostream.

Photographs and written words, The Italian Machine Project is Salgood Sams’ homage to his father, Lionel Douglas.

Back in 1979 Lionel Douglas crashed a motorcycle he was testing. Unlike many others he trashed he didn’t walk away that time.

In his short life, aside from being my father he also did his best to live up to his name and sign [leo]. There’s been past efforts to publish his work, but they remain obscure. Always felt it was down to me to do it now. I’ve had his papers for some time, and a trunk full of negatives. Been meaning to do something with them – it’s taken time, opportunity, and ultimately my own brushes with mortality to get my ass in gear.

The site is called THE ITALIAN MACHINE PROJECT. The why of the name explained here.

On the site you’ll find his words as well, but at this stage it’s dominated by his photos. Here’s a few highlights. The shots link through to sets of photos they come from. I’m going through them more or less in chronological order, so these are all taken around 1969

New pictures will be uploaded, so check back to the Italian Machine Project often.

“Where other people see wonder, or perhaps foolishness, I see only spilled blood and the work of years. It took so much from so many to build this place, and to this day I think I only understood the totality of what was crafted and forged there.

It stole everything from me. But it was worth everything. It proved that the future could be called forward into the present. All we had to do was think hard and care enough.”

- Captain Swing

The exhibit features ~EvidencE~, besides several other talented photographers. If you find yourself in Toronto (or are lucky enough to live there), the exhibit opens the 20th of March and runs through to July.

Via OM2 Photography’s photostream.

Via suspiciousminds’ photostream.

Via OM2 Photography’s photostream. Special thanks to Chris “Ruz” for the link!

One more step to make printed college textbooks a thing of the past:

Via core77.

Via Digitalyn’s photostream.

From Gearlog:

Like a lot of green technologies, one of the major issues with solar panels is that they are expensive. But a team of researchers from the University of Oxford may have stumbled upon a way to make solar cells much less expensive.

And they found the answer in a tube of toothpaste.

The team discovered that a metal oxide commonly found in toothpaste can be combined with a special dye and imprinted onto glass, making an instant solar cell. The glass can be created in a variety of colors, and the creators say that it has a great deal of potential.

“It opens up a lot of versatility and a lot of possibilities for building design,” Dr Henry Snaith told the BBC, though he admitted that it’ll take some time before the solar glass will be a commercially viable product.

“Coupled with our extremely low cost of manufacture and processing and the ongoing research effort to improve the overall performance of the device, we think it’s only a short while till our performance will be competitive.”

Intricately designed by Motoi Yamamoto:

Yamamoto has constructed close to 30 of these mazes since he started working with salt in 2001. His began working with salt a decade ago after his sister passed away from brain cancer. In Japan, salt is a symbol for purification and mourning, so his drawings and sketches were a way of honoring her and expressing a sense of eternity. Yamamoto starts his work in the back of the installation and works his way forward so as not to touch or cross over his previous work.

Via Inhabitat.