News for Curious Minds

Behind The Scenes Of

The REAL Mayberry

The Andy Griffith Show is a timeless and heartwarming portrayal of American small-town life during simpler times, where traditional values were cherished, and people respected and cared for one another.Read More

These beautiful animated photos by New York photographer Jamie Beck take photos to a new level.

Jamie Beck's Blog

Want to Wake Up in San Francisco or Paris? Turn Two HDTVs into a Virtual Window to the World with 3D Perspective

Winscape is a DIY project that features two HD plasmas in faux window frames that display whatever scene you’d like to see out your window. Using a Wiimote, the setup even detects your position in the room and shifts the perspective screens' high-resolution video to create the illusion of looking out a real window.Read More

Randy Grubb's tricked out Peterbilt features a 12v71 Detroit Diesel with two 671 superchargers

This cool ride started out life as a 1965 Peterbilt Model 351 cab, which creator Randy Grubb kept seeing parked in an old logger's place near his home in rural Oregon. After years of driving by it, he finally decided to stop for a closer look in late 2008.Read More

The five-star Emirates Palace Hotel installed a gold bullion ATM in its lobby as the first permanent gold vending machine in the world, according to Ex Oriente Lux, the German firm that developed it. The Gold To Go machine sells 24-carat gold bars weighing 1, 5, and 10 grams as well as gold coins from Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Each comes in a gift box.Read More

While some politicians are boycotting Arizona, many Americans are supporting Arizona businesses with their pocketbooks

iStockPhoto

One Arizona jewelry company, Aerogem.com, has seen a rise in business since the new immigration law (Senate Bill 1070) was signed last month, in large part by out-of-state residents wanting to show their support for Arizona.Read More

Laser Scanning Flyovers of NYC Will Yield Accurate 3-D Map

New York City may be on the cutting edge of cuisine and fashion, but in nerdier pursuits like cartography, NYC has unfortunately fallen behind - like, 30 years behind. But a twin-engine airplane fitted with LIDAR scanners has lately been gathering data that will close the city's map gap, creating extremely detailed digital maps of the city that will lead to better land management, inform emergency protocols, and help identify the best places to install solar panels across the five boroughs.Read More

Lights, Bots, Action! Former Car-Assembly Robots Find New Careers in Film Business

It’s great to see a startup hiring laid-off autoworkers — even if they aren’t human. Jeff Linnell (center) recently picked up three Fanuc s430iL industrial robots at fire-sale prices and reprogrammed them for jobs in TV advertising. Seems that the autobots (nicknamed Puck, Gilda, and Rosie) had transferable skills.Read More

LUCIFER was developed through a partnership between several research groups in Germany, the US and Italy

The world’s largest optical telescope is about to get a lot better, thanks to LUCIFER - a new near-infrared camera/spectrograph system being added to the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mt. Graham in south-eastern Arizona. The telescope has been in development for over a decade, and is now ready to offer astronomers “spectacular insights into the universe, from the Milky Way up to extremely distant galaxies.”Read More

The Bloom grocery store chain, part of Food Lion, erected a giant sign to promote its new brand of beef. It disperses the smell of steak during rush hour, from 7 to 10 a.m. and from 4 to 7 p.m. It pairs the smell with a big visual, showing a giant piece of steak and a French fry on a giant fork, and is one of the first of its kind in the country.Read More