Keurig is best known for popularizing the coffee pod machine, designed to make your morning cuppa joe more convenient. But realizing it’s always five o’clock somewhere, the company is now taking the concept out on the town with the Drinkworks Home Bar, which cooks up cocktails (or beer and cider, for some reason) from the same kind of premixed pods. […]
Pod Based Cocktail Maker
Can Gold Really Be Melted At Room Temperature
Melting gold normally requires temperatures upwards of 1,064° C (1,947° F), but physics is never quite that simple. A team of researchers has now found a way to melt gold at room temperature using an electric field and an electron microscope. Although we’re all familiar with the phenomenon of melting, most of us don’t really think about the physics behind […]
Patch Delivers Medicine In The Blink Of An Eye
We’ve already heard about “microneedle” patches that near-painlessly deliver medication through the skin. Well, scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore have now taken the same approach to treating eye diseases. They’ve developed a tiny patch laden with even tinier needles, which get poked into the eyeball. While eye drops are the most frequently-used means of delivering medication to the eye, […]
A Budding Tulip In London
The City of London may soon receive an unusual new addition to its skyline courtesy of Foster + Partners‘ aptly-named Tulip observation tower. Assuming it goes ahead, the building will offer viewing points and glass slides, as well as pod rides on its exterior. On completion, the Tulip will be one of London’s tallest buildings and rise to a height […]
Waterfront Parks Over Seawall
Cities along the coast have typically relied on sea walls to keep the ocean out. These concrete and steel embankments mitigate flooding when storms whip the waters onto land, and they currently protect the residents of countless ocean-adjacent towns. But according to Stateline, U.S. city leaders are reconsidering their flood defenses. Instead of sea walls, they’re increasingly opting for waterfront […]
Solar Roof Cars
Cars aren’t the most eco-friendly option for getting around but Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors are trying to change that. The two companies jointly announced that starting next year they’ll begin installing electricity-generating solar panels on select vehicles, along with supporting internal combustion, hybrid and battery electric vehicles with additional electrical power. “In the future, we expect to see many […]
Internet Of Ears
Long-time New Atlas readers can hardly have missed the so-called internet of things, and its domesticated subset of smart technology in the home. We’ve had this for years now. You may well already have smart devices controlling your heating, media, lighting and appliances – or smart devices that control themselves. What might the future of smart home technology look like? […]
Fancy A Trip To The North Pole?
There’s still some conjecture about exactly who got to the North pole first, but you can have a say in who goes there next. Swedish company OceanSky is selling a 30-hour travel package taking folk for a luxury picnic lunch at magnetic North, in the world’s largest aircraft, the Airlander 10. The trip starts out in Svalbard, Norway, and you’ll […]
Detecting Tainted Food
Passive RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are small, inexpensive, battery-less labels that are already used to track and identify a wide variety of items. If MIT’s experimental RFIQ system enters general use, they may also soon allow consumers to check if food products are contaminated. Upon being temporarily powered up by radio waves emitted from a handheld reader device, passive […]
First-of-their-Kind Glasses Proven to Improve Sleep for Screen Addicts and Gamers
With holiday festivities around the corner, ’tis the season to ensure you and your loved ones get enough zzz’s. Innovative Swannies blue light blocking glasses are not only stylish, but also help improve the quality and duration of sleep by providing an all-natural solution to filtering out blue light before bedtime. This includes blue light emitted by electronic devices – […]