Cleverly done.

It looks like a bag and comes with a high price: over £5000 because it is crafted, personalized and assembled completely by hand. It boasts of a glitter-covered keyboard and an exotic exterior. But there is more: you can also personalize your notebook/laptop with a unique leather or fabric skin and add embroidered initials or symbols. It runs Windows Vista, has a built-in webcam, and enjoys an anti-reflection high-resolution screen for indoor and outdoor use.

It’s been reported that Dutch scientists have managed to make some lab-grown hamburger but would you like to eat some? Are we going to be a society living on lab-grown products, including meat?

MSNBC reports that some Dutch scientist intend to serve the world’s first lab-grown hamburger by the end of year. This research has been funded by an anonymous investor and intends to to develop “life-transforming technologies” and in this case to find an alternative to traditional animal-reading methods of producing meat.

The process has been explained by the Time as follows: “First, bovine stem cells are grown in a vat and transformed into thousands of layers of beef muscle cells. The thin layers are then minced and mixed with animal fat, also lab-grown, to form a ball of meat — or something like it. If the team, led by Mark Post, a physiologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, successfully produces that synthetic lump, the burger will be cooked by British experimental chef Heston Blumenthal.”

According to U.N. estimates, land used for animal farming takes up nearly a third of Earth’s land mass. And over the next four decades, demand for meat products is projected to double, MSNBC reports. At a news conference in Vancouver on Sunday, Post predicted growing meat in a lab “could reduce the energy expenditure by about 40 percent.” Lab-grown meat has also received an endorsement from PETA.

Despite potential upsides, producing lab-grown meat, while innovative, is costly and labor-intensive. It’s also strange. Post said he’s unsure what the burger will taste like, because samples created thus far have been too small. He hopes to debut the burger in October, but expects that full commercialization would take at least 10 years.

via TIME

Don’t ask me why there is a cross sign on it!

Not on water, on custard. In fact, you don’t have to be a Brianiac to be able to walk on custard; you have to be rich enough to fill up a pool with custard. The rest is done by custard.

Every town and city likes to have a unique feature which can help them stand out in the crowd and give them distinction. San Francisco has this in abundance. One of them is Lombard Street.

Lombard Street is an east–west street in San Francisco, California. It is famous for having a steep, one-block section that consists of eight tight hairpin turns.

Lombard Street is best known for the one-way section on Russian Hill between Hyde and Leavenworth Streets, in which the roadway has eight sharp turns (or switchbacks) that have earned the street the distinction of being the crookedest [most winding] street in the world.

To add to its attraction, in 2009 the curvy San Francisco Lombard Street was turned into a gigantic version of the game Candy Land. Celebrating its 60th anniversary, 575 feet of switchbacks in the Russian Hill neighborhood were transformed into the famous board. Photos of this event are also included.

This true story happened some 5 years ago but it can happen any day any where perhaps with the same result. If you have heard of it, it is worth to send it to your friends. You may watch the video first and then read the text which follows and then make your own judgement.

So the story goes like this: On a cold January morning, a man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. Being rush hour, it was calculated that 1,100 people went through the station, mostly on their way to work.

Three minutes went by, and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace, and stopped for a few seconds, and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping, and continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried, but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally, the mother pushed hard, and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money, but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the most talented musicians in the world. He had just played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, on a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste, and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

You can read more about it here

A pioneering experiment by Russian scientists has brought back to life an ancient plant from 30,000 years ago. This extraordinary achievement opens the way for the revival of ancient plant and other species.

Some 30,000 years ago, a prehistoric squirrel in Ice Age had hidden deep in the permafrost of Siberia some plant seeds to eat them in time. Now Russian scientists have managed to resurrect a whole plant which bloomed flowers for the first time after 30,000 long years.

The previous record for a revival of the plant were 2,000 years old palm tree in Israel and a lotus 1,200 years old.

The researchers, led by Svetlana Yassin Institute of Cell Biophysics of Russian Academy of Sciences, showed they say that the frozen subsoil acts as a natural “repository” for the ancient forms of life for tens of thousands of years.

The prehistoric plant, arctic leaved Silenus (Silene stenophylla) that the Russians revived, much like the modern offspring of the same that grows in the northeast Siberian tundra, an indication of how well they are adapted to the difficult environment from an evolutionary standpoint. The modern plant has just fewer larger seeds and buds, while the roots grow faster.

The Russian researchers found, in a depth of 20 to 40 meters from the present ground surface, dozens of huge fossilized burrows size, each as a football stadium ageing from 30,000 to 32,000 years; these were created by ancient squirrels on the banks of Siberian river Colima.

At the same geological layer with burrows, abundant fossil bones of large mammals like mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, bison, horses and deer. The Russian researchers are now looking for frozen animal tissue samples of these animals, hoping one day to revive them too.

via iefimerida