Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the building defies description — better just to look at the pictures. Construction started in 2003, but was paused due to the financial crisis. Right now, it’s on track to be fully completed in February 2011. In honor of one of Oviedo’s most famous children, the palace will be inaugurated officially as the Palacio de Congresos Princesa Letizia.
We fear piranhas and make jokes about them, but they have their place in the ecosystem. National Geographic sets us straight with some facts about the fish.
They’re good parents—at least initially. A mom may lay 600 eggs at once, dad promptly fertilizes them, and both parents guard the brood once it hatches.
Called the Heliotrope, this innovative home by Ralph Disch essentially "takes full advantage of the sun by rotating with it, allowing daylight to course though its triple-pane windows and energize its large roof-mounted solar array and solar thermal pipes."
YouTube user KleinerLudewig jumped out of an airplane at 4,300 meters while sitting in a small rubber boat and solved a Rubik’s Cube in 31.5 seconds. He finished at 2,500 meters and then deployed his parachute.
Angus Hines cut plywood into jigsaw puzzles pieces, coated them with polyurethane, and made them the floor of his Carrollton, Virginia home. The Flickr set at the link shows the progression of his work.
What do movies, cars and books all have in common? They're all available for rent. But these days there are even more for-lease items on the market than the usual suspects––including dogs, underwear and islands. While renting used to be reserved for things you don't use very often (or can't afford), now it's an option for trying out a slew of surprising and totally unexpected things.
I'm sure you've all heard of Bernard Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme that fooled even the most financially savvy investors. But what do you know about Ponzi or pyramid schemes? Here's a quick (and fun) crash course at the 9 Most Brazen Ponzi Schemes in History:
The world’s first human testing of a mind-controlled artificial limb is ready to begin. A joint project between the Pentagon and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), the Modular Prosthetic Limb will be fully controlled by sensors implanted in the brain, and will even restore the sense of touch by sending electrical impulses from the limb back to the sensory cortex.
Archaeologists have unearthed the largest species of rat ever discovered, which lived on East Timor until about 1,000 to 2,000 years ago. The new species was three times heavier -- about six kilograms (13 pounds) -- than the biggest rats known to exist today, which are found in the tropical forests of the Philippines and New Guinea.
Weather has been available on Google Earth for several years, but the latest version has the capacity to show real-time weather information.To see it, you must first enable the clouds layer, and then zoom in to a location where it’s raining or snowing. Google Earth displays rain and snow only in certain parts of North America and Europe; to see where exactly the new feature is available, enable the radar layer.
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