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A public school in Los Angeles has become a magnet for Korean families who want their kids to learn English while escaping the intense rigor of the Korean school system. In the U.S., they move from school district to school district, cherry-picking the best schools as their kids rise through the grades.
from News
It happens to the best of us: you slog through the summer heat on your morning commute and wind up a messy ball of sweat by the time you make it to the sweet comfort of your air-conditioned office. Now a team of MIT grads is trying to solve that problem by borrowing temperature-control technology from NASA.
The team, Ministry of Supply, is taking donations via Kickstarter for their Apollo line of dress shirts, which use phase-change materials to absorb heat from your body to cool you off when it’s hot, then release it when things cool down. It’s similar to technology used in NASA-approved spacesuits. The shirts keep sweat and moisture off of you, and use an anti-microbial coating to keep you smelling fresh.
The shirt has been a hit on Kickstarter so far, blowing past its initial goal of $30,000. To keep the funding rolling in, the team has been offering incentives, like new colors or patterns for reaching certain goals. At last count they were at more than $178,000.
[Kickstarter via Tech Crunch]
from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now
Ah, power. You give a person too much and they will abuse it. Such is the case with Thomas Langenbach, a 47-year-old VP at Palo Alto-based software company SAP Labs, who has been arrested for the nerdiest crime in recent memory. His abuse of power: computer-based. More »
from Gizmodo
When Gac Filipaj fled war-torn Yugoslavia in 1992, he became a refugee in New York. He took a janitor’s job at Columbia University because it included free tuition. But he first had to learn English. After a dozen years, he received a bachelor’s degree in classics over the weekend.
from Morning Edition
Amaury Villa and Amed Villa, two brothers from Cuba, have been arrested for stealing $80 million worth of pharmaceutical drugs in Connecticut in a sophisticated scheme that evokes The Italian Job and Ocean’s 11. It’s the largest pharmaceutical drug heist in history, and it was all brought down because one of the brothers left a water bottle at the scene. More »
from Gizmodo
Filed under: Etc., Japan, Videos, Motorcycle, Canada
As far-fetched as it may seem, the owner of the Japanese Harley-Davidson motorcycle that washed up on the coast of Canada has been found. Beachcombers sent photographs of the bike to Harley-Davidson, which managed to track the registration to Ikuo Yokoyama in Miyagi Prefecture. Yokoyama lost three family members and his home in the tsunami that struck Japan a little more than a year ago and assumed his bike was gone forever. But the beachcombers have extracted the bike from the remote shore, and at its own expense, Harley-Davidson reportedly plans to have the machine shipped back to Miyagi, where it will be restored and returned to its rightful owner. Yokoyama is still living in a temporary shelter.
The bike drifted some 3,100 miles across the Pacific ocean in the back of a cube van. Yokoyama was using the box as storage for the bike on his property. Harley-Davidson says that despite plenty of corrosion, the motorcycle is in surprisingly good shape given what the machine has endured.
Miyagi Prefecture was one of the hardest-hit areas of Japan, where the disaster left 11,000 people dead or missing. Click past the jumpto watch a CBC report on the remarkable story.
from Autoblog
After a teenage Afghan girl spoke to a boy by phone, she was threatened with death by her brothers, who said she dishonored her family. She fled to a U.S. military base, creating a quandary. If returned home, she faced almost certain death. If the military kept her on the base, the deeply conservative Afghan community would be outraged.
from News