Lifeboat Foundation

Every year, various members of the illusion community—which is made up of scientists, neurologists, researchers, and even artists—get together to decide which of their recently created mind-melters deserves the honor of Best Illusion of the Year. This year, Japan’s Kokichi Sugihara claimed the top prize with a deceptively simple illusion that plays with how our mind perceives 3D objects.

This isn’t the first time Kokichi Sugihara, a mathematician at Meiji University in Japan, has won the Best Illusion of the Year honor. Nor is it the first time his fantastic illusions have shown up on Gizmodo. Triply Ambiguous Object, his latest award-winning creation, appears to be a simple 3D structure, with a tiny flag mounted on one of its many corners.

Continue reading “The ‘Best Illusion of the Year’ Will Make You Mistrust Your Brain” »

The results of the poll are in.

Not in the Philippines?

A new component makes existing fiber optic cables 100 times faster.

They pack a powerful health wallop, but they’re tasty, too.

A man who relied on a wheelchair for 10 years was able to walk and dance after receiving his stem cell transplant.

A common virus seems to be behind a puzzling condition that’s paralyzing children, but uncertainties remain.

A s the summer of 2014 gave way to fall, Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, started seeing a wave of children with inexplicable paralysis. All of them shared the same story. One day, they had a cold. The next, they couldn’t move an arm or a leg. In some children, the paralysis was relatively mild, but others had to be supported with ventilators and feeding tubes after they stopped being able to breathe or swallow on their own.

The condition looked remarkably like polio—the viral disease that is on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. But none of the kids tested positive for poliovirus. Instead, their condition was given a new name: acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM. That year, 120 people, mostly young children, developed the condition across 34 states. The cases peaked in September and then rapidly tailed off.

Continue reading “The Main Suspect Behind an Ominous Spike in a Polio-Like Illness” »

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

Solar panels might be the energy source of the future, but they also create a problem without an easy solution: what do we do with millions of panels when they stop working?

In November 2016, the Environment Ministry of Japan warned that the country will produce 800,000 tons of solar waste by 2040, and it can’t yet handle those volumes. That same year, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that there were already 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste worldwide and that this number would grow to 78 million by 2050. “That’s an amazing amount of growth,” says Mary Hutzler, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. “It’s going to be a major problem.”

Continue reading “More solar panels mean more waste and there’s no easy solution” »

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration now is pivoting toward promoting EVs in public transportation and fleet operations – primarily, two- and three-wheelers, taxis and buses. The Ministry of Finance is finalizing a plan to spend about 40 billion rupees ($600 million) in the next five years to improve the nation’s charging infrastructure and subsidize e-buses.

An electric-vehicle revolution is gaining ground in India, and it has nothing to do with cars.

The South Asian nation is home to about 1.5 million battery-powered, three-wheeled rickshaws – a fleet bigger than the total number of electric passenger cars sold in China since 2011. But while the world’s largest auto market dangled significant subsidies to encourage purchases of battery-powered cars, India’s e-movement hardly got a hand from the state.

Continue reading “India’s Rickshaw Revolution Leaves China in the Dust” »