“The Mico mind-reading system is made up of two parts: a pair of bulky headphones and an iPhone app. The headphones come with a forehead sensor that analyzes the user’s brainwaves to detect his mood, then connects to the Mico database via the iPhone application and selects the song that best fits his current state, from a number of neuro-tagged tunes. If your mood changes, and you feel the song isn’t appropriate anymore, all you have to do is shake the phone to clear collected data and have the sensor scan your brain again. Neurowear’s revolutionary headphones also come with built-in LED indicators that display your mood through icons to everyone around you. Right now, they have an exclamation mark for when you’re focused, a ‘zzz’ sign for when you’re feeling drowsy, and a cross icon for when you’re stressed.” w/ photo + videos

“At the Gastein healing caves, in Radhausberg mountain, a controversial form of therapy with radioactive radon gas is used to treat a long list of medical conditions, including arthritis and other joint pain, chronic bronchitis and skin conditions such as my psoriasis. The medical staff are evangelical about the healing benefits of the low-level radon gas found in the caves: they say it can offer sustained pain relief, reduce the need for medication, stimulate the body’s anti-inflammatory abilities and help people who have suffered for years.” w/ photos

“Driving down the No. 2 highway south of Moose Jaw, bang in the middle of the Saskatchewan prairie, one can see a large ship flying Finnish and Canadian flags. Confused about a ship so far away from the sea? Well, we were too. But it turns out the ship was built there for good reason by a Finn named Tom Sukanen during the Great Depression. His plan was to use the vessel to sail back to his homeland of Finland.” w/ photos + video

“So what makes gallium so special? Well, first of all, the brittle metal has a melting point of just 29.76 °C (85.57 °F), so if you hold it in your hand long enough it will become liquid. That alone is pretty cool, but this rare metal has a few other amazing properties. For example, it ‘attacks’ other metals, like aluminum. As you’re about to see in one of the videos below, just a drop of liquid gallium weakens the structure of a Coke can to the point where it can be pierced with the slight press of the thumb. Gallium infiltrates the aluminum structure, compromising its integrity and making the can feel like tin foil instead of metal. Another interesting experiment involving gallium is called the ‘beating heart’, in which the amazing element is made to look like an alien life form. When submerged in sulfuric acid and a dichromate solution, gallium looks like an organic beating heart, due to the gallium sulfate which increases surface tension.” w/ photos

“Bombproof is a term that is bandied around rather a lot these days to describe things that are, well, merely pretty tough. But if you’re looking for a watch that is actually, literally bombproof, then look no further. The hip hop-esquely oversized KAVENTSMANN Triggerfish Bronze A2 has been pressure tested to 300 bar – enough to survive under the weight of 3,000m of water pressure… The exceptionally solid piece of timepiece technology is encased in CuSn8 phosphor-bronze, the strength of which is revealed by another of its uses: making the load bearing plates for bridges.” w/ photos

“Before you start dreaming of spending a night in a nest, you must know that these structures don’t exactly provide the best of comfort. They aren’t water proof and have no other amenities except maybe a mattress or two. If it starts to rain, the best you can do is pitch a tent inside the nest. But if you are prone to roughing it out in nature, then this is one experience you don’t want to miss. The nest at Treebones can accommodate up to 8 people and is made from the branches of eucalyptus trees. The ones that Jayson sells to individuals can be as small as a love-seat or large enough for 30 people.” w/ photos + video

“It’s really incredible how many bad strategies legacy companies come up with in trying to compete with the internet. Rather than increasing their own value and figuring out ways to leverage that value, they often go in the other direction and make the experience worse. Case in point, this store in Australia that is so fed up with people shopping in the store, but then buying online that it’s now charging people $5 as they enter just to look around. If you buy something, the $5 counts towards the purchase. If you don’t, the store keeps it.” w/ photos

“The specimen, described in the latest Journal of Fish Biology, has two heads side-by-side, each with its own gills, mouth, and teeth, fused onto a single body. The fisherman kept the fetus for further study, and released the remaining shark offspring, which were able to swim away. ‘They’re hardy little critters,’ the paper’s coauthor Dr. Michael Wagner, assistant professor at Michigan State University department of fisheries and wildlife, told The Register. ‘But despite this, the two-headed specimen probably would have died after birth. It was near-to-term, but should have been a lot larger – the body looks to have invested so much energy in growing a separate head that the rest of the body was foreshortened.” w/ photos

“A high humidity level ‘enhances taste perception’ and more crucially, will make you drunk. It comes with the following caveat from Bompas & Parr who presumably want us to inhale responsibly: ‘Inhaling the Whisky Tornado will intoxicate as the alcohol is absorbed through the lungs and straight into the blood, bypassing your liver. We’re not entirely sure that the liver’s bypassed altogether – presumably there’s some alcohol to be filtered from some blood at some point.” w/ photos

“This is my street-legal jet car on full afterburner. The car has two engines: the production gasoline engine in the front driving the front wheels and the jet engine in the back. The idea is that you drive around legally on the gasoline engine and when you want to have some fun, you spin up the jet and get on the burner. The car was built because I wanted the wildest street-legal ride possible. With this project, I was able to use some stuff I learned while getting my fancy engineering degree to design a street-legal jet car without the distraction of how other people have done it in the past – because no one has. I don’t know how fast the car will go and probably never will. The car was built to thrill me, not kill me. That doesn’t stop me from the occasional blast on the highway though.” w/ photos