Author: Shaunacy Ferro

Nike’s Marty McFly-inspired self-lacing sneakers finally have a release date. The futuristic sneakers will go on sale in a limited number of stores on November 28, according to Engadget.

The HyperAdapt 1.0, with what Nike calls “adaptive lacing,” was first teased as a prototype in a video with Michael J. Fox in 2015, and the final product was officially announced in March. However, we’re still waiting on information on how to make the appointment required to purchase a pair.

For now, users will still have to adjust the fit manually, but one day, the company hopes to create shoes that can sense exactly how snug you need the fit to be for different maneuvers.

Here’s how the HyperAdapt 1.0 works, according to a statement from Nike’s technical lead on the project, Tiffany Beers: “When you step in, your heel will hit a sensor and the system will automatically tighten. Then there are two buttons on the side to tighten and loosen. You can adjust it until it’s perfect.”

The shoes are made for athletes, but as Nike’s partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research indicates, they could also be useful for people with diseases or disabilities that make it difficult to accomplish fine motor tasks like tying shoes.

[h/t Engadget]

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You no longer have to worry about perfecting the filter on your Instagram in one go. Now, you can save drafts of your photos before you post them. The photo-sharing app, which launched six years ago this October, just debuted a drafts feature, and you don’t need to update the app to activate it.

All you have to do is hit the back button once you’ve started editing your photo (say, a picture of your cat like the one below), and the app will prompt you to save a draft. The next time you go to post a photo, you’ll find your drafts just below the last photo in your library (say, a different photo of your cat) and above the rest of your library images. Like so:

For obsessive photo-editors who like to toggle back and forth between their filtered images and others in their library, it’s a blessing to be able to press pause on whatever contrast or lighting tweaks have already been made. And now, you could even save different versions of the same image with a bunch of different filters and look at them side-by-side, just to be sure that Valencia really is your favorite.

More detailed instructions on how to save your drafts are here.

[h/t Engadget]

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It’s easier than ever to get yourself to a pub—just order an inflatable one for the backyard. 

The inflatable Irish pub, spotted by Food & Wine, is the adult successor to the bouncy castle. All you have to do is stick it on a patch of grass or a driveway (it doesn’t have a floor) and get ready to party. 

Boston-based PaddyWagon is a full-service pub-themed party caterer, with a cozy inflatable bar that fits as many as 80 people. The company provides Irish food and menus, along with music and entertainment from the Emerald Isle, if you so desire. The pop-up pubs come in multiple sizes, in case you want to host a really intimate inflatable bar gathering in your backyard. 

The beer slingers at PaddyWagon aren’t the only ones who will deliver you a blow-up booze fest. Ireland’s Inflatable Pub Company rents 33-foot-long blow-up buildings that come in several different designs and are painted to look like traditional pubs—whether with musty brick or timber framing. The temporary saloons cost about $435 to rent and come with a bar counter, benches, and lights. And if you live outside the country, not to worry: If you’re willing to buy one outright, the Inflatable Pub ships worldwide. 

If inflatable isn’t your style, there’s also The Shebeen, a rentable Irish pub on wheels. 

[h/t Food & Wine]

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Making a lava lamp isn’t quite as trippy as watching one, but it’s still fascinating. The process involves mechanical glass blowers, liquid wax, top secret ingredients (a mixture of chemicals and dye), and 160°F baths. The psychedelic liquid inside the bottle is made of wax and the aforementioned chemical mixture, and expansions and contractions in response to changes in temperature are what make the colorful gloop travel up and down the bottle. Watch how it all gets put together in the video above from Science Channel. 

[h/t LIKECOOL]

All images via YouTube

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At some Canadian schools, paper bag lunches are on the way out. As part of the Ontario EcoSchools initiative, schools are asking parents to cut down on the trash associated with kids’ packed lunches, Co.Exist reports.

Litterless lunch programs are a part of school district policies all across Canada, like in the Calgary school system. The programs ask parents to send their kids to school with lunch boxes, a thermos or reusable water bottle, sandwiches wrapped in cloth, and metal utensils. Ideally, kids shouldn’t be tossing anything in the trash at the end of lunch.

According to the Recycling Council of Ontario’s Waste-Free Lunch Challenge, the average student throws away 66 pounds of trash every school year (not counting food waste), adding up to 18,700 pounds a year for the average elementary school. And while it does cost money to buy reusable containers, by using bulk foods and leftovers to pack kids’ lunches instead of throwing in pre-packaged snacks, you actually end up saving money. Not to mention what you’ll probably save on buying plastic baggies. ECOlunchbox, a company that sells reusable containers, estimates that a family with two kids spends about $450 a year on disposable bags, utensils, and other lunch items that just end up in the trash.

[h/t Co.Exist]

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Not all houses of government are alike. That’s true in the abstract sense, but it’s also a physical fact. Some parliament houses are set up in a horseshoe shape, others in a circle, and some in a rectangular, classroom-shaped layout. Parliament—a book from the Amsterdam-based creative agency XML and available at ideabooks.nl—explores how the different layouts of the physical rooms where parliaments hold their sessions reflect the political processes that go on inside, WIRED reports.

In 2010, XML began researching the physical layouts of the parliaments of all 193 of the United Nations member countries.

“Parliament is the space where politics literally takes shape,” the book’s authors write on the accompanying website. “Here, collective decisions take form in a specific setting where relationships between political actors are organized through architecture.”

In some rooms, opposing sides argue from across the room, and in others, they sit directly next to each other. Russia’s government, classified as authoritarian in the book, is decidedly classroom-shaped. The layout is a metaphorical reflection of the top-down ruling structure of a state that is increasingly being called a dictatorship.

And while you may never get to see inside the government halls of Bangladesh or Germany or South Africa or the European Union in Brussels, you can visit them virtually and see where the laws that affect us in daily life actually get discussed and passed. On the parliament website, visitors can take in the layouts of some of the government spaces featured, as well as explore 360° photography of the rooms, giving an experience inside the halls that is similar to Google Street View. All of the images were taken between 2011 and 2013 by the book’s authors.

[h/t WIRED]

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Back in my day, kids learned about periods the old fashioned way: By being shoved into a gender-segregated classroom with the lights off and forced to watch a cartoon about deodorant, new hair growth, and monthly bleeding. But this is 2016, and ladies no longer need to hide in dark classrooms to learn about the joys of sanitary napkins and the maze that is the fallopian tubes. Champion swimmers talk about their periods on international television, and marathon runners let their blood flow freely down their legs as they cross the finish line.

Now you can learn about menarche with a spin of the ovaries. Designers Daniela Gilsanz and Ryan Murphy created the Period Board Game in a Rhode Island School of Design class to turn the awkwardness of menstruation education into a fun experience.

To play, you just have to turn one of the two ovaries, releasing a marble that’s either red or clear. If it’s red, you’re on your period, and you get to move forward on the game board. If it’s clear, sorry, you’ve just learned about vaginal discharge.

You can play cards that protect you from period woes like leaks and PMS, or end up without a tampon headed for the nurse’s office to sit out your next turn. The first person to get around the board—past ovulation, periods, and PMS—wins.

Will this actually turn talking about periods with young girls into a fun, positive experience? Maybe. It at least forces kids to say the word tampon a few times, although without a doubt, kids will find a way to find the whole situation mortifying regardless. But hey, every child should have to confront the realities of ovulation at some point. Plus, it’s so cute!

The game doesn’t have a distributor yet, since it was a student project, but hopefully some company will pick it up and put one in every kid’s hands soon enough.

See it in action in the video below:

The Period Game from Daniela Gilsanz on Vimeo.

All images courtesy The Period Game.

Add another job to the list of careers that are going to be taken over by robots. Museum curators, too, should get ready to be obsolete like the rest of us. The Tate Britain’s latest exhibit, Recognition, is algorithmically curated, as Co.Design reports.

Recognition was the 2016 winner of the Tate’s IK Prize, a digital creativity award sponsored by Microsoft that focuses on innovative ways to explore the Tate’s collection of British art. The artificial intelligence program connects the collection to current photojournalism from Reuters, updated minute-by-minute. It was created by Fabrica, an Italian communication research firm, and the French artificial intelligence company JoliBrain.

The exhibition, which will run until November 27, will be ever-changing as new images come in and are paired with art from the collection. The algorithm matches images based on object recognition; the gender, age, and emotions of the people pictured; the image’s composition; and the title, date, and other descriptors of the image.

Online, users can explore ongoing matches and see what similarities the algorithm found between the two images, whether accurate or not. A comparison of Hillary Clinton and Portrait of an Unknown Lady, by Cornelius Johnson, for instance, mislabels several things, including identifying the woman in the painting as a man and the background of both portraits as a blue sky. The responses people have to the matches will be posted on the exhibition’s virtual gallery at the end of the project.

[h/t Co.Design]

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The otherworldly creatures in Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise are some of the most elegant monsters in science fiction. That’s because they—and their whole world—were inspired by, and later designed by, the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, whose style is a kind of dark, hypersexualized, ghostly steampunk.

San Francisco-based YouTuber Kristian Williams, who makes video essays on pop culture, dives into everything Giger in his latest video, spotted by Boing Boing. His Alien (1979) designs, Williams says, are “everything we fear about ourselves, exaggerated to the point of surrealism.” Giger created most of the set pieces and costumes himself, making sure they stayed faithful to his unique, twisted vision.

The artist had a background in industrial design, and the logic and real-world functionality of his creations were carefully thought out during the production. The creatures needed to breathe without a nose, so there are tubes on their backs. Their blood is acidic, so they have an exoskeleton (made out of real bones). And it’s no surprise they look grotesquely human: They were made with real human skulls at the tip of their elongated heads.

Learn more about the brilliant design process of the monsters from Williams’s YouTube channel, kaptainkristian:

[h/t Boing Boing]

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Manhattan is getting its very own staircase to nowhere. Innovative British designer Thomas Heatherwick, known for his design for the 2012 London Olympic torch as well as for the city’s controversial plant-laden Garden Bridge, recently announced plans to build a monstrous staircase installation. The piece will be located at Hudson Yards, an extensive redevelopment project currently being built over a working rail yard within spitting distance of the Hudson River. The 16-story staircase sculpture, called Vessel, will cost around $150 million, The Telegraph reports.

The massive climbable sculpture will be the centerpiece of the Hudson Yards development. There will be 154 interconnected staircases with 2400 steps in total, allowing the public to climb a mile’s worth of stairs in one place. Shaped like a giant latticed vase, it will be 150 feet tall and get wider as you climb, stretching 150 feet across at its highest point.

The painted steel and concrete pieces that make up the staircase maze are currently being fabricated in Italy, and will be shipped to New York and put together sometime next year. It’s scheduled to open to the public in 2018.

In its design, Heatherwick Studio says it hopes to create “a landmark every inch of which could be climbed and explored. Vessel will lift the public up, offering new ways to look at New York, Hudson Yards and each other.” At the very least, it’ll be a really great public gym.

[h/t The Telegraph]

All images by Forbes Massie courtesy Heatherwick Studios