Gearfuse Technology, Science, Culture & More

Everyday scientists are creating new ways to develop the things we take for granted. Eliminating the problematic ways of creating plastic with oil or gas, scientists of Genomatica Inc. have formed strains of bacteria which produce plastic. This is great news as this bacteria requires little more than sugar and water to produce butanediol, the compound used to manufacture many ...

Hmmm. I’m torn on this zipper necklace designed by Outi Pyy. DIY chic or just plain disgusting? I keep leaning toward the latter but I’m hardly qualified to critique fashion. What do you think? Link [via]

Love to drive fast? Break the law? Good! Audi is aiming to get you into one of its cars in the next few years with a feature that should keep you seated. The Travolution system will communicate with traffic lights to let the driver know what the current state of the light is and when it’s changing colors. While most ...

Creative advertising for a Schick ad. Note the tiger sans fur. Link [via]

If you find yourself purchasing videos from Sony’s Playstation Network, be wary: You may want to read the Terms of Service thoroughly or you could risk the possibility of losing all of your purchased digital goods thanks to Sony’s DRM policy. An Ars Technica forum-goer dubbed Noise found this out the hard way and warns others of this unfair policy. ...

Comcast is the first ISP to start ramping up use of bandwidth caps. P2PNet has a fantastic write-up that completely details all of Comcast’s shady doings. The piece mentions how Comcast has developed a “disconnect user” option. That’s right. Use too much bandwidth for it’s liking and the big C might kill your connection for good. Even scarier are the ...

Right now, in a time where the economy is complete shit and corporate raiding is nothing new, Samsung is trying to buy SanDisk, one of the largest manufacturers of flash memory. SanDisk is being resistant, so what’s a troubled company to do? In this case, SanDisk decided to launch SlotMusic, a microSD card equipped with a full album’s worth of ...

Japanese company Thanko just came out with a new set of headphones that clip to the bottom of wearers’ earlobes like earrings. Thanko’s headphones seem to be the exact opposite of noise cancelling and, frankly, they look pretty darn stupid. If they were wireless, these things really would lbe like earrings, but as is, they just look like standard headphones ...

There are lots of dope new cases coming out for the iPhone, but lately it seems like designers have been forgetting to make similarly nice stuff for the good ol’ iPod. Luckily, high end Japanese luggage-maker Head Porter has come out with a cool iPod case as part of their Enamel collection. Head Porter’s new iPod case is made with ...

A University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student named Jimmy Lemke tried to plan a block party on Facebook and now he’s in hot water with school officials, his neighbors, and the local SWAT team.