Unexpected Inventions from Unexpected People

There are some inventions and inventors you just grow up knowing about – Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, Thomas Edison and the lightbulb (even though he really just improved upon it). But there are a lot of inventions lurking out there that you didn’t learn about in your elementary school history and science books – inventions from geniuses known for other creations and discoveries, and inventions from people you didn’t expect to be inventors at all. Here are a few of them…

Extraordinary Scans Reveal What Being Fat Does to Your Body

Carrying extra pounds may not look attractive from the outside, but it’s been difficult to understand precisely the havoc it wreaks on your insides – until now.  Here, in a pair of astonishing pictures, we can see exactly what being overweight does to the organs, bones and muscles. These images of two women were taken by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRIRI) scanner and reveal in horrifying detail the obesity effect.

Einstein The World’s Smallest Horse

Einstein is just three days old, after being born on Friday at a farm in Barnstead, New Hampshire.

It’s thought that Einstein could lay a claim to the title of the world’s lightest foal – his 6lb weight at birth being normal for a human baby, but not a horse, even a miniature breed like Einstein.

World’s Supply of Diamonds is Running Out

In what appears to be a blatant attempt at market manipulation, De Beers says it will reduce its production to extend the life of its mines. Taking into account the moderated output diamond prices could rise by at least 5 per cent a year for the next five years, according to Des Kilalea, a diamond analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

Photo Gallery of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull Volcano

The volcano has now simmered to 80 per cent of its intensity, but scientists are warning that earth tremors could cause an even larger eruption at a neighbouring crater. An eruption at the Katla volcano would be ten times stronger and shoot higher and larger plumes of ash into the air than its smaller neighbour.

eyeDriver – Steering a Car with Your Eyes

Did you ever wanted to play “look ma, no hands” with your car? Meet eyeDriver, software that allows you to drive a car just by looking at where you want to go.

Top 10 Photos of the Week

Some forward thinking people only manage to work their way up to the point of “retro-visionary” without ever truly getting ahead of the pack. If they had been born 20 to 50 years earlier the would have been considered brilliant. But instead, they simply end up being relegated to the trash-heap of also-rands and squander-magnets. Life is such a cruel sport.

World’s First Full Face Transplant Performed in Spain

A team of 30 Spanish doctors claim to have successfully performed the world’s first full face transplant. The ground-breaking operation was carried out last month on a young man whose face had been disfigured in an accident.

World’s Most Remote Mountaintop Restaurant

This is supposedly the world’s most remote restaurant; but the mountaintop restaurant in China pictured above offers diners a free lunch…if they can navigate the torturous trail to actually reach the place.

CRAZY STUFF

After scanning through over 1,000 photos this past week, we settled on the select few that touched a nerve with the staff here at Ebooks Online. In many cases it was their last nerve, but in any case, it needed touching.

What is the Maximum Memory Capacity of the Human Brain?

Top 10 Most Powerful Rivers in the World

When you think of a river, the last thing you think about is probably how strong its water really is. You are more than likely to think about calm flowing water that brushes over stones at the bottom of the river. Maybe you envision small fish in the river. Whatever you think about, it’s definitely not how powerful the river is.
If you’re one of those people that are fascinated by random yet helpful bits of information, then this top-ten list is for you. Here are the top ten most powerful rivers in the world. This list is based upon the flow rate of the river itself.

Top 10 Bizarre Road Signs

If you drive the same route each day, you probably know and expect to see certain things. Certain buildings, certain houses, and certain road signs, you are used to seeing them and passing them each day. We all know the usual yield and stop signs, but in the U.S. and around the world, there are some unusual ones that are sure to make you wonder. Here are the top ten uncommon road signs.

Top 10 Photos of the Week...

The laws of nature state that a bad thing cannot happen unless an equal and opposite good thing happens at the same time. This has become known as the “laws of balance and goodness reciprocity.” For this reason, if the military is causing bad things to happen on the other side of the world, then we will experience relatively better things on this side of the world. Problem is that we have yet to figure out the exact location where the good thing will happen. Its not an exact science by any stretch of the imagination, but at least the military is doing their part.

Reader's Digest - May 2010

Earthquake in Tibet – Amazing Photo Gallery

On April 14th, residents of China’s remote Yushu County, located on the Tibetan plateau, were awoken by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. In the sparsely populated villages and the larger town of Gyegu, thousands of wood-earth buildings collapsed and many larger structured heavily damaged or destroyed. The region is difficult to reach for the response teams of the Chinese government outside aid groups – lying at an elevation of 3,700m (12,000 ft) and connected by few roads, most of which were damaged in the quake. Chinese state media now says the death toll has risen to 1,144. Rescuers continue to search for survivors as homeless residents work to recover what they can and set up shelter from the freezing overnight temperatures.

Top 10 Tongue Twisters

Here is collection of 10 tongue twisters to tie your tongue. These were hard enough to type much less to say. I found it amusing that the title to this post was a tongue twister: Top ten tongue twisters. Say that ten times fast, while reading these tongue twisters.

Women Can Be ‘Blinded’ By Jealousy

The study found that women who were made to feel jealous were so distracted by unpleasant emotional images they became unable to spot targets they were trying to find.  The researchers suggest that their results reveal something profound about social relationships and perception.

CRAZY STUFF

Even the crazy people have a purpose in life. They can always serve as a bad example. In this week’s top 10 photo list, we have gone out of our way to find a purpose for crazy people. In some cases, we are still looking.

Top 10 Most Remote Places On Planet Earth

Thanks to modern technology and air travel, the world is forever becoming a smaller place. Where journeys from one continent to another once took months, they now take hours, and sometimes it seems like there is nowhere left for a would-be adventurer to really get away from it all. Still, if you have the time, money, and know-how, there are still some places off the map—or just barely on it—that remain shrouded in mystery simply by virtue of being really difficult to reach. Whether mining camps at the top of the world, or tiny islands thousands of miles from civilization, the following are the top 10 most remote places left on planet Earth.

Top 10 Photos of the Week

Competition is a funny thing. Since everyone wants to be better than average and everyone is indeed better than average, then the bar for average gets raised and you’re still only average or below. Best to stick with below average. There’s less competition there.

Top 10 Most Incredible Prison Escapes

Every year, thousands of inmates escape from prisons around the world. Of these, most just walk away from minimum-security corrections facilities, but other inmates implement complex, ingenious, and often violent schemes in order to make their getaway. Whether the work of notorious outlaws, WWII G.I.s, or 18th century writers, the following are the top 10 most incredible prison escapes.

10. Gerard’s Tower Of London Escape

John Gerard was a sixteenth century Jesuit priest who is remembered as one of the only people to ever escape from the notorious Tower of London. Gerard was put in the Tower for carrying out his religious missions during a time when the Catholic Church was under persecution in Elizabethan England. He endured frequent interrogations, and despite never breaking even under torture, he was eventually sentenced to death. Gerard immediately began planning an escape, and was able to communicate with allies on the outside via smuggled notes written in an invisible ink made from orange juice. After one failed attempt, Gerard was able to make his escape when some accomplices rowed a boat into the Tower’s moat and managed to get a rope up to him. Gerard almost fell to his death because his hands were so injured from torture, but he managed to climb down to the boat and was smuggled out of England to live out the rest of his life in Rome.

9. Dillinger’s County Jail Escape

Legendary 30s outlaw John Dillinger was involved in a number of often violent prison escapes. In 1933, he and his gang engineered a daring escape from a prison in Lima, Ohio after they used smuggled rifles to gun down two guards. But Dillinger’s most famous escape of all came in 1934, after he was arrested on the heels of a number of famous bank heists. Dillinger was put in the “escape-proof” Lake County Jail, a prison that was guarded by an army of policeman and National Guard troops. In what has become something of a legend, Dillinger is said to have fashioned a phony gun out of a bar of soap and used it to force his way out of the jail. In his typical brash style, he then stole the Sheriff’s brand new Ford and made his escape to Illinois. Ironically, it was this move–driving a stolen vehicle across state lines– that got the FBI on his trail and eventually led to his demise.

8. The Libby Prison Escape

Richmond, Virginia’s Libby Prison was one of the most infamous jails of the Civil War, but it’s also the site of one of the conflict’s most daring escapes. In 1864, a group of 15 Union soldiers under the direction of Col. Thomas E. Rose and Major A.G Hamilton managed to tunnel through the prison’s basement to a nearby vacant lot. This was no easy task, as Libby’s basement was a dark and vermin-infested cellar known to the men as “Rat Hell,” but after seventeen days of digging, they reached a nearby tobacco shed. From here, 109 soldiers managed to escape into the city of Richmond and make a run for the nearby Union lines. 48 of the men were recaptured, and 2 drowned in a nearby river, but 59 managed to make it to the safety of the Federal army. Their escape remains the most successful prison break of the Civil War.



7. Casanova’s Escape from the Leads

Venetian writer and adventurer Giacomo Casanova is best remembered for being a ladies’ man, but he is also responsible for one of the all time great prison breaks. In 1753, after gaining a reputation for debauchery and adultery, Casanova was arrested and confined to the Leads prison, so named because it was outfitted with a lead roof that was designed to encourage stifling heat and make escape impossible. After smuggling a metal spike into his cell, Casanova and a renegade priest confined nearby managed to tunnel through the ceiling of their cells. Once through, they pried open the lead plates on the roof and broke into another room through a dormer window. Using a combination of ladders and ropes, the duo managed to make it to the ground floor, and after breaking a lock and sneaking through the prison corridors, they escaped by gondola into the city’s network of rivers. Casanova would later write about the escape in a popular memoir, and though many have speculated that the story may be embellished, evidence from scene of the jailbreak seems to back up his account.

6. Pascal Payet’s Helicopter Escapes

Many European prisons have exercise yards on their roofs, a feature that French criminal Pascal Payet has repeatedly used to his advantage. Payet was originally jailed for a murder that occurred during a botched robbery on a security van, and was sentenced to thirty years in France’s Luynes Prison. In 2001, he managed to make a daring escape when an accomplice simply picked him up from the prison’s roof with a hijacked chopper. Payet even returned to the prison two years later with another helicopter and proceeded to help three other prisoners make their escape, but all four men were re-captured, and Payet was given another seven-year sentence for his role in the jailbreak. Amazingly, in 2007 Payet again escaped via helicopter, this time from Grasse prison in southeast France. He was lifted off the roof by four masked accomplices who had hijacked a chopper from a nearby airport by threatening to kill the pilot. After landing near the Mediterranean Sea, the pilot was released, and Payet and his accomplices have since disappeared.

5. Dieter Dengler’s Prison Camp Escape

Dieter Dengler was a German-American Navy pilot who made a famous escape from a jungle prison camp during the Vietnam War. In early 1966, Dengler’s plane was shot down by anti-aircraft fire over Laos, and he was captured and shipped to a prison camp run by the Pathet Lao, a group of North Vietnamese sympathizers. Dengler had earned a reputation for his uncanny ability to escape from mock-POW camps during his military training, and he immediately contributed to a plan the prisoners had to make a getaway. On June 29, 1966, he and six other prisoners managed to escape from their hand and foot restraints and get a hold of the guard’s weapons. After gunning down three guards, Dengler escaped into the dense forest. He would eventually spend 23 days in the jungle enduring extreme heat, insects, leeches, parasites, and starvation before being rescued by an American helicopter. Only one of the other prisoners, a Thai contractor, survived the escape. The others were all either killed or disappeared in the jungle. Dengler would go on to become a successful test pilot in his later years, and to this day he is credited as the only American soldier to successfully escape from a prison camp during the Vietnam War.

4. Escape From Alcatraz

In 1962, Frank Morris and Clarence and John Anglin used months of meticulous planning to make what has become the prototypical prison escape. The trio were being held in the infamous prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, which was reserved for the most hardened criminals and considered to be one of the most escape-proof prisons ever built. The men used a series of tools including a drill assembled from a vacuum cleaner motor to chip away at the aging concrete in their cells and make it to a nearby ventilation shaft. They then made their way down a chimney to the beach, where they quickly assembled a handmade raft and escaped into the San Francisco Bay. Their escape was not realized until the next morning, as the men had fashioned some dummy heads from soap, human hair, and toilet paper to make it look like they were asleep in their beds. The men were never heard from again, and most evidence suggests they drowned in the bay, but no bodies were ever found.

3. The Maze Prison Escape

One of the most violent prison escapes of all time, the Maze Prison break took place in 1983, when 35 inmates escaped after taking control of the prison by force. The Maze was reserved for Irish Republican Army paramilitary combatants and terrorists, and was considered to be one of the most inescapable prisons in all of Europe. But after several months of planning, a group of prisoners led by IRA members Gerry Kelly and Bobby Storey seized control of an entire cellblock by using handguns that had been smuggled into the jail. After wounding several of the guards and stealing their uniforms, the prisoners hijacked a car and took over a nearby guard post, but when they couldn’t get past the main gate, the men hopped the fence and made a run for it on foot. All told, 35 men escaped from the prison– sixteen of whom were recaptured soon after–and twenty guards were injured.

2. Billy Hayes’ Escape From Turkish Prison

Arriving in New York on October 24, 1975, after his five-year ordeal in the Turkish prison system, Billy Hayes displays the new passport that the American embassy in Athens, Greece issued him.

Billy Hayes was an American student who was arrested in 1970 when he tried to smuggle two pounds of hash onto a plane in Turkey. After being caught, he was sentenced to thirty years in the harsh Turkish prison system. Hayes toiled in Sagmilicar Prison for five years, but he was eventually transferred to an island prison in the Sea of Marmara, and it was here that he began to seriously plan his escape. The island had no boats, but a nearby harbor would frequently fill up with small fishing vessels any time there was a strong storm. Hayes spent days hiding in a concrete bin, and when the time was right, he swam to the harbor and stole a small dinghy. From here, he was able to make his way to Greece, and eventually traveled halfway around the world before arriving safely back in the United States. Hayes later wrote a book about his ordeal called Midnight Express, which was adapted into a fictionalized film of the same name.

1. The Great Escape

For sheer planning, risk, and scale, prison escapes don’t get much more complex than the 1944 escape of 76 Allied soldiers from Stalag Luft III, a German prison that operated during WWII. The escape was the culmination of over a year of work by some 600 prisoners. The men dug three tunnels (nicknamed “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry”) 30 feet beneath the surface of the prison with the plan of tunneling past the main fence and surfacing in the nearby forest. This required a sophisticated construction process that included the use of wood blocks for support, a series of lamps, and even a pump to make sure the soldiers digging had enough air to breathe. After gathering a collection of civilian clothes and passports, on March 24, 1944 the soldiers began to make their escape. Unfortunately, the tunnel had come up short of the forest, and as the men surfaced they were in clear sight of the guards. 76 men still managed to escape, but the 77th was spotted and the tunnel was shut down. The Nazis took a special interest in the escaped prisoners, and all but three were eventually caught. Still, thanks to the popularity of the famous movie based on it, as well as its sheer scale and audacity, “the Great Escape” remains one of the most well-known prison escapes of all time.








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Top 10 Dead Persons Still Said To Be Alive After Death

We’ve all heard of people faking their deaths and later being found to be alive. Some do it for attention, others as a publicity stunt, and others to just get out of the spotlight, but in the end realize they soon return to the spotlight. In any case, people who intentionally go “missing” are usually found guilty or some other crime.
We’ve all probably heard of conspiracies and skeptics as well. Put death and skepticism together and what do you get? A bunch of conspirators that start to believe people who are more than likely dead are actually alive and well. Crazy or not, there are people who believe others said to be dead just may be alive. Here is a list of ten people who have become the center of fake death conspiracies.

Top 10 Mysterious World Landmarks

The world is filled with ancient monuments built by master craftsmen in order to honor everything from kings and presidents to religious figures. And although most of these landmarks have been carefully studied and researched by scientists and historians, some are simply so old, incomplete, or obscure that we still don’t know very much about why they were built or what purpose they served. The following are 10 world landmarks that, whether by intention or simply due to the passage of time, continue to baffle the people who study them.

Top 10 Terrible Inventions

Top 10 Bizarre Science Experiments

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question “How?” but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question “Why?” 
We all know that scientific experiments are meant to be conducted in a way so that they provide some sort of useful information. Whether it be an experiment to test a cure for a disease, or just to observe something naturally, most experiments are seen as beneficial as they provide new information to questions scientists have today. However, scientific experiments can be confusing and difficult to understand, and at times some would agree that they’re not always helpful or even useful.

300,000 iPads Sold on Opening Day

Apple today said it sold more iPads on Saturday than it sold first-generation iPhones in 2007 over a two-day period, including one to the deranged idiot in this video.
The 300,000 number that Apple touted included deliveries of pre-ordered iPads, sales at Apple’s retail stores and shipments to its partners, the company said. The only other retail outlet selling iPads on Saturday was Best Buy.

Top 10 Most Absurd Job Titles

Lifeguards are no longer on hand to rescue swimmers in Ceredigion, Mid Wales – after council bosses decided to term the employees “wet leisure assistants”.  The absurd description is one of a raft of euphemistic job titles dreamt up by modern managers desperate to attract a higher calibre of candidates, but which give little insight into the position on offer.

Top 10 Photos of the Week

Daylight savings time was originally invented by the watch-making industry to draw attention to time, and by extension, the need to purchase more time pieces. Similarly, cartographers, professional map-makers, were downsized by improvements within the GPS industry to increase our dependency upon portable GPS units. So why is it that all these improvements in clocks and geo-location services has left us even more lost in time and space?

Cryosat-2 Satellite to Hunt Mosquitoes from Space

The Cryosat-2 is a satellite launched by the European Space Agency to study the state of polar ice with cutting edge tech. But what’s to be done with such a satellite’s advanced radar altimeter and data collection capabilities when it’s not over the poles? You use it to hunt mosquitoes from space, of course.

April Fools’ Day Pranks on the Internet Revealed

A few of the obligatory April Fools’ Day pranks tech firms will roll out today will be funny. Some will be believable. To confirm the jokes, and help you avoid endless “Did you see this” emails, we’re rounding them up here.

Top Ten Inventions That Changed The World

To mark its centenary, in June the Science Museum in London had its curators select the 10 objects in its collection that had made the biggest mark on history. These then went to a public vote to find the most important invention of past centuries. Visitors to the museum and online voters cast nearly 50,000 votes. Find out the winners below.

World’s First 256GB USB Flash Drive

Kingston Technology, the independent world leader in memory products, announced the launch of the world’s first 256GB USB flash drive, the Kingston Technology DataTraveler 300. It allows users to carry around a whole digital world, from thousands of image files to a whole database of documents. Users will also benefit from quick transfer rates and the option to password protects their data.

The World’s Top 10 Most Expensive Foods

If you’re looking to expand your horizons into the world of excess culinary expense, then you could do worse than starting with a few items on this list of the most outlandish, outrageous and, above all, the most expensive foods in the world.

World’s Smallest Snowman

David Cox, a scientist in the Quantum Detection group at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, is an expert in nanofabrication techniques. Recently, using the tools of his trade and a bit of humor, he has created his latest masterpiece: the world’s smallest snowman, which measures just 0.01 mm across (about one-fifth the width of a human hair).