Archive for June, 2011

HowStuffWorks.com Tech Editor Holly Frey’s done at E3 2011 — here’s her wrapup from day three.

Alright, on Thursday there was no messing around. I would have some special together time with the Wii U no matter what! The last two days, I visited the area of the show floor I lovingly call Nintendo City, but to get actual play time with the Wii’s successor would have taken a minimum of a five-hour wait in line. That’s not a typo or fever dream. Five hours, minimum.

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I love spending time outside, so in the interest of not roasting my brains out this summer now that I’m sans-apartment-complex-pool, I decided to get a little aboveground pool for the yard. It’s about 10 feet across and 2 feet high. I got it filled up last night and it’s perfect for lounging in (but not for diving in! heed the warning, people, or your neck might explode!) and I’m really looking forward to spending hot afternoons hanging out in it. Question now is — how to keep it clean.

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In the United States, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) keeps a database of transplant candidates waiting for organs. The statistics are daunting: Demand for organs has outstripped the available supply, meaning that patients must wait for months or years before receiving an organ. According to LifeShare (via our article), each passing day brings [...]

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Recently, on Stuff Mom Never Told You, Molly and I have covered the Western obsession with tanning and the Eastern custom of skin lightening. In both episodes, we focused largely on women since we’re stereotypically more attentive to our personal appearance and more willing to alter it via makeup, tanning, hair styling, etc. But in [...]

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Follow HowStuffWorks.com Tech Editor Holly Frey on her adventures at E3 2011! Here’s what she had to say about her second day on the show floor:

I started my day by killing bikini-clad zombies with a boat oar. How was your morning?

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Today’s episode is something of a puzzle, and we need you guys to helps us piece it together. What happens when we plug into our electronic gadgets and tune out the rest of the world? What kind of world do we live in when everyone gets to pump their own continuous, custom soundtrack in and alter reality’s emotional decor. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Julie and I discuss the so-called Walkman Effect and the manner in which our precious music and personal electronics alter the reality we live in.

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You know how there are a lot of elderly couples out there who look a lot like each other. A lot of them are because they’re cousins, which I suspect was more okay back in olden times when you had to stock the farm with as many people as you could and it didn’t really matter how divergent their genetic lines were. There are also plenty of elderly married couples that look alike who aren’t related in any way, and it’s these couples who have long puzzled researchers. A 1987 study that sought to get to the bottom of this was recently sent to me by Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know’s Ben Bowlin, who comes up with good stuff pretty much all the time.

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Chicago’s version of the glass-bottom boat is a glass-bottom box suspended 1,353 feet above the city.

The Ledge at the Chicago Skydeck, Willis Tower, was inspired by all the forehead prints on Skydeck windows, according to the tower’s Web site — including those prints belonging to Ferris Bueller, Cameron and Sloane, and all their copycats …

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If you’re like a lot of people, you probably hear the word “psychopath” and picture corpse-stuffed crawlspaces and maniacal dictators. Maybe you even think of our fictional friend here Hannibal Lecter, but you know what? Maybe Dr. Lecter was a really effective psychiatrist most of the time. Maybe, a few ethical discretions aside, he did the world a lot of good.

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Pretty soon the Carrying Capacity podcast will be published and we’ll all know that the highest number anyone’s reasonably come up with as the upper end of the human population the Earth can possibly sustain with our current understanding of ourselves, the biogeochemical processes of the planet and our ability to exploit these processes to maintain ourselves is 40 billion. Forty billion people and that includes a lot of factors that aren’t in place yet.

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