Cool Hunting

Streets.to: A Virtual Guide
Planning a visit to Canada's largest city? Look no further than Streets.to, Toronto's visual search engine, to set you up with a personal tour. Taking you on a simulated 3-D city excursion, Streets.to is touted as "the world's first and only patent-pending virtual cityscape." It's purpose: to turn virtual into reality, giving you a comprehensive visual depiction of what one can expect in and...

Google Moon
To Honor the 36th anniversary of the first manned moon landing Google has given us Google Moon. Using the Google Maps interface you can pan and zoom across the moon's surface and view the locations of each Apollo landing. Zoom in all the way for a silly little surprise! Thanks, JGG!...

Color Changing Pavement
Simple, effective and possibly life-saving idea, France's Eurovia is developing a thermosensitive road varnish that changes color to indicate freezing and dangerous conditions. Like a Hypercolor t-shirt, the road could turn pink (or any other indicative color) when surface temperature is below freezing and returning to neutral once it warms back up. Not only a boon to motorists, but it helps out the environment...

NASA Create the Future Design Contest
Roads that produce electricity from the kinetic energy of cars, DNA-scanning ballot boxes to wipe out voter fraud, superbly energy-efficient houses (pictured right) to stave off the impending energy crisis... these are some of the entries vying for the $20,000 prize offered by NASA in the Create the Future Design Contest While the entry date has come and gone, there are literally hundreds of...

Stratocruiser
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a blimp...no, it's the gorgeous, futuristic-looking Stratocrusier, currently in concept form by Tino Schaedler and Michael J. Brown. Calling it a "lifestyle zeppelin," the duo designed the white airship as the latest offering in luxury travel that refreshes passengers instead of leaving them dry, dehydrated and jet lagged, a consequence travelers have come to expect. The key...

Wired NextFest 2007
From ideas that ran from the creepy (like regenerated body parts including bladders) to conceptually fascinating (like a harp with strings made from lasers and a Lifestraw that kills sinister infectious organisms in water upon contact), over 160 exhibitors at the 4th annual Wired NextFest in Los Angeles this past weekend enthusiastically revealed their visions of the future to receptive nerds of all ages....