Valery Rozov is running out of mountains off which to jump.
The Red-Bull-pedaling daredevil added Mount Kilimanjaro to a recent jump in a wingsuit, traveling a horizontal distance of nearly two miles in a minute-long free fall before pulling his parachute to safely land at Barranco Camp. He was greeted by several Africans, who hoisted him on their shoulders.
“The locals had heard what I was up to and were pretty impressed,” Rozov, 50, told redbull.com.
Wardrobe malfunctions can happen with every style of clothing. It’s just a little terrifying when it happens to an astronaut on a spacewalk.
NASA astronaut Terry Virts reported a floating blob of water inside his helmet Wednesday after completing a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to perform cable and lube work outside the International Space Station.
America’s oldest surviving robot no longer smokes cigarettes.
Long lines of people no longer wait to see him, topless women haven’t danced around him in years and his legs have been broken since that amusement park gig.
But Elektro is home now, his head reunited with his body, cared for by a man named Scott Schaut, who is so fiercely protective that museum requests to borrow the gold robot usually end with him replying “over my dead body.”
Ben Marcus attracts attention whenever he flies his quadcopter and sometimes he lets the curious take the controls.
During those exchanges, many say this: That’s cool, but what about the privacy issues?
Marcus sensed that the concern about camera-outfitted drones unknowingly hovering over our lives was real enough that it could stunt the potential applications of drones.
So he started a company that will let people restrict their own air space.
NoFlyZone launched on Feb. 10 and already has more than 20,000 homeowners signed up to request drone pilots steer clear of their property.
Photographer and book publisher Rick Smolan was 25 when he made the best picture of his young career while on assignment in Australia. It was a group of aboriginal children playing in golden light with a balloon on a red dirt runway.
But when he looked down at his camera, he realized the shot would be grossly underexposed. Sure enough, when the Kodachrome 25 slides came back, the frame was dark and murky.
“I stuck the slide in a safe deposit box because I knew someday someone would invent something to save that picture,” Smolan, who created the Day in the Life photo book series and America 24/7, told Cult of Mac.
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Allen Zderad lost a career in science because of a degenerative eye disease. Now, science is allowing him to see his wife for the first time in 10 years.
The 68-year-old former chemist from Minnesota recently became the recipient of a “bionic eye” implant, a chip with electrodes implanted in his retina that interacts with a camera in Zderad’s glasses. The camera and wearable computer pack sends information to the electrodes, which then send the information on to the optic nerve.
Lenny Kravitz has designed a camera for Leica and you are going to need rock-star money to afford it.
Kravitz, whose life-long love for photography is evident by the Leica camera often slung on his shoulder, has collaborated with his favorite company to design a limited edition Leica M-P Correspondent digital rangefinder.
The “design” comes in the form of areas of the camera’s black enamel finish where the paint has been deliberately worn away to reveal flares of brass. It has the vintage appearance of a well-traveled workhorse that came from the bag of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
David Sherry and Allie Lehman are not out to kill anything. But when they named their growing photo agency Death to Stock, they were sending out a pretty strong signal. Not with malice toward this segment of the photo industry, but a tongue-in-cheek invitation to any person who has ever had to create something using expensive, mediocre photography from a stock agency.
The name as well as the pictures they produce have caught the eye of more than 230,000 subscribers since Sherry and Lehman started the agency in Columbus, Ohio, in 2013.
The value of the company, Sherry said, is growing fast — in large part because they distribute the work free of charge.
A good belt should hold your pants up and be fashionable doing so.
Piers Ridyard has raised the expectations of this simple but important mens fashion accessory: the belt as smart phone charger.
Ridyard’s XOO belt looked like any other belt when it made its debut at London Fashion Week in January as part of a new collection from men’s fashion house Casely-Hayford. The charging power is in layers of thin, flexible lithium ceramic polymer battery sewn into the leather.
A microUSB-to-USB charging cable stored on the inside of the band can be plugged into the belt to charge a pocketed iPhone or Android device. The belt can be recharged on a computer.
AJ Forsythe couldn’t stop dropping his iPhone and cracking the screen. He also couldn’t afford to be Apple’s best repair customer.
Clumsy but industrious, Forsythe bought parts on Alibaba and found he could fix his own phone cheaply and quickly. Soon, he was running a repair service out of his dorm room at California Polytechnic State University, replacing cracked touchscreens for $75.
Five years later, Forsythe runs a network of 1,700 technicians in the United States with another 400 in 11 countries under the name iCracked.
Some journalists remember the day the future arrived: We felt like James Bond on special assignment when our editors, playing the part of provision master Q, handed us the portable device that would allow a story to be written in the field and transmitted back to the office.
So when Radio Shack said earlier this month it would file for bankruptcy, more than a few of us flashed back to the TRS-80 Model 100, one of the first notebook-style computers.
Released in 1983, it set portable computing in motion. The TRS-80’s liquid-crystal display showed eight lines of text. The computer came in 8K and 24K versions and weighed just over 3 pounds. A later version, the Model 200, boasted a flip-up screen that showed even more text, but the original model was by far Radio Shack’s most popular, with more than 6 million sold.
There was the buzz going into Sundance and the applause of satisfied audiences at the end of the movie’s screening. But there was also a collective gasp as the last line of the credits rolled past.
Shot on the iPhone 5s.
Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the story of two transgender sex workers in Hollywood, was a break-out hit at the renowned film festival in January. The Hollywood Reporter said the film stands out as “crisp and vigorously cinematic.”
Oft-praised for the rich fringe characters in his independent films, Baker did not set out to change the filmmaking landscape by shooting with a cellphone. Like most indie filmmakers, he had no money.
When camera companies began putting a “record” button on DSLRs, things got really interesting for Rob Whitworth. Is he a photographer or a filmmaker?
The ambiguity about his work description does not matter for anyone who has taken a heart-racing, stomach-dropping ride through his time-lapse videos.
In his latest, Dubai Flow Motion, viewers will feel shot out of a canon for a three-minute hectic but thorough tour of this sparkling Middle East city. Whitworth’s camera will take you up the tallest skyscraper, send you blasting through its floors to see rooms teeming with life and send you crashing into the sea.
Eccentric rocker Neil Young has never been swayed by the critics. He has always made the music he wanted.
But he may not be able to be so carefree, as some critics eviscerate his latest musical endeavor – a pricey, Kickstarter-funded digital music player aimed at rescuing music from the MP3 format.
The PonoPlayer, resembling a Toblerone bar in shape and color, was supposed to revolutionize the digital listening experience and with a $400 price tag, not to mention a $6.2 million Kickstarter campaign, expectations were high. Users can download music from the Pono site and listen to high-quality files that restore the quality historically compressed out of digital music.
Turns out, it sounds no better than music on an iPhone, according to several critics who have put the PonoPlayer through its paces.
Computer users of a certain age remember the Commodore 64. Millions brought the future into their homes with this, their first personal computer.
And if you still have a Commodore 64, dust it off and make sure it’s not a Commodore 65. A model with the higher digit sold on eBay Sunday for close to $23,000.
The 64 still holds sales records. It outsold IBM and Apple during the early 1980s, in part because it sold in retail stores and not just electronics or computer stores.
But the 65? It never made into the stores.
Most clothing designers like to see their clothes well photographed. Betabrand’s Steven B. Wheeler has menswear that just might ruin a photo — and that’s part of the cool factor.
Wheeler and DJ Chris Holmes teamed up to design five pieces called Flashback, clothing made of a highly reflective fabric that will bounce any iPhone flash right back through the lens.
In most cases, the result produces a nuclear look, with the silhouette of the clothes distractingly white hot. Surrounding details either get lost in the shadows or simply go unnoticed because the eyes zero in on the aura of the Flashback clothing.
Stephan Brusche was bored and starting to play with his food when he made a discovery that would change his life: Bananas are nice to draw on.
Graphic artists are paid to think this way, and Brusche was being urged by his wife to promote his work to a wider audience using Instagram.
“There wasn’t anything exciting to photograph,” said Brusche, 37, an artist for a travel agency in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. “I still had a banana and I thought maybe if I draw a smiley face on it, that would make a nice picture. I discovered how nicely the ink flows on the peel. It was really a pleasant surface.”
That smiley face, posted more than three years ago, received more likes than his work illustrations. And thus Fruitdoodles was born. Since then, Brusche has transformed more than 200 bananas into fine art.
Arganalth can look at an old floppy disk drive and see in it a second act.
The 23-year-old engineer from Lille, France, uses old computer hardware long overdue for the landfill to assemble an electronic orchestra that he conducts out of a suitcase for a growing audience tuned into his YouTube channel.
Arganalth — he prefers to use his YouTube name in interviews — creates strange but recognizable music with a network of hard and floppy disk drives powered by a Raspberry Pi.
It would have been hard to don a Xybernaut Poma wearable PC in 2002 without uttering the phrase, “Resistance is futile.”
What was arguably the first wearable computer had the look of a Borg, a cybernetic villain from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
The Borg’s design, a menacing mashup of species and technology, was badass, but Poma users just looked awkward. The computer’s processing unit was portable enough, fitting in a pocket or clipping to a belt. But once you added the keyboard to the forearm and a clunky-looking, head-mounted optical piece, your cool crashed like a bad hard drive.
Blind dates can be full of surprises, but few ever end with the man crapping his pants – and with cameras rolling.
Such are the scenes in a Ford Motor Company promo video for the 2015 Mustang, in which a hidden-camera captures a gorgeous blonde stunt driver and her unsuspecting dates.
The video, which has racked up more than a quarter-million views since it was posted to YouTube late last week, runs just under three and half minutes. It shows technicians installing tiny cameras in the car’s dash.
Neil Armstrong had just been the first man to walk on the moon but now had to put out the trash.
It was a critical step home. Precise weight had to be calculated for re-entry and to make way for moon rocks, miscellaneous space travel items had to be discarded in the lunar module.
Just before sending the Eagle crashing into the surface of the moon, Mission Control records Armstrong’s voice saying nothing historic, certainly not as memorable as “One Small Step for Man…”
“You know, that – that one’s just a bunch of trash that we want to take back . . . We’ll have to figure something out for it.”
This audio proved to be an important piece of provenance when the wife of the late astronaut discovered a white bag in a home closet.
Robot vacuums might be having a moment.
Should sales suddenly spike, it may be because of the unintentional endorsement from a South Korean woman, who made news when her hair got sucked up by her robot vacuum.
The woman had to make a “desperate” call to her local fire department and paramedics spent about a half-hour trying to free her hair, according to the newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun.
While such a device allows you to nap while your floors get cleaned, its seems like a bad idea to sleep in its path.
New app Cloe is a dutiful concierge service you can text to request a good jazz club or microbrewery and get an informed, cheery response in a minute or less. Think of the mad research skills of Siri with the personality of Samantha, the AI operating system from the movie Her.
Need a tailor? Cloe may ask if you need a custom shirt made or just a button sewn on a jacket before she sends you a recommendation based on where you are standing at that very moment.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is redefining high tea.
Drones are taking to the skies in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to deliver tea to a test group of 450 shoppers using Alibaba’s website Taobao. The three-day trial of drone delivery service in the Chinese cities ends Friday as Alibaba continues to push its might across the globe.
To get a “thumbs-up” from art directors, photographer Justin Poulsen provided the thumb.
In an act of creative expression that Van Gogh would appreciate, the Toronto-based Poulsen sent out his work on thumb drives that he made to look like realistic severed thumbs.
After the initial shock, who wouldn’t want to plug it in and have a look at the contents?
