It's my life, you're just along for the ride!

With an unsettling *splat* your toast has once again landed butter-side down on the carpet. But it’s not like you’re going to waste another five minutes waiting for a replacement piece to brown. Heck no, just yell out “five second rule,” pick that sucker up, brush off all that hair and lint and you’re ready to eat, right? Science says no.

The most important thing to remember about the world around you is that everything is covered in germs, at all times. There are an estimated 100 billion in your mouth right now, another 100 trillion living in your digestive tract. As many as 25,000 germs crowd onto every square inch of your cell phone, though, and another 7.2 billion call your kitchen sponge home. Luckily, an overwhelming majority of these microscopic lifeforms either pay us no attention or actively work for our mutual benefit. The rest of them, though, can kick your ass.

via The Five Second Rule Will Make You Sick (And Maybe Dead).

Have you ever wanted to wave your hand to unlock a door or transfer your contact information by simply touching a phone? How about keeping all of your top secret passwords at arms length, literally? Well, with this Kickstarter-funded near field communication-enabled ring, all that could soon be possible.The technology behind the NFC ring is strikingly simple. Its nothing more than a titanium band and two inlays with NFC-ready chips in them. Theres a big one on the top of the ring for public information and a smaller one on the inside for private information. This is designed to enable the wearer to use different types of hand gestures in order to share different kinds of information.What that information might be is totally up the wearer. As suggested above, the NFC signal can perform simple tasks like unlocking a smartphone or your front door. You can store all kinds of personal data including URLs that you want to share easily with your friends, and even save the code for your Bitcoin fortune. It can be programmed to work as your key fob and actually serve as a replacement for your cars ignition button. This is all assuming the rings make it off of the assembly line in working order, of course.

via This NFC-Enabled Ring Stores Your Personal Data On Your Fingertips.

Elon Musk has made his name on big ideas, whether it’s space tourism or the electric car — but his latest project, mysteriously dubbed the Hyperloop, may be more revolutionary than anything he’s done. It started with a simple promise: the ability to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour. As time went on, Musk added more. It would be low-friction, and use such minimal power that the entire thing could be run on electricity from solar panels installed above the tracks. It would use small pods, leaving “whenever you arrive” instead of cleaving to a schedule like an airliner. He’s promised to unveil his alpha design for the project in just under a month’s time, but already, observers are speculating on exactly how this next-generation transportation scheme would work.

THE CLOSEST WE’VE GOT IS JAPAN’S BULLET TRAIN

The details Musk has already hinted at tell us a great deal about the project, and outline a number of the challenges he’s likely to face. Based on simple math, we know it will have to travel an average of more than 600 mph. And it will have to do so almost frictionlessly, allowing for the low-power travel Musk envisions. It’s a big promise, and one that would have major consequences for the transportation industry and for society at large. For the technically minded, it raises the obvious question: how in the world is this thing going to work?

via Here’s how Elon Musk’s Hyperloop might actually work | The Verge.