Magnetically Grown Fashion

Coffee as Viagra, car crushing, Tokyo in high-def and more in our weekly look at the web

Combining high-fashion and geology, product designer Jolan Van Der Wiel and pioneering fashion designer Iris van Herpen, have “grown” a line of dresses using magnets. To create the garments, the Dutch designers added a mixture of iron fillings and resin to fabric, and then used magnets to pull the particles into a strange texture of spikes and filaments. It took three weeks to grow each …

Coffee: The Original Viagra

Coffee as Viagra, car crushing, Tokyo in high-def and more in our weekly look at the web

We’re all familiar with the day-to-day value of coffee intake. Back in 1652, however, a coffee craze swept England because it was also considered a sexual stimulant. While the “Women’s Petition Against Coffee” referred to the substance as a “heathenish liquor,” reducing men’s virility, the “Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee” made note of the opposite. Men found that it made “the erection …

Life, on Mars

Coffee as Viagra, car crushing, Tokyo in high-def and more in our weekly look at the web

This week marks the one-year anniversary of NASA’s successful mission to Mars. Curiosity, the rover roaming the red planet, gained definitive success for the space program with its discovery of clay, which suggests Mars may have been hospitable to life at one point. The rover’s biggest opportunity is yet to come. Traveling at 100 yards per day, Curiosity is approaching Mount Sharp, an 18,000 foot …