The Eiffel Tower was only supposed to stand in Paris for 20 years... but experiments in "wireless telegraphy" helped convince the powers that be to keep the tower in place. Plus: this gallery of the weirdest-looking cars to ever roll off the assembly line is maybe not the aesthetic equal of the Eiffel Tower, but it sure is fun.
That doesn't sound good.
On this day in 1942, the patent was issued for a car that was to be (at least partly) made from soybeans. And it was the idea of none other than Henry Ford. Plus: Steven Paul Judd is an Oklahoma-based artist of Kiowa/Choctaw descent, and last month he made a portrait of Sitting Bull using just over 20,000 black and white dice.
Dental history is, shall we say, complicated. Fortunately we have all sorts of ways to minimize pain today, but none may be as exciting as those used by Edgar "Painless" Parker, a dentist who would distract his patients by putting on a vaudeville show as he worked. Plus: V2P technology could help us keep cars and pedestrians from crashing into each other.
All kinds of pop culture can lead to trends in baby names, but there’s research that shows that when a hit song has climbed up the pop charts, the same name starts climbing the list of baby names. Plus: good news out of the Consumer Electronics Show for drivers who forget their sunglasses. It's an interactive smart car visor.
You’ve heard about making cars smarter, but what about smarter intersections? Cornell researchers find that making intersections more autonomous could help get self-driving cars where they want to go more efficiently. Plus: on the anniversary of the last day of the last Apollo mission to the moon, how about a trip to the Museum of the Moon, now visiting Philadelphia?
The busiest travel season of the year is getting underway, so here's a story about a vehicle right out of Richard Scarry’s Busytown: the Big Banana Car, which is a 15 foot long banana with four seats on the frame of a Ford F-150. Plus: the Volkspod is a motor scooter made with upcycled parts from old-school Volkswagen Beetles!
This week's videos are (very) loosely themed around desserts - fitting that we're all coming down from the Halloween sugar rush.
The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles is about to open a new exhibit called “Hollywood Dream Machines: Vehicles of Science Fiction and Fantasy." If you’ve ever wanted to get close to the coolest rides the big screen ever shared with us - like, say, the DeLorean in "Back to the Future" - this is your chance.
Thirty years ago today was the last regular season game of one of the greats on and off the court. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored more points than any NBA player ever - and he may have set the record for most kinds of post-basketball success, from doing fight scenes with Bruce Lee to writing on the reboot of Veronica Mars.
