After missing footage was found in Argentina, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” has been restored and its narrative better understood (above).

Oxo Good Grips Designers Take on Tablet Magazines.

How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online?

Apple to xplatform developers: We’re no longer suicidal.

Create Your Own Virtual Instruments With Maize Sampler v2.0.

New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer: eat organic, drink filtered water, avoid plastic containers.

Dear nerd, start a nerd sash with nerd merit badges (nerd).

SKTCH is an interesting generative drawing iPhone app.

We’d love to buy the My water bottle in light blue, but the shipping costs as much as the bottle!

The Big Bang Was an Explosion OF Space, Not IN Space.

New Reverse Vending Machine Pays You to Recycle,

Interview with David Toop, one of our favorite music writers.

The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books.

Why Funnel Marketing Doesn’t Work.

Uncommon Act of Design: The Secret of Getting Kids to Eat Veggies? Move the Salad Bar.

Guerrilla gardeners use candy machines to sell seed bombs.

The Progress of the Platform.

Recycled, Modern, Outdoor Furniture (above) by Loll Designs.

Apple and the politics of phoney outrage.

Modern House Numbers giveaway.

Curated hypocrisy: How Google camouflages its attacks on Apple.

Biomimicry Challenge: IDEO Taps Octopi and Flamingos to Reorganize the USGBC.

How Cul-de-Sacs Are Killing Your Community.

Polar Beer pint glasses, for fans of Lost.

88% of Lost Wallets Containing Baby Photos Get Returned: How To Use That Fact to Boost Business.

The Shirky Principle: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Marvel Comics for the iPad looks rad.

The Twenty Systems project combines an audio CD of new music with a full colour 60 page book containing photos and diagrams of the electronic instruments used, along with a detailed history documenting the development of synthesisers between 1968 and 1988.

Dazzle Makeup to foil computer facial recognition.

Setgo Transport Urban Bag from Yanko Design (above).

Thermopower waves: MIT scientists discover new way to produce electricity.

Obama appoints Edward Tufte to advise on stimulus transparency.

A loot valued at $20 million lies off the coast of Staten Island, and Ken Hayes is on the hunt for the sunken silver bullion.

Demolishing density in Detroit: can farming save the motor city?

Whales, like trees, slow warming.

With artificial photosynthesis, a bottle of water could produce enough energy to power a house.

Books in the age of the iPad.

LastHistory graphs all your Last.fm listening.

A Tree in Jars, an art installation by Naoko Ito (above).

Synth Britannia and Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany are two great BBC Four documentaries, but you’ll need to find torrents to watch them, as they’re not streamable online (even to rent) due to music licensing restrictions.

On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno

Old cast-iron radiators, transformed for electric heat.

Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself.

Tending the Garden of Technology, an interview with Kevin Kelly

The United States spends more on medical care per person than any country, yet life expectancy is shorter than in most other developed nations and many developing ones (above).

Robert Henke, aka Monolake shares his custom Max for Live devices.

How to dispose of old electronics in a responsible way.

Top 7 Best Green iPhone Apps.

Ira Glass on Storytelling (YouTube): part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Design and Meaning: an interview with Nathan Shedroff.

Self-Destructing Bacteria Could Be the Key to Better Biofuels.

Incredible ‘Garbage City’ Rises Outside of Cairo.

How to protect your ideas in the digital age: Don’t. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can.

The practice of hanging out is consistently demonized by educationally-minded folks as a waste of time. Yet, it is in that space where youth learn to navigate social situations, make sense of impression management, and develop the social skills necessary to be productive adults.

Kind of Bloop (above): An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?.

Art of the arcade.

How to develop groove in your playing.

12 Greenest colleges and universities in the U.S.

Osmos has a sublime electronic soundtrack by Loscil, Gas/High Skies, Julien Neto, Biosphere, and more.

By refusing to comment on the work you show the work some respect; you allow the work to just be.

The State: The Complete Series (above) is finally available on DVD (affiliate link).

Consumers get paid to reduce their emissions.

The fifth edition of The Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt is now available.

Michael Bay as Generative Art: Explosion Action Painting with oF.

An essay against Situationism.

Open Atrium is a customizable, open-source team portal.

Music Made from a Tree.

Why We Need a Globally-Recognized Unit of “Green”

Managers Embrace Design Thinking, Designers Reject It.

Starting a Design Studio In a Downturn: Part 1: Taking Leaps, Part 2: The First 15 Weeks, Part 3: When There’s No There There

The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems: The new rules ask, “Who are you? What do you need? How can I help?”

Get yer grub on with these Aluminum Snack Boxes (above) from SIGG.

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson.

No Lifeguard On Duty is the name of this beautiful photographic series of abandoned swimming pools by J Bennett Fitts.

The Feast Conference gathers the world’s greatest innovators from across industries and society to empower, inspire and engage each other in creating world-shaking change.

The Forces of User Experience, an expansion on Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience.

“The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful.” Paul Hawken’s 2009 Commencement Address at the University of Portland.

Open Emu is like having a giant visual performance synth made from the tasty innards of classic games.

When companies try to come up with new ideas, they too often look only where they always look.

What Makes Us Happy?

Hayo Miyazaki’s Ponyo (above), a story inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale ‘The Little Mermaid.’ (video)

Futurespeak: Shane Hope’s keywords defined.

Gary Hamel on managing Generation Y.

The evidence is growing that privately owned, consumer-driven, small-scale, geographically distributed renewables could deliver a 100% green-energy future faster and cheaper than big power projects alone.

The Sears Tower is going green.

How does our language shape the way we think? by Lera Boroditsky

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s video report from their alien adventure film, Paul

The Dirty Dozen: Top 12 Foods to Buy Organic

2009 Penguin Design Awards

Get yer DIY wall clock (above) from Radius

Watch, discover and discuss independent, foreign and classic films.

Fluxx is a card game with ever-changing rules.

Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living, from the experts at TreeHugger.com

Innovation is a result — not a process.

To celebrate Yayoi Kusama’s eightieth year, Gagosian Gallery is presenting two major interrelated exhibitions of her recent work (above).

Images of Brian Eno’s recent 77 Million Paintings installation at the Sydney Opera House.

New Math, by Craig Damrauer.

WANT: Neuton CE 6 Rechargeable Lawn Mower.

David Lynch’s new Interview Project.

WANT: Bali 12-Bottle Wine Rack.

Neil Voss’s music generating iPhone puzzler, xgon.

100 Abandoned Houses.

Hulu Desktop beta for Mac OS X.

Use the Mac OS X app Self Control when you need to limit your online temptations.

Steel Factory Reinvents Itself, Now Grows Lettuce (video). Something about green, going green, they’ve really gone green, someone—everything’s gone green… no.

Mark Bittman On Why Food Matters.

Ableton Live 8 and Studio 8 are finally out, so defrost your plastic! Or, you can download the demo (sans save and export, of course) to get your fix like the rest of us po’ folk.

Facebook, YouTube at Work Make Better Employees, says a recent study.

The next green fuel source: algae.

DIY camera kit (above) for the crafty geek in all of us.

Herman Miller Replaces the Sample Catalogue With a Smart Web Site; someday we’ll be able to afford such brilliance.

He Charted the Moon Before Galileo, But You’ve Probably Never Heard of Him.

Jenny Holzer’s Protect Protect Show.

The Unreleased Recordings by Hank Williams.

Wrong Tomorrow is a database of provable predictions.

Novation announces SL Mk II; sweetness.

Fantastic design work followed by fantastic increases in newspaper circulation, by Polish newspaper designer Jacek Utko. His advice: “Give power to designers.” Right on!

Get Satisfaction as a Protection Racket.

A 10-month investigation by a team of researchers at the University of Toronto uncovered a broad Chinese espionage scheme that reached into foreign embassies, news services and even the office of the Dalai Lama.

The Top 5 Greenest Laptops.

Goodbye Google: Where the engineers are guided by metrics, and the designers play second fiddle (or leave), by Douglas Bowman.

Experimental Geography Reading List, by Rhizome contributing editor Marisa Olson.

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism, by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Trees: More than just carbon sinks – How Tree Aid, a UK-based charity, helps poor rural communities fight poverty, become self-reliant and help the environment.

He may seem like Mister Rogers. But in a revealing interview, the travel guru Rick Steves shares his daring views on Iran and terrorism, spoiled Americans and the best places to smoke pot in Europe.