Fashionable and practical, and, yet, the risk of accidental electrocution is causing some initial sales resistance.

Solar powered bikini charges electronics on the beach.

Obligatory bikini picture -

Details on same -

Textual justification for bikini picture:

Put away those flimsy little nylon bikinis and instead strut your stuff in this Solar-Powered Bikini. Aside from being on a totally different level, it makes your already smoking bod look even better by accentuating all the right curves. More than that, it can also charge up your iPod, smartphone, or any other device via USB because it’s actually made up of a series of photovoltaic cells sewn together with conductive wire.


Gone are the days when you need to get up from your lounger to fit your device with a spare battery or keep it because it has run out of juice. As you can see, the Solar-Powered Bikini is pretty skimpy and doesn’t have room to hold a battery. This means that any energy it can get from the sun is directly transmitted straight to your mp3 player or mobile phone. Bazinga!

5 Unexpected Downsides to Being Smart...

...according to Cracked, which obviously is the premier source for things the subject of which is "intelligence."

Also, nerds are "hyperwhite":

2. Nerds tend to focus narrowly but deeply (single-tasking), Big Men broadly but shallowly (multitasking). Nerds lack the "situational awareness" that the Air Force prizes in fighter pilots, but their ability to concentrate obsessively makes them good at designing the planes that pilots fly.


3. Nerds work best asynchronously (as Howard Bloom says, they never say the right thing at the right time -- I can vividly recall walking along after a college history class, thinking about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when some black friend passing by said, "Hey, what's happening?" "Hmmhmmh????," I thought to myself in consternation, "What exactly is happening? Well, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is definitely not happening, but what is?" About five minutes later, I came up with a clever, but by now useless, reply, which later I could never seem to remember the next time somebody asked me "What's happening?). In contrast, Big Men are better when they are "in the flow" (of the discussion, the hunt, the battle, the basketball game, or whatever).

Also, a lot of reading literally rewires your brain in a way that impair your ability to recognize faces.

A lack of "situational awareness," a reaction time measured in minutes and an impaired abilty to recognize the faces of people you've met and you have the explanation for why I find walking into a bar to be living life "on the edge."

Finally, some good news...

...nerds live longer!

Beware jocks and mean girls: you may be more popular in high school, but according to a new academic paper, it is the smart kids and conscientious glee-club types who will live longer. Not only that, they will suffer fewer diseases before they die. Only the good die young? Guess again.


The paper, which was published recently in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, summarizes data from millions of people studied in dozens of academic articles. The bottom line is that people who are smarter and more conscientious acquire fewer illnesses and die later than those who have the opposite traits.

How these relationships work is wildly complicated, but one of the simplest associations is between intelligence and health: smarter people are more adept at avoiding accidents, and they are more likely to understand public-health campaigns against smoking or drug abuse. Studies typically show that by middle age, there is a reliable correlation between low IQ and rate of hospital admission, even when researchers control for socioeconomic differences. (More on Time.com: Five Ways to Stop Stressing)

A more puzzling but just as reliable finding is that people of lower intelligence are more likely to have disorders that stem in large part from genes. For instance, the new paper quotes a 2010 finding that those who have IQ scores just one standard deviation lower than the mean have a 60% greater risk of being admitted to a hospital for schizophrenia. That could be because admitting staffs are biased against people they see as less intelligent, but low intelligence is also correlated with greater risk of alcohol problems, depression, anxiety, late-onset dementia and posttraumatic stress disorder — again, even after researchers control for class variances. The same goes for risk of death by suicide and homicide and risk of injury from fights, stabbings, or maulings with blunt instruments.

Some of these relationships can be explained simply: stupid people make stupid decisions. But no one decides to be schizophrenic or to have dementia (or, for that matter, to be mauled by a blunt instrument). The authors wonder, then, if there's a genetic relationship between intelligence and likelihood of injury and earlier-than-average death.

And yet more intelligent people are more prone to binge drinking.

Go figure.

Weird

Just weird.

Hitting uncomfortably close to home.

New York Times reports that nerds are 'hyperwhite'.

As a melanin-deficient, "situationally unaware" redhead, I find that kind of characterization to be just cruel.

And who hasn't been interrupted from a deep reverie about the Austro-Hungarian Empire at least once in their life?

The part about nerdish contributions to civilization is pretty inspiring however.