Watch this great video clip of disabled Kenyans who’ve managed to transform their wheelchairs into mobile phone booths.

Video Clip::Ruud Elmendorp, Videoreporter.nl

Over the weekend, the Cassini Imaging Team, lead by Carolyn Porco (Pop!Tech 2005) of the CICLOPS/Space Science Institute released the latest images from the Cassini spacecraft. These pictures bring a stunning view of Saturn and its rings, unlike anything seen before.

Dr. Porco writes - “Not only have we discovered a new ring, not only have we seen strikingly long tendrils of icy particles emanating from Enceladus and supplying the E ring, but we have also captured sight of planet Earth, a pale blue orb, as it wandered behind Saturn’s rings and into Cassini’s field of view.”

See more photos
click here for the news release.

People seem to love list making, recommendations and visual representations of said lists and recommendations.

Here is a cool little web app called Amaznode created for Amazon that does all these things for you, and with the added bonus of Atari-like beeping sounds. You type in a book or movie or any other item that you would look for on Amazon and Amaznode generates a map of related items.

Its a great way to find the next book to read.

Check out the designer Takayuki Fukatus’s other cool flash programs at Fladdict.net

Chef Homaro Cantu will be featured in the October issue of Gourmet Magazine.

Cantu is the executive chef at Moto Restaurant in Chicago and has been described by the New York Times as “a chef in the Buck Rogers tradition, blazing a trail to a space-age culinary frontier.”

And Cantu has a surprise in store for Pop!Tech participants. Who knows what it will be, but not doubt, it will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Jessie Sullivan, the world’s first bionic man, was recently featured again in a news story on MSNBC.com as part of a story on the pioneering technology that allows for the first thought-controlled artificial limbs.

Jessie and the creator of the bionic arm, Dr. Todd Kuiken, Director of neuroengineering at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, presented their astonishing work together at Pop!Tech 2005 and were also featured in the recent PBS special, Alive from Pop!Tech.

Click here for the full story and to watch video footage of the bionic arm in action.

Synthasite is a tool developed by South-African based Incubeta . The tool is intended to help people build webpages entirely online. It will include a lot of the functionality of desktop applications like Frontpage and Dreamweaver.

To learn more about Web 2.0 applications being built by African developers, click here.

An intriguing article by Pop!Tech speakers Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton appeared in the New York Times Art and Design section this weekend. The piece is concerned with the on going struggle to preserve Pre-Islamic antiquities in the Iraq from looting and destruction as a result of shifting political power in the country.

Click here to read the full article.

Micah and Marie-Helene are the founders and owners of Four Corners Media, a documentary organization working in still photography, video and print media. They are also the authors of the bestselling “American Hostage: A Memoir of a Journalist Kidnapped in Iraq and the Remarkable Battle to Win His Release”

Sites like CitySearch,Yelp or local food blogs like ChowHound have created a gastronomic democracy - anyone and everyone is free to leave reviews about local restaurants and other services. Once the domain of the Frank Bruni’s of the world, restaurant reviews are now being produced by the masses and changing the way people dine and the way restaurants serve.

For local dining establishments, which are often left unreviewed by food critics and rely on foot traffic or word of mouth, a posting on Citysearch can make or break their business in a week rather than several months. Similarly, for hyped restaurants that were at the mercy of a handful of newspaper and magazine critics must now treat every customer as a potential review. As a result, restauranteurs have to stay on the ball and make sure their service is consistent for the unexpected reviewer in plain clothes.

From :: SlashFood
via SF Chronicle

Inventor of the Gigapxl camera (the world’s highest resolution camera — that’s 1000 megapixels) and 2005 Pop!Tech presenter, Graham Flint remembers New Orleans before Katrina hit one year ago. These images of New Orleans can be viewed in stunning detail online at the Gigapxl gallery. These are only some of the stunning mind-blowing photos that make up Flint’s “Portrait of America” project.

Flint and his team began the project in 2000 and estimated that it would take 5 years to create an ultra-high resolution portrait of America. In those five years, The Gigapxl project has taken them to 51 states and Canadian provinces where they capture national parks, monuments, and cities. To date, they have amassed more than 1,200 gigapixel photographs documenting the North American landscape, and with the Pre-Katrina photos, its history as well.