by Nicole Martinelli

The tiny brick library in Leonardo Da Vinci’s hometown is putting 3,000 pages of the genius’ work online in a high-resolution, searchable archive.

The Leonardian Library in Vinci, Tuscany, is making the Madrid Codices and the Codex Atlanticus — two collections of scientific and technical drawings — available as a free digital archive called e-Leo.

The EU-financed project will also digitize the Windsor folios and 12 notebooks from the Institut de France for a total of 12,000 pages, creating the most extensive public online archive of Leonardo’s codes.

It’s a powerful resource for amateurs — Renaissance groupies, crowdsourcers looking for technical solutions — who make half of all requests to the library in the hamlet where Leonardo was born.

E-Leo won’t be putting lone librarian Monica Taddei out of a job anytime soon, though. Continue reading →

If you’ve ever visited the Bel Paese, you know how scarce public toilets are. Before you’ve visited any number of nicely crumbling ruins, your thoughts will inevitably turn to the loo. Where to find one, how to avoid the Turkish kind and how to convince your traveling partner to have yet another caffé so you can go.

Oliviero Toscani, former Benetton ad guru, shares your pain. He convinced porta-potty company Sebach to hold an international “dream toilet” competition for architects, designers and engineers. Creator of the ideal privy — chosen both on aesthetics and feasibility for mass production — wins €5,000 (circa $6,600). Get cracking: the deadline is August 4.

Italian scientists are testing a new diet pill that turns into a clear, gelatinous blob the size of a tennis ball that may help shrink waistlines by giving dieters a sense of satiety.

The pill, currently undergoing clinical trials at Rome’s Policlinico Gemelli hospital, would be downed with two glasses of water at the first sign of a stomach rumble.

“The effect is like eating a nice plate of pasta,” said Luigi Ambrosio, lead researcher on the project at the National Research Council’s Institute for Composite and Biomedical Materials in Naples. “If you sit down for a meal with a stomach that already feels full, you’ll end up eating less.”

The unnamed pill is made from a cellulose compound of hydrogel, a material that’s powdery when dry but plumps up to a cousin of Jell-O when wet. The gel can soak up to 1,000 times its weight. A gram in capsule form quickly balloons from the size of a spit wad to a ball that holds nearly a liter of liquid. Ambrosio and fellow researcher Luigi Nicolais, now minister for reform and innovation, noticed the burgeoning girth of Americans during a trip to the United States in the ’90s.

Continue reading →