A Discotheque in London gets most of its electricity needs from people dancing in their specially equipped dance floor.  How cool is that?

All the flashing strobes and pounding speakers at the dance club are massive consumers of electric power. So, bar Suya in London, re-outfitted its floor with springs that, when compressed by dancers, could produce electrical current that would be stored in batteries and used to offset some of the club electrical burden.  The club owner, Andrew Charalambous, said the dance floor can now power 60 porcent of the club's energy needs.

Hollywood is a place where folks are often recognized more for their looks than their talent - and actress Hedy Lamarr was no exception. But it's what she invented in her spare time - to help end that war - that has history turning a kinder eye, linking her to a bombshell of a whole different sort. 

She possessed the kind of beauty that was haunting - an almost smoldering sensuality, with an exotic accent to match. She was once dubbed "the most beautiful woman in the world." Even her name - Hedy Lamarr - sounded dark and mysterious. But although she shared the screen with Hollywood legends like Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart, people rarely remember Hedy's talent.

From Vincent Callebaut Architects, this impressive project is meant to navigate through the rivers in Europe in order to clean water and make it drinkable. Its name comes from "Physalia physalis", meaning "water bubble".

It is a project whose idea came from a major global issue which is the fact that one billion people nowadays don't have access to drinking water.

Norman Joseph Woodland, the man who revolutionized the checkout counter with the invention of the bar code - scanned five-billion times a day - died at the age of 91 in his New Jersey home after suffering Alzheimer's disease.  The original 1952 patent for the bar code favoured a circle - allowing scan from any direction originally sold for $15,000 making the most ever earned by Woodland or co-inventor with Bernard Silver of the bar code that labels nearly every product in stores today. 

Scanned more than five million times a day, instantaneously encoding product data while boosting work production, it was with Norman Joseph Woodland's fingers in the sand that he first invented the revolutionizing bar code.

Look up into the skies today at a passing aeroplane and the view is not that much different to the one you would have seen 60 years ago. Then and now, most airliners have two wings, a cigar-shaped fuselage and a trio of vertical and horizontal stabilizers at the tail. If it isn't broke, the mantra has been, why fix it, particularly when your design needs to travel through the air at several hundred miles an hour packed with people.  

But that conservative view could soon change. Rising fuel prices, increasingly stringent pollution limits, as well as a surge in demand for air travel, mean plane designers are going back to their drawing boards. And, now, radical new shapes and engine technologies are beginning to emerge, promising the biggest shake-up in air travel since de Haviland introduced the first commercial jet airliner in 1952.