Bat Bonanza

Austin, Texas, is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony, and just after sunset each evening in March, hundreds of thousands of the winged creatures emerge from beneath a bridge to soar into the night across Lady Bird Lake. Mexican free-tailed bats have been migrating to the city for hundreds of years, but it wasn’t until a 1980 expansion of the Congress Avenue Bridge that the numbers really took off. The renovation resulted in deep, dark, concrete crevices that roosting bats find ideal for raising their young. Now, the bridge serves as a nursery, hosting as many as 1.5 million bats each year. When the weather cools between October and November, the colony takes off again for warmer climes.

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America's Microcar

America's only true street-legal electric microcar just got big upgrades. There’s a growing push in the U.S. to rethink what a car really needs to be, as more Americans than ever embrace alternatives from e-bikes to golf carts, among other car alternatives. Wink Motors is the latest company betting that smaller, slower, and cheaper might actually be the smarter answer for a lot of drivers. However, Wink has a different approach, focusing on those who want to retain the benefits of a traditional car without all the extra cost or hassle. The company just announced the launch of its Wink Mark3 electric microcar, a fully enclosed, street-legal vehicle designed specifically to meet and exceed federal low-speed vehicle (LSV) regulations. Unlike many low-cost EVs that hide key features behind pricy options lists, Wink is positioning this one as fully loaded out of the box, priced at $19,995.

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Creative Solution: "Storage Chair" For Your Half-Dirty Clothes

If you’re like most people, that shirt or pair of jeans you’ve worn only once typically gets tossed onto a chair. The only problem with that is that clothes can pile up pretty quickly, causing your chair to all but disappear. Inventor Simone Giertz has come up with a solution for that dilemma: the Laundry Chair. You guessed it: it serves as a chair and clothing storage at the same time. The Laundry Chair features a movable rail, so instead of forming a pile, clothes go around the chair. The rail is mounted on a smooth ball-bearing Lazy Susan mechanism, so you can rotate it, hide the clothes behind the chair, and still be able to sit in it. The rail can fit at least 10 items of clothing. Call it a clever design or a luxury, but if this chair keeps your room tidy and essentially serves as two pieces of furniture in one, it might just be worth it. Giertz is currently raising funds on Kickstarter, and you can be a backer for just $879. The retail price is planned to be $1,100, with shipping beginning in November.

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You Can See a Swirling Sculpture Made of 8,000 Books at a Library in Prague

Nearly 30 years after a dizzying sculpture fashioned from books was first installed at the Prague Municipal Library in the Czech Republic, literature lovers have turned the artwork into a viral fascination and unexpected tourism hotspot. Idiom, created by artist Matej Krén features roughly 8,000 books stacked into a tower. Mirrors placed on the top and bottom give the illusion of infinite length, and a raindrop-shaped entryway invites visitors to peek inside the wormhole, almost like they’re literally disappearing into a good book. The design is meant to symbolize the infinity of knowledge, with books being like bricks but containing much more information. To accommodate the crowds, the library recently turned one of its five entrances into a designated doorway for tourists. Officials are also weighing whether to charge a fee.

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