Columbia Sportswear has offered a number of their employees voluntary buyouts and also put some through a round of layoffs. How many you ask? Well, Columbia won’t disclose the number of employees leaving town, which leaves us to imagine Portland packed with people walking everywhere because they can’t afford bikes. Columbia says their buyouts in Portland are part of the company’s strategy to focus on their international growth. Makes sense—after all, everyone moved production off shore ages ago.

Spyder’s employing the flexy d30 gel previously used in ribcap ski hats to give their downhill mountain biking suit a new level of protection. The d30 gel  relies on magical molecules that remain flexible under normal conditions and seize into a hard plastic shell when impacted. It’s a remarkable material that feels soft to the touch but bounces a hammer back at your skull when you take a swing at the stuff on a testing bench. Spyder wraps the thighs of their $270 D30 Ultimate Chamois Bike Shorts and from the shoulders to the wrists of their $350 D30 Armored Long-Sleeve Crew. It’s a nice technology, I’m just trying to figure out why Spyder used the word “Chamois” in their spendy bike shorts—it makes them sound like a uniform worn by carwash employees.

via Gear Junkie

It looks like some kid begged his out-of-work dad for a bike on his birthday. Erik Bjork is the industrial designer who put together this bike with low-cost materials. I’m not sure how much it weighs, but you can bet those tubes aren’t double-butted. At first it struck me as ugly as hell, but I’ll admit that it’s really grown on me. I bet I could put my own wooden bike together in a year or two.

via DirtRag

The Filterbrella design concept would have you refill bottles of water by screwing them into the handle of a water-collecting umbrella. It relies on a gravity filter in the umbrella guts to clean the collected rainwater. As much as I hate the wastefulness of bottled water, this thing’s just not going to work. It’d be like drinking rainwater after running it through a Britta filter, and even if it did a reasonable job cleaning the water, most people don’t spend enough time standing in the rain to be filling bottle.

via Gizmodo

A study printed in the Journal of American College Health puts forth the notion that drinking heady energy drinks is a predictor of risk-taking behavior among the college crowd. The most interesting part of the study found that people who drank cocktails made with the energy drinks would get about twice as drunk as people who imbibe Cran Vodkas and beer. A friend of mine is a middle school principal, and he said one of his students drank so many energy drinks that he went a-fib and his heart started wigging out. Of course, the people who conducted the study are the same ones who declared that binge drinking leads to risky behavior and other obvious facts, but this study means that parents are going to start checking between their kids’ toes for track marks if they see them pounding Red Bulls. My guess is that these guys would still be throwing 32oz bottles of beer into bars whether or not they drank 10 cans of Red Bull—and it’s more of a testament to the ingenious branding of the energy drinks. It’s not like they created the Toxic Jocks, they just gave them a cocktail to rally around. Let me SAT this for you younger guys: Guinness is to Ireland as Red Bull is to Frats.

via Outside