There’s wind in that thar sky ... That’s
the sort of thing that – conceivably – might be wistfully said by
someone who is tasked with looking for locations in which to locate wind
turbines. Their job could soon be getting a little easier, however,
thanks to a new balloon-based wind-prospecting system. Read More
Nuance Communications, the company responsible
for the Dragon line of speech recognition software, has announced a new
natural-language voice platform designed specifically for in car use.
Targeted at automotive manufacturers and suppliers, the Dragon Drive!
platform will allow hands-free and eyes-free dictation of text messages
and emails, and voice control of car entertainment and navigation
systems. Read More
With decidedly little fanfare, Microsoft’s
research-oriented FUSE Labs launched a new, student-oriented social
network last weekend. While very much an experimental product at this
point, So.cl (pronounced “social”) does highlight once more that the
Redmond-based software giant is keen to keep its boffins thinking
outside the box in order to find the next big thing, first. Read More
Tesla Motors has announced it will begin deliveries of its long-awaited Model S sedan
next month. The first customers to slap down a reservation for the
battery electric vehicle will be put behind the wheel from June 22, a
month ahead of schedule. And despite being just a month away from
launch, the company also revealed a number of new features that will
allow drivers to personalize the feel of their ride by using the car’s
17-inch touchscreen to adjust steering, suspension and regenerative
braking settings. Read More
Modern electronics have given us the means to
measure nearly every part of our performance – speed, distance,
vertical, heart rate, etc. But there are still other variables that go
unmeasured by the average athlete. The Laser Spoke provides a simple
aftermarket solution for tracking cycling power. Read More
Building robots out of bubbles is an intriguing
idea in its own right, but propelling them with lasers is just plain
crazy. The bubble microrobots, devised by the researchers from the
University of Hawaii at Manoa, have no mechanical parts whatsoever, but
can nevertheless be manipulated with very high precision. Combined into
complex robotic systems, they could potentially be used to assemble
larger objects, such as biological cells. Read More
A group of plant scientists at the University of
Missouri have discovered a new, inexpensive approach to extracting an
powerful anticancer chemical from soybeans. The incidence of a number of
common cancers (breast, colorectal, prostate, bladder, lymphoma, and
oral cancers) is lower in Japan by a factor of two to ten times than in
North America or Western Europe. The medical profession is edging toward
a conclusion that a significant portion of the reduction in alimentary
system cancers and breast cancer is associated with the importance of
the humble soybean to Japanese diets. Read More
Last month we told you about a team of
engineering students from Utah’s Brigham Young University (BYU), who
were competing in a wall-climbing contest using a Batman-inspired system
that they created. While they may not have won that competition, the
university recently alerted us to another one of its student engineering
teams that did take first place in another contest – in this case, they designed a very fast, very efficient hybrid racecar. Read More
Learning to play any musical instrument can be a
mammoth task, especially for those who aren't naturally gifted in that
regard. The guitar is particularly difficult to learn to play, with a
steep learning curve and some extraordinary finger dexterity required
right from the start. Therefore, any tool designed to make the process
less painful is welcomed with open arms by budding guitar gods. A
company called Incident is hoping that will be the case for gTar, a new
digital guitar that utilizes the power of the iPhone. Read More
Well, we really should have seen this one coming.
The humble door lock key, which has been around in one form or another
for literally thousands of years, may be getting replaced by an app ...
or more specifically, by an app that works with a dedicated lock. It’s
called the UniKey system, and it has some features that are actually
kind of clever. Read More
Altering the tension of tuned strings through the
influence of the tremolo or whammy bar on an electric guitar is an
important part of any modern guitarist's trick bag. Early mechanical
vibrato systems were notorious for throwing the instrument out of tune,
and although huge improvements have been made over the years, intense or
brutal use of some modern systems can still lead to problems. In 1989,
DigiTech launched a pedal-based solution called the WH-1 Whammy, that
offered players the same pitch altering capabilities of hardware
systems, as well as additional harmony and detune effects, without any
of the associated tuning hassles. Over 20 years later, and looking very
much like the iconic original, the fifth version of the Whammy is
currently being readied for release and brings something new to the
party – the unique Chordal Pitch-Shifting. Read More
When it comes to urban living,
architectural innovation is very much about maximizing use of space.
This example from London based firm Hogarth Architects does just that by
taking a simple studio apartment and transforming it into a luxury
multi-level home. Read More 
Have you ever tried changing lenses on a DSLR, in
a situation where you had to keep hold of the camera the whole time?
The problem is that it essentially requires three hands. You need two
hands to twist off the old lens and put its rear protective cap on, and
to un-rear-cap the new lens and twist it onto the camera – your
non-existent third hand, meanwhile, is required to hold the camera body.
Because photographers are in reality limited to two hands, they instead
perform a sort of awkward juggling act, in which they risk dropping the
camera or one of the lenses. The Backer Capper, however, is a
product-in-development that’s designed to make the task considerably
easier. Read More
Two hundred and fifty years ago, brewer Arthur
Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease for his St. James's Gate Brewery in
Dublin, Ireland. To commemorate this event, the Guinness company could
have rolled out a stretch limousine, but it decided to go one better by
launching a “deep-sea bar” in the chilly waters of the Baltic off
Stockholm, Sweden. Designed by London-based Jump Studios, the modified
tourist submarine was commissioned as part of the Guinness Sea
Experience competition, that included an underwater trip inside the
Guinness sub as a prize. Read More
For three decades, the annual GTI-Treffen held at
the Austrian Lake Wörthersee’ has been one of the highlights of the
European calendar for Volkswagen enthusiasts. It is increasingly a venue
where Volkswagen communes with its closest fans and presents an array
of concepts to assess market viability. This year it showed five
new cars: the Golf GTI Cabriolet which had debuted at Geneva
International Motor Show, plus four completely new concepts - the Polo
R-WRC, Polo WRC Street, Golf GTI Black Dynamic and Golf GTI White
Concept. Read More
In the most economically excluded regions of the
world about 1.5 million children die of dehydration every year. When
patients get to hospital for IV therapy, there may not be enough staff
to monitor the drip, and the child may die from receiving the wrong
amount of fluid, which is also potentially fatal in cases of
over-hydration. In order to help health care workers in those places,
engineering students at Rice University have developed a prototype of a
technically simple yet ingenuous IV drip system that adds an element of
automation to the process. Read More
Designed for the utmost portability,
designaffairs studio's FLYM folding portable speakers are made for any
device with a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack without need of additional
power. Read More 
Mitsubishi Motors has today announced that it is
to enter two electric cars into this year's Pikes Peak International
Hill Climb, taking place this July. In addition to the electric
production i-MiEV
taking part, Mitsubishi is entering its i-MiEV Evolution, a prototype
developed from i-MiEV technology, purpose built for the Pikes Peak
event. And compared to the production model it's a wee beastie. Read More
It's been a good news week for those suffering
debilitating spinal injuries. First we looked at a breakthrough that
enables quadriplegic patients to move robotic arms using just their thoughts
and now, in related news, surgeons at the Washington University School
of Medicine have reported the successful rerouting of working nerves in
the upper arms of a quadriplegic patient, restoring some hand function.
Read More
Last year, a team of U.S. researchers applied the pruning shears to computer chips
to trim away rarely used portions of digital circuits. The result was
chips that made the occasional mistake, but were twice as fast, used
half as much energy, and were half the size of the original. Now,
building on the same “less is more” idea, the researchers have built an
“inexact” prototype silicon chip they claim is at least 15 times more
efficient than current technology in terms of speed, energy consumption
and size. Read More
Google has updated its Chrome
browser, adding the ability to sync browser tabs across multiple devices
to make a single session of Chrome accessible as you move from desktop,
to mobile, and back again. Read More
With both gasoline and diesel
engines having their own particular advantages and disadvantages,
automotive component manufacturer Delphi is looking for a
best-of-both-worlds solution with a gasoline-powered engine that uses
diesel engine-like technology for increased fuel efficiency. According
to MIT’s Technology Review, such an engine has the potential to
increase the fuel economy of gasoline-powered cars by 50 percent and
give hybrid vehicles a run for their money in the fuel economy stakes.
Read More
SpaceX has suffered another hitch in its quest to become the first commercial company to send a spacecraft
to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch scheduled for May
19 from Cape Canaveral was cancelled due to a potential problem with one
of the engines aboard the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, but all systems
should be go on May 22. Read More
The G8 Summit, the annual meeting of
leaders from eight of the world’s largest economies, is always a
popular venue for protestors who don’t like what some of those leaders
are doing. While you may not be able to make it to this year’s upcoming
event in Maryland, an advocacy group known as One could still get your
message out – by using what could best be described as a giant inkjet
printer to paint it on the street. Read More
While a good quality sleeping bag is
a solid investment for keeping the crisp night air at bay, said bag can
quickly become an oven when the ambient temperature heads northwards.
Add to this the cramped nature of snoozing in a sack and you get a
recipe for discomfort that some of us find hard to bear. The Zippered
Vents Sleeping Bag aims to overcome these issues with a design that
brings a little versatility to the equation. Read More
The Venn diagram of objects you can
eat, and objects from which digital synthesizers have been made is one
with minimal overlap. But thanks to Gadget Gangster's Jeff Ledger and
his Bananaphone touch capacitance synthesizer, that union has gotten a
little bigger. Read More
The creative fellows at Pensa are
turning a few heads with their Street Charge concept that would seek to
turn everyday city street signs into illuminated charging stations for
mobile devices. Read More
The new Toyota GT86 and Subaru BRZ
haven't been visible for long, but the marques' newest sports car scored
a major coup on the weekend when it won two separate classes at the
40th ADAC 24 Hours Nürburgring race, including the V3 class for
production machines. In all, it was a huge validation of the handling
and horsepower of the new machine on what is generally regarded as the
most demanding racetrack in the world. Read More
Researchers at the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have created a new
piezoelectric nanogenerator that promises to overcome the restrictions
found in previous attempts to build a simple, low-cost, large scale
self-powered energy system. Read More
Generally speaking, companies developing
suborbital manned vehicles brag about how much elbow room their
spacecraft will provide passengers. They say there will be plenty of
room to float around during the weightless portion of the flight, that
there will be no fighting for windows, that passengers will comfortably
endure the high-g portions of the flight ... and then there's Copenhagen
Suborbitals' (CS) Tycho Brahe. Read More
Google has updated its Chrome
browser, adding the ability to sync browser tabs across multiple devices
to make a single session of Chrome accessible as you move from desktop,
to mobile, and back again. Read More
With both gasoline and diesel
engines having their own particular advantages and disadvantages,
automotive component manufacturer Delphi is looking for a
best-of-both-worlds solution with a gasoline-powered engine that uses
diesel engine-like technology for increased fuel efficiency. According
to MIT’s Technology Review, such an engine has the potential to
increase the fuel economy of gasoline-powered cars by 50 percent and
give hybrid vehicles a run for their money in the fuel economy stakes.
Read More
SpaceX has suffered another hitch in its quest to become the first commercial company to send a spacecraft
to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch scheduled for May
19 from Cape Canaveral was cancelled due to a potential problem with one
of the engines aboard the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, but all systems
should be go on May 22. Read More
Unfortunately, when it comes to sharing digital
music with friends, there aren't too many eco-friendly portable speaker
options available for the discerning green consumer. When such things do
make an appearance, they tend to be acoustic docks made from materials
like bamboo (think iBamboo)
that simply boost the source audio in a similar way to using an
old-fashioned horn speaker, or otherwise get their power from renewable
resources (as with the SoliCharger or Rukus,
for instance). The Pulpop MP3 speaker designed by Balance Wu and Chin
Yang takes a slight diversion from such norms. It's made from recycled
paper pulp and uses of vibration speaker technology to amplify the
source audio through the surface on which it stands and the hollow space inside the doughnut. Read More
A sprocket of research engineers (yes, apparently
that's the collective noun for a group of engineers) at the Catalan
Institute of Technology (CIT) has succeeded in breaking the record for
sensitivity of mass measurement. By measuring the resonant frequency of a
short length of single carbon nanotube, masses as small as a single
nucleon (proton or neutron), having a mass of about 1.7 yoctogram (1 yg =
10^-24 grams) were measured, thereby exhibiting a level of sensitivity
several orders of magnitude better than previous devices. This new
technology enables the detection and identification of individual atoms
and molecules and tracing the fate of individual atoms in a chemical
reaction. Read More
A stick, a ball, a rope with a knot tied on it,
these are all tried and tested methods of entertaining and exercising
dogs. But for some people, basic isn't always best … meet Go-Go Dog
Pals, remote controlled pet toys designed to be chased by dogs while the
owner takes the more leisurely option of controlling it with a remote.
Read More
ROCCAT's latest peripheral brings some of its past innovations
together along with a couple that you won't find on anything else. The
new Savu Mid-Size Hybrid Gaming Mouse offers a unique peripheral-based
achievement system and a customizable light bar in addition to extremely
precise optics. Read More
The G8 Summit, the annual meeting of
leaders from eight of the world’s largest economies, is always a
popular venue for protestors who don’t like what some of those leaders
are doing. While you may not be able to make it to this year’s upcoming
event in Maryland, an advocacy group known as One could still get your
message out – by using what could best be described as a giant inkjet
printer to paint it on the street. Read More
Office buildings have traditionally been so staid that whimsical departures from the norm
still trigger a strong response, both good and bad. The latest member
of the avant-garde architecture club, the estimated US$1.08 billion,
44-floor, 768 ft (234 m) CCTV headquarters building in Beijing (already
so iconic it's part of a board game for architecture groupies) is now finally complete - after nearly eight years of construction. Read More
While a good quality sleeping bag is
a solid investment for keeping the crisp night air at bay, said bag can
quickly become an oven when the ambient temperature heads northwards.
Add to this the cramped nature of snoozing in a sack and you get a
recipe for discomfort that some of us find hard to bear. The Zippered
Vents Sleeping Bag aims to overcome these issues with a design that
brings a little versatility to the equation. Read More
One of the myriad of hurdles premature babies
must overcome after entering the world too soon is learning how to suck
and feed. To address this problem and get premature babies feeding and
out of the hospital sooner, Florida State University (FSU) professor
Jayne Standley has developed a pacifier that provides musical
reinforcement every time the baby sucks on it correctly. Read More
With unexploded ordnance and land mines remaining
a serious global problem, we’ve seen many efforts to develop new
technology to detect these dangers, such as using terahertz waves and inkjet-printable sensors.
But instead of relying on the development of new technology, some
students at the Military University of Technology in Warsaw have sought
to use an existing one in a new way with the development of their SAPER
explosives detection app for smartphones. Read More
Modern DSLRs can shoot some pretty impressive
video footage, but unfortunately their small and often fiddly focus
rings aren't quite cut out for creating cinematic masterpieces which
require smooth and accurate focus. The Lens/Focus Shifter is a lens
mounted follow focus which claims to offer DSLR film-makers and
photographers a professional solution to this problem … on a budget.
Read More
Look up this project on the website of its
architects ACXT and you will find that it goes by the rather understated
name of 242 Affordable Housing Units in Salburúa (Salburúa being a
neighborhood in the Basque city of Vitoria-Gasteiz). In many ways the
downplaying of the name is in keeping with ACXT's quiet approaches to
sustainable design. Though there may be no obvious green bells and
whistles such as wind turbines or photovoltaics, passive architectural
methods combined with on-site generation contribute to what ACXT claims
is a "considerable reduction" in the building's carbon dioxide
emissions. Read More
The Venn diagram of objects you can
eat, and objects from which digital synthesizers have been made is one
with minimal overlap. But thanks to Gadget Gangster's Jeff Ledger and
his Bananaphone touch capacitance synthesizer, that union has gotten a
little bigger. Read More
Thanks to the popularity of 3D printers like the Replicator and the Cube,
there are plenty of devices out there for crafting almost any solid
object from just a design. But what if you're more interested in
building a 3D object from something a little less voluminous like, say, a
simple line drawing? The materials used to create most 3D printed
object unfortunately aren't sturdy enough to recreate objects that thin.
That's why New York-based design consultancy, Pensa, has built the
DIWire Bender, a machine that follows vector diagrams to bend and shape
pieces of wire into elaborate structures. Read More
Regular readers might remember the robotic universal gripper
that can pick up a wide variety of objects thanks to an elastic
membrane filled with coffee grounds. Earlier this year, the developers
revealed they had given their versatile gripper the ability to “shoot” objects
some distance, and now a team at MIT has “extended” the technology to
create a robotic arm that can twist, flex and grip in a way not
dissimilar to an elephant’s trunk. Read More
There is a bandwagon just starting to roll
containing various pairs of video-capable and augmented reality glasses.
Google
is currently in the driver's seat, but it's far from the only company
working on ways to allow us all to record video from a first-person
perspective and integrate what we see into our online lives. A case in
point is Vergence Labs' Social Video Electric Eyewear. Read More
It's rare to see a building's form so adapted to
maximizing renewable energy potential as is the case with the Endesa
Pavilion, Solar House 2.0. Not content with a roof completely covered in
photovoltaic panels, the designers at the Institute for Advanced
Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) led by Rodrigo Rubio have covered the
building's south facade with protrusions supporting additional solar
panels, which are angled optimally for harvesting energy from the sun.
Read More
The creative fellows at Pensa are
turning a few heads with their Street Charge concept that would seek to
turn everyday city street signs into illuminated charging stations for
mobile devices. Read More
The new Toyota GT86 and Subaru BRZ
haven't been visible for long, but the marques' newest sports car scored
a major coup on the weekend when it won two separate classes at the
40th ADAC 24 Hours Nürburgring race, including the V3 class for
production machines. In all, it was a huge validation of the handling
and horsepower of the new machine on what is generally regarded as the
most demanding racetrack in the world. Read More
In a stunning nightime launch at 3:44 Eastern
Daylight Time, Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has
sent the Dragon spacecraft into orbit on its way to a rendezvous with
the International Space Station (ISS). The Dragon will deliver about 460
kilograms of cargo, including food, disposables, several nanocubes for
small-scale experimentation and blocks of ice. Read More
Tourists want to experience the "sights and
sounds" of everywhere they travel, but usually viewing the sights is
much easier than hearing the sounds. It's one thing to look at the
Statue of Liberty; it's quite another to be able to listen to the sounds
around it. The UK designer behind the Listen Here concept would like to
redress the balance by giving tourists a chance to hear audio from all
over a town without having to actually go to each place. With
microphones at different locations transmitting data to a central map,
tourists would be able to simply point at a different and hear live
ambient sound from all around a city. Read More
The dramatic increase in the number of devices
finding their way into people’s homes has made the humble electrical
outlet hot property, with all manner of power-hungry hardware and
proprietary port-packing mobile gizmos clamoring for attention. The
PowerBrick universal charger from Feligan aims to be your one-stop
electricity outlet by virtue of its ability to simultaneously power 11
devices. Read More
Researchers at the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have created a new
piezoelectric nanogenerator that promises to overcome the restrictions
found in previous attempts to build a simple, low-cost, large scale
self-powered energy system. Read More
We're not quite sure why the sudden interest in hydrofoil innovation in Slovenia, but last week's Internautica event saw the release of two different and quite radical recreational hydrofoil craft. The first was the Quadrofoil electric hydrofoil sportscar for the water,
and the second is the wFoil 18 Albatross, a cross between a WWI
seaplane and a modern hydrofoil which is capable of 50 knots. Read More
Los Altos-based start-up Electric Imp is looking to make putting the "things" into the Internet of Things
both cheaper and simpler with Imp - a Wi-Fi equipped card designed to
connect appliances to the internet so that users can remotely monitor
and control them. Read More
While there are plenty of ways to make carbon-based products from CO2, these methods usually require a lot of energy because the CO2 molecules are so stable. If the energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels, then the net result will be more CO2
entering the atmosphere. Now a material scientist at Michigan
Technological University has discovered a chemical reaction that not
only soaks up CO2, but also produces useful chemicals along with significant amounts of energy. Read More
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