Back when the iPad mini was just a rumor,
many of us expected it to be in the same price range as the Nexus 7 and
Kindle Fire (US$200). That didn’t happen. In fact, Apple’s budget
tablet rings up for more than Amazon’s high-end tablet.
But a reputable Apple analyst now thinks the company might do something
about that later this year – by releasing a cheaper version of the iPad
mini. Read More
At the 2013 Geneva Motor Show in March, Ferrari unveiled its latest flagship supercar, elegantly titled LaFerrari. It's a beast of a machine sporting almost 1,000 horsepower, and we featured a full write-up
(with plenty of photos) at the time of its unveiling. Now, just a
couple of months later, a wristwatch designed to match the look and feel
of the LaFerrari has been announced. Those with deep pockets and a
penchant for luxury watches should read on, while the rest of us instead
resign ourselves to looking at our phones when we need to know what the
time is. Read More
Playing a bit like a computer version of Lego, Mojang's Minecraft
– the darling of the indie game movement – has been an impressive
success story. It soared to mainstream popularity as intrepid players
proudly showcased their elaborate creations online. Its similarity to
Lego didn't go unnoticed by the toy giant, and in 2012 kids of all ages
could enjoy the game AFK with a licensed brick set. The problem is, you'd need an awful lot of bricks to recreate what you can make in the game (for example, check out this version of Game of Thrones' King's Landing), so that's where Printcraft – and the magic of 3D printing – enters the picture. Read More
BMW’s sustainable mobility-focused
sub-brand BMW i has announced it is to join forces with German
photovoltaic firm SOLARWATT GmbH, in a bid to supply consumer-friendly
solar-powered carport and rooftop charging systems to future i3 and i8
owners. Read More 
It was Puerto Rico's day at the 20th NASA Great
Moonbuggy Race. Teams from that country won first place in both the high
school and college division races. More than 90 teams competed in the
race, in which lightweight human-powered buggies race over a simulated
lunar surface built at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville,
Alabama. The winning times for this grueling three-quarter mile course
were 3:24 for the high school division and 3:32 for the college
division. Read More
One of the things that makes heart disease so
problematic is the fact that after a heart attack occurs, the scar
tissue that replaces the damaged heart tissue isn’t capable of expanding
and contracting – it doesn’t “beat,” in other words. This leaves the
heart permanently weakened. Now, however, scientists from
Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have developed
artificial heart tissue that may ultimately provide a solution to that
problem. Read More
Mobile start-up Sion has developed a quad-core
Android smartphone named the V1sion that it hopes to bring to the market
unlocked and without a contract for under US$299. The company claims
its performance bests that of a Galaxy S3 thanks to its Samsung Exynos 4
Quad (aka Exynos 4412) processor. The company says that the compelling
bank-for-buck ratio is possible using crowdfunding, and that the number
of backers will determine the final price. Read More
For years now, scientists across the globe have strived to find a method that gives robots an accurate sense of touch,
and with good reason. A robot with an improved ability to feel would be
better equipped to identify objects, judge its movements with greater
care, and perform more tasks overall. In the latest step towards that
goal, researchers at Georgia Tech have crafted a new type of
touch-reactive material that's sensitive enough to read fingerprints and
could provide robots with a sense of touch that resembles our own. Read More
Launched last year, the Suunto Ambit
brought a new level of functionality to the GPS watch market. Not only
could its GPS keep tabs on your speed, distance and vertical, but it
allowed for full navigation functions, routing you in and out of the
great outdoors. Suunto has now revealed the second generation of Ambit
watches with something for both explorers and athletes. Read More
Researchers at Queen’s University’s Human Media
Lab have developed a prototype smartphone that uses shape-changing
capabilities to let the user know of an incoming call, text or email.
Built around a thin, flexible electrophoretic display manufactured by
Plastic Logic, the MorePhone can curl its entire body to indicate a
call, or curl up to three individual corners to indicate a particular
message. Read More
One lesser known snippet out this
year's Shanghai Auto Show concerns a joint venture between Toyota and
China’s FAW (First Auto Works), which resulted in a new sub-brand and a
new electric vehicle that was displayed along with an SUV EV resulting
from another Toyota-China joint venture. Read More
Hot on the heels of last week’s F1 inspired by Twizy,
comes another (slightly) less outlandish EV in the form of the
awkwardly named GWKULLA. Looking very much like the Twizy, this concept
from Great Wall Motors showed its pert little face at the Shanghai Auto show last week. Read More
While it still remains to be seen exactly how
many people will be willing to get about town with a wearable computer
strapped to their heads, the market looks set to be a competitive one.
Google got the ball rolling with the announcement of Google Glass, then reports surfaced that Chinese search company Baidu
and Microsoft were getting in on the act with their own devices. Now
Japanese designer and self-described augmented reality entrepreneur
Takahito Iguchi is throwing his hat into the ring with Telepathy One.
Read More
One lesser known snippet out this
year's Shanghai Auto Show concerns a joint venture between Toyota and
China’s FAW (First Auto Works), which resulted in a new sub-brand and a
new electric vehicle that was displayed along with an SUV EV resulting
from another Toyota-China joint venture. Read More
Hot on the heels of last week’s F1 inspired by Twizy,
comes another (slightly) less outlandish EV in the form of the
awkwardly named GWKULLA. Looking very much like the Twizy, this concept
from Great Wall Motors showed its pert little face at the Shanghai Auto show last week. Read More
When you’re sitting on top of the world, what do
you do? Do you pay tribute to what got you there? Or do you use that new
freedom to try something different? In the case of Samsung with the
Galaxy S4, it leaned more towards the former. Is it too much of the
same? Or an improvement on a successful formula? Read on, as we review
the Samsung Galaxy S4. Read More
When someone is feeling sick, you take their
temperature to see if they’re running a fever. That’s the way it’s been
for decades. However, all that a regular thermometer will tell you is
their body temperature – it won’t tell you what they might have, or what
you should do. The Kinsa Smart Thermometer, while not quite a medical tricorder, is designed to do those things. Read More
For some time now, the rise of the mobile phone
has been seen by many as the death knell of the watch. Why, they ask,
would anyone carry around a device that just tells the time when their
phone can do that and much more? Smartwatches
look set to bring the wristwatch back in style by bringing smartphone
functions to a wristwatch form factor, but WATCHe of Switzerland has
taken a different approach to combine the two with the We5S – a luxury
mechanical watch set in a re-positionable frame designed to fit the
iPhone 5. Read More
While splitting a keyboard into two distinct
zones may well make for more comfortable typing, especially for touch
typists like myself, you still need to reach out to the side to grab
your mouse and confirm onscreen actions. The Combimouse addresses this
by having the right arm of the divided keyboard also serve as an optical
mouse. Read More
Just because someone is getting close to nature
doesn't necessarily mean they need to ditch their smartphone. However,
keeping a device charged while in the great outdoors is not always the
easiest thing to do. After all, those trees don't come equipped with
power outlets. We've already seen the BioLite stove that generates its own power. A new product called VOTO performs a similar function, but with any cooking fire. Read More
We keep hearing about how smartwatches
may replace – or at least augment – the smartphone, but how would you
type on that tiny display? In some cases, where the watch is linked to a
smartphone in your bag or pocket, you could just use the phone’s
screen. For stand-alone smartwatches or quick messages, however,
researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created the ZoomBoard
system. Read More
To old fogeys like me, it seems like only
yesterday that the coolest way to go online was to dial up the AP wire
service bulletin board on a 300-baud modem, but it was actually two
decades ago that the web as we know it burst onto our world. On Tuesday,
it was 20 years ago that the World Wide Web went public, when CERN made
the technology behind it available on a royalty-free basis. To mark the
occasion, the organization announced that it is recreating the world's
very first website for posterity. Read More
Los Angeles industrial designer and keen
guitarist Mark Andersen says that close examination of playing patterns
has revealed that the current knob/switch setup on most electric guitars
results in "conflicting motion paths" when the player needs to tweak
the tone or volume, or select a different pickup. His answer is to
replace the pots and switches with a pair of touch panels on the pick
guard, to convert your Strat-shaped axe into a Touchmark Guitar. Read More
If you went into a store without any
cash, cards or mobile devices, would you be able to buy anything? Well,
if both you and the store were using the new PayTouch service, the
answer would be yes – all that you’d need to do is place two of your fingers on the fingerprint scanners of the PayTouch terminal. Read More 
For a while, it looked like Apple was going to
utterly dominate the tablet market forever. Xooms, Xyboards, and
Transformers came and went – accomplishing little more than building the
world’s biggest collection of store shelf dust. But today Android
slates have grown in quality and quantity, while shrinking in screen size and price. In the first quarter of 2013, they continued to eat into the iPad’s market share. Read More
The average watch uses a simple formula of
rotating inner hour and minute hands pointing at fixed numerical
designations. The Harry Winston Opus XIII, the result of a collaboration
with renowned watchmaker Ludovic Ballouard, turns that simple formula
on its ear, using an outer ring of 59 moving minutes and 11 moving
hours. Read More
Contrary to what certain cartoons may have us
believe, insects’ compound eyes don’t produce a grid of tiny identical
images. Instead, each of their many optical facets supply one unique
section of a single composite image – sort of like the individual pixels
that make up one digital image. Now, a team of scientists has
replicated that eye structure, to create an ultra-wide-angle camera.
Read More
You don't create one of the utmost masterpieces
of the high-performance supercar market without countless hours of
testing. Much of that testing is dirty, sweaty and anything but sexy,
but a few select aspects are riveting enough to make for
edge-of-your-seat video – aspects like the McLaren P1 drifting through
snow-powdered ice in northern Sweden. McLaren released just such a video
this week. Read More
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for
Physical Measurement Techniques have come up with a car-mounted laser
scanner the size of a shoe box, that can survey the contours of road
surfaces at speeds of up to 100 km/h (62 mph). The system detects
potholes and other road damage in need of repair. According to the
Institute, the Pavement Profile Scanner (or PPS) has surveyed 15,000 km
of road since mid-2012, in which time it has proven cheaper, faster and
more accurate than existing systems which require hefty attachments to
the carrier vehicle. Read More
In the ProDesk3D, 3D printing outfit botObjects
has come up with not only the first full color desktop 3D printer, but
thanks to its anodized aluminum body, unquestionably one of the
prettiest. Read More
A US school has cut a six-figure sum from its
winter energy bill by replacing its oil-burning boiler with woodchip
biomass ones. The switch has reduced the school's carbon footprint by
between 35 and 45 percent. The boilers are housed in a brand new
green-roofed building which has become only the third LEED-certified
power facility in the US. Read More
NASA's autonomous, solar-powered explorer GROVER
has been kitted out with ground-penetrating radar to take to Greenland's
ice sheet on Friday. There the robot will spend a month analyzing the
accumulation of snow and how this contributes to the ice sheet over
time. The scientists involved hope to identify a new layer of ice that
has formed since summer 2012, an unusually warm summer which saw melting
across 97 percent of the area of the ice sheet. During that time, an
iceberg twice the size of Manhattan calved from the Petermann Glacier,
part of the ice sheet. Read More
Julie McEnery is NASA's Project Scientist for the
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. When she checked her email on March
29, 2012, she was startled to find an automatically generated message
stating that in six days, her half-billion-plus dollar satellite was
going to cross paths with Cosmos 1805, a Soviet-era spy satellite. The
predicted encounter had the two satellites occupying the same
coordinates only 30 milliseconds apart. Not only that, but Cosmos was in
an orbit moving nearly perpendicular to Fermi such that their collision
would be equivalent to tons of high explosives. Essentially total
destruction. Read More
At CES in January, Microsoft Research teased its IllumiRoom
concept, which involves projecting an image around a TV screen to
enhance video games with additional visuals. Unfortunately, the company
didn't offer much info beyond a short video that briefly showed it in
action. But the team behind the project recently showed up at the CHI
2013 conference in Paris with some more in-depth details about how
Illumiroom will not only expand the game screen, but completely alter
the appearance of your living room. Read More
Samsung was the first Android phone maker to take a stab at tablets. Released in 2010, the Galaxy Tab
was a 7-inch slate that cost more than the bigger and better iPad. But
Samsung kept chipping away, making tablets in all shapes and sizes, and
is now gaining on Apple’s shrinking lead. How does Samsung’s latest – the Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 – compare to the Google/Asus Nexus 7? Read More
Anyone who’s tried their hand at stop animation
will know it’s an incredibly time consuming and delicate job. But spare a
thought for scientists at IBM Almaden in California who have produced
the world’s smallest stop animation movie by using a scanning tunneling
microscope to move individual atoms. Rather than competing with Aardman
or Pixar for a slice of the international box office, the film is
intended to make the public aware of new technology that could increase
computer memories far beyond what is possible today. Read More
The intermittent nature of wind and solar power
generation is one of the biggest challenges facing these renewable
energy sources. But this isn’t likely to remain a problem for much
longer with everything from flywheels to liquid air
systems being developed to provide a cheaper form of energy storage
than batteries for times when the wind is blowing or the sun isn’t
shining. A new concept out of MIT can now be added to the the list of
potential solutions. Aimed specifically at offshore wind turbines, the
concept would see energy stored in huge concrete spheres that would sit
on the seafloor and also function as anchors for the turbines. Read More
The importance of local culture in shaping a
marketplace was never more conspicuous to this Western mind than at the Bangkok Motor Show
when Honda showed two concept bikes that are so far from the normality
of Western markets that they will challenge your thinking as they did
mine. The highlights of Honda Thailand's massive exhibition were a
Chopper-styled scooter and a Grand Prix Racer-styled mini-bike meant for
the road. Read More
It's predicted that by the year 2050 there will
be 9.3 billion people on Earth and 6.4 billion of them will be living in
cities. There could also be four times as many cars on the roads as
today, leading to an incredible degree of urban congestion and gridlock.
That’s the impetus behind Ford and technology partner Schaeffler’s
eWheelDrive electric research car, that moves the motor to the wheel
hubs. Read More
Back when DARPA first announced its Autonomous Robotic Manipulation
(ARM) program in 2010, the average cost of a military-grade robot hand
was around US$50,000. That's expensive even by the US military's
standards – especially for something that is bound to be in close
contact with explosives – which is why the hardware team of the ARM
program tasked participants with developing a reliable low-cost hand.
Now, thanks to work by iRobot (yes, the company that makes the Roomba
robotic vacuum) and researchers at Harvard and Yale, the ARM program
has a surprisingly effective new hand to play with that costs just
$3,000 (in batches of 1,000 or more). Read More
A lot of kids don’t like having to
put on their pajamas, as doing so means that it’s time to go to bed. If
those jammies had bedtime stories digitally hidden within them, though –
well, maybe then the kiddies couldn’t wait to get them on. That’s the
idea behind Smart PJs. Read More
NASA's autonomous, solar-powered explorer GROVER
has been kitted out with ground-penetrating radar to take to Greenland's
ice sheet on Friday. There the robot will spend a month analyzing the
accumulation of snow and how this contributes to the ice sheet over
time. The scientists involved hope to identify a new layer of ice that
has formed since summer 2012, an unusually warm summer which saw melting
across 97 percent of the area of the ice sheet. During that time, an
iceberg twice the size of Manhattan calved from the Petermann Glacier,
part of the ice sheet. Read More
Julie McEnery is NASA's Project Scientist for the
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. When she checked her email on March
29, 2012, she was startled to find an automatically generated message
stating that in six days, her half-billion-plus dollar satellite was
going to cross paths with Cosmos 1805, a Soviet-era spy satellite. The
predicted encounter had the two satellites occupying the same
coordinates only 30 milliseconds apart. Not only that, but Cosmos was in
an orbit moving nearly perpendicular to Fermi such that their collision
would be equivalent to tons of high explosives. Essentially total
destruction. Read More
At CES in January, Microsoft Research teased its IllumiRoom
concept, which involves projecting an image around a TV screen to
enhance video games with additional visuals. Unfortunately, the company
didn't offer much info beyond a short video that briefly showed it in
action. But the team behind the project recently showed up at the CHI
2013 conference in Paris with some more in-depth details about how
Illumiroom will not only expand the game screen, but completely alter
the appearance of your living room. Read More
Samsung was the first Android phone maker to take a stab at tablets. Released in 2010, the Galaxy Tab
was a 7-inch slate that cost more than the bigger and better iPad. But
Samsung kept chipping away, making tablets in all shapes and sizes, and
is now gaining on Apple’s shrinking lead. How does Samsung’s latest – the Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 – compare to the Google/Asus Nexus 7? Read More
Anyone who’s tried their hand at stop animation
will know it’s an incredibly time consuming and delicate job. But spare a
thought for scientists at IBM Almaden in California who have produced
the world’s smallest stop animation movie by using a scanning tunneling
microscope to move individual atoms. Rather than competing with Aardman
or Pixar for a slice of the international box office, the film is
intended to make the public aware of new technology that could increase
computer memories far beyond what is possible today. Read More
The intermittent nature of wind and solar power
generation is one of the biggest challenges facing these renewable
energy sources. But this isn’t likely to remain a problem for much
longer with everything from flywheels to liquid air
systems being developed to provide a cheaper form of energy storage
than batteries for times when the wind is blowing or the sun isn’t
shining. A new concept out of MIT can now be added to the the list of
potential solutions. Aimed specifically at offshore wind turbines, the
concept would see energy stored in huge concrete spheres that would sit
on the seafloor and also function as anchors for the turbines. Read More
The importance of local culture in shaping a
marketplace was never more conspicuous to this Western mind than at the Bangkok Motor Show
when Honda showed two concept bikes that are so far from the normality
of Western markets that they will challenge your thinking as they did
mine. The highlights of Honda Thailand's massive exhibition were a
Chopper-styled scooter and a Grand Prix Racer-styled mini-bike meant for
the road. Read More
It's predicted that by the year 2050 there will
be 9.3 billion people on Earth and 6.4 billion of them will be living in
cities. There could also be four times as many cars on the roads as
today, leading to an incredible degree of urban congestion and gridlock.
That’s the impetus behind Ford and technology partner Schaeffler’s
eWheelDrive electric research car, that moves the motor to the wheel
hubs. Read More
Back when DARPA first announced its Autonomous Robotic Manipulation
(ARM) program in 2010, the average cost of a military-grade robot hand
was around US$50,000. That's expensive even by the US military's
standards – especially for something that is bound to be in close
contact with explosives – which is why the hardware team of the ARM
program tasked participants with developing a reliable low-cost hand.
Now, thanks to work by iRobot (yes, the company that makes the Roomba
robotic vacuum) and researchers at Harvard and Yale, the ARM program
has a surprisingly effective new hand to play with that costs just
$3,000 (in batches of 1,000 or more). Read More
A lot of kids don’t like having to
put on their pajamas, as doing so means that it’s time to go to bed. If
those jammies had bedtime stories digitally hidden within them, though –
well, maybe then the kiddies couldn’t wait to get them on. That’s the
idea behind Smart PJs. Read More 
In the last week, over 3,000 people on
Kickstarter ignored the fact it's next to impossible to keep a
houseplant alive and backed the now fully-funded "Glowing Plants:
Natural Lighting with no Electricity" campaign. The funds will be used
to build upon existing technology and create a transgenic plant that has
a soft blue-green glow to act as an electricity-free nightlight. Backer
rewards, each glowing, include an arabidopsis plant, a rose plant, and
arabidopsis seeds. We check in as the Glowing Plants team heads towards
their first stretch goal and look at how this project is part of a
bigger trend in DIY biology. But be warned: this is not your grandma's
seed catalog. Read More
Festivals can be great fun, but
aren't always so friendly to the local environment. Gathering that many
people in one place tends to produce a large amount of waste, but it's
the human waste that can be the hardest to dispose of cleanly. That's
why French design group Faltazi
has produced L'Uritonnoir, a portable, composting urinal for large
festivals that helps to turn a bale of hay into usable fertilizer. Read More 
Epilepsy seizures can range from something as
subtle as a passing localized numbness to something as noticeable and
potentially dangerous as wild involuntary thrashing. While some people
experience symptoms before a seizure that indicate one is about to
occur, others have no warning at all. A new device that is designed to
be implanted between the skull and the brain surface has been found to
accurately predict epilepsy seizures in humans and can indicate the risk
of a seizure occurring in the coming hours. Read More
The Dutch-built Tonke Camper is a more stylish
version of mobile home than those found in the average trailer park. It
features a wooden home set atop a Mercedes Sprinter platform and can be
used like an RV or removed off its vehicular underpinnings and planted
on firm ground. Read More
It’s a sad fact of life that as we age, our
cognitive skills decline. In particular, the “executive function” of our
mind diminishes – this function is a key aspect of our memory,
attention, perception, and problem solving skills. There may be help,
however. Scientists from the University of Iowa are now claiming that by
playing a specific video game, test subjects aged 50 and over were able
to stop and even reverse the trend. Read More
Researchers from the University of Maryland have
built a new micro air vehicle dubbed Robo Raven that's such a convincing
flyer, it's been attacked by a local hawk during testing. Though
numerous other robotic birds have successfully taken to the skies in
recent years, including Festo's visually stunning SmartBird,
this featherless mechanical marvel is capable of impressive complex
aerobatic maneuvers thanks to completely programmable wings that can
flap independently of each other. Read More
With the nasty tendency of its airborne fibers to
cause lung cancer, the installation of asbestos building insulation has
been banned in many countries for some time now. A lot of buildings
still have the insulation, however, the fibers of which can get stirred
up when work such as renovations or demolition are being performed. In
order to help protect the people performing such work, scientists at the
University of Hertfordshire have developed what they say is the world’s
first portable, real-time detector of airborne asbestos. Read More
Toyota introduced the 2014 4Runner this week.
While other once-rugged mid-size SUVs have been watered down into
car-like crossovers – just look at the station wagon called the Nissan
Pathfinder or the thing Jeep wants us to believe is a new Cherokee
– the 4Runner stays true to its off-road roots, including body-on-frame
construction. In fact, the 4Runner's new styling shows that Toyota is
eager to let everyone know that the truck means business. Read More
Haikus to Mars may sound like the title of a
1950s sci-fi B movie, but that’s what NASA is asking for. The space
agency is inviting the public to submit haikus to be recorded on a DVD
that will be carried by the unmanned Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in November. Read More
Well, our cyberpunk-weapons-making
friend Patrick Priebe has been at it again. Having previously built
things like a gauss rifle, a rotary-blade-shooting crossbow and an Iron Man laser gauntlet, he recently let us know about his latest creation – the video game-based Plasma Cutter. Read More 
0 comments:
Post a Comment