Metal Storm is to begin working with TASER on less-than-lethal ammunition for the its aptly-named MAUL
rapid-fire 12-gauge launcher. The tiny 800 gram MAUL can be operated
independently from its own shoulder stock, fitted as an accessory to an
assault rifle (pictured), or used with a pistol grip. A five round
reload takes two seconds and each bullet incapacitates those it hits
with the same Neuro Muscular effect of a handheld TASER. Read More
The same Indian company that gave us the US$2500 Tata Nano,
the world's cheapest car, is now about to give us the world's cheapest
house - the 20 sq meter house will cost Rs 32,000 (EUR500 –GBP440 -
US$715 ), can be built in a week and is the first viable zero-cost
housing package for beneficiaries of the Indira Awaas Yojana shelter
rehabilitation scheme. The scheme provides for the underprivileged and
with Rs 40,000 per house provided, there's even room for some cheap land
in the deal. Read More
When the space shuttle Atlantis touched down at
5:57 a.m. EDT this morning at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center it marked the
end of an era. Over 30 years, NASA's Space Shuttle program has overseen a
total of 135 shuttle missions for the five-shuttle fleet, beginning
with the April 12, 1981 launch of Columbia carrying two astronauts into
space on an operational test flight. In their lifetimes, the world's
first reusable spacecraft have been used to launch and repair
satellites, carry out cutting-edge research and facilitate the
construction of the largest manmade structure in space, the
International Space Station (ISS). As the curtain comes down on the
space shuttle era we take a look back at the craft that have defined
space travel for a generation. Read More
Creek Stewart is a survival instructor whose main
interest lies in building compact-sized and clever survival kits. One
of his latest projects is to modify a pump-action shotgun and cram it
full of survival stuff, essentially creating a combination of a weapon
and survival tool ... perfect in case of a zombie apocalypse. Read More
Just in case the release of OSX Lion and the unveiling of the updated MacBook Air
isn't enough to satisfy your Apple cravings today, the company has also
taken the wraps off its first Thunderbolt equipped display and revealed
a beefed up Mac Mini line-up. Read More
This April, researchers from Montreal's McGill University announced the development of their prototype Biomedical Sensor Glove.
Stroke victims who have lost the use of their hand are intended the
wear the glove, then use it at home to play custom video games on an
attached computer. Not only do those games help them regain the use of
their hand, but the computer also sends data regarding their gaming
performance on to their physician, so they can track the patient's
progress remotely. Well, it seems that Spanish researchers have now
developed a similar system for the rehabilitation of paralyzed arms,
called ArmAssist. Read More
Along with a pair of Android 3.1-based tablets,
Lenovo has unveiled its plans to release the 10.1-inch Lenovo IdeaPad
Tablet P1, powered by the 1.5GHz Intel Atom CPU and running the Windows 7
OS. Despite the fact that this system is not as tablet-tailored as
Android Honeycomb, and Windows 8 has already been revealed as a touch-optimized OS, Lenovo apparently believes there still is a market for a Win 7-based tablet. The device is due out in the fourth quarter of 2011. Read More
Painter gives bicycle frames the woodgrain look
By Ben Coxworth
July 20, 2011
Whether it’s the Renovo/Audi duo lineup, the just-announced Lagamorph, or one of the various bamboo creations,
wooden-framed bikes (or in the case of bamboo, “wooden”-framed) are
becoming more and more popular. While this is partly because of the ride
characteristics and eco-friendliness of sustainably-harvested wood,
let’s be honest – it’s mostly because they look nice. Unfortunately,
they also tend to be pricey, with a single complete bike costing several
thousand dollars. Well, if it’s just the aesthetic of wood that you
want, now you have an alternative ... New Zealand’s Rob Pollock will
give your frame a hand-painted woodgrain finish, for just US$1,500. Read More
Lenovo has announced the launch of two
Android-based 10.1-inch tablets - Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet K1 and Lenovo
ThinkPad Tablet. The first is an entertainment and multimedia-oriented,
Netflix-certified device, while the ThinkPad Tablet is tailored for the
business market. Both devices are powered by dual-core 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra
2 processors and run Android 3.1 OS. Lenovo will introduce the tablets
to the US market in August. Read More
If you've tried to digitally capture a guitar
performance or turn your six-string into a powerful MIDI synth using an
interface or special pickup, you'll no doubt be familiar with signal lag
and pitch accuracy issues. As you pluck a string, there is a very short
delay before it reaches its final frequency - it might only be a few
milliseconds but it can be enough to cause latency angst. Germany's M3i
Technologies has developed an optical system for accurately detecting
the pitch of a string - even before a player has plucked it. The Laser
Pitch Detection (LPD) Pickup system runs a beam under each string, from
the bridge to the end of the fingerboard, and monitors its return to
photosensitive receptors in the unit. When a player's finger touches a
string, the beam is shortened and the system quickly measures and
calculates the exact pitch. Read More
The world has changed greatly for Apple in the
past few years. As of their earnings statement released Tuesday, three
quarters of all income comes from the iPhone and iPad and the number of
users of iOS is already at least four times that of Mac users. After the
under-the-hood tweaks and rationalizations of previous operating system
update Snow Leopard, the mission for Mac OS X Lion was clear - make the
Mac OS comfortable and familiar to the new Apple mobile user audience
without putting off established Mac veterans. Can they pull it off? Read More
According to the Associated Press, a recent study
has revealed that three quarters of America's nuclear reactors have
leaked radioactive tritium from buried pipes that transport water for
the cooling of reactor vessels. This tritium could in turn find its way
into the groundwater. While industry officials do reportedly check these
pipes for leaks, they can only do so in either indirect or costly,
labor-intensive manners. Now, however, researchers from MIT are
developing tiny, spherical swimming robots that could check on the pipes
directly, relaying their findings in real time. Read More
To look at the Russian RadioAstron spacecraft, which launched from Kazakhstan this Monday, it doesn’t seem
particularly record-breaking. Its 10-meter (33-foot) antenna is
certainly no match for those on earthbound radio telescopes, which can
be up to 300 meters (984 feet) across. Once in orbit, however, its
signal will join forces with those from ground-based telescopes to form
one giant virtual telescope. Using a process known as interferometry,
they will form the equivalent of a single radio telescope dish that at
over 350,000 kilometers (217,480 miles) across is almost 30 times wider
than the Earth. Although it’s not actually one physical object, it is
nonetheless being heralded as the largest telescope ever created. Read More
This year's Ferrari World Design Contest award
has gone to three students from Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea.
Students from 50 universities worldwide put pencil to paper to compete
for the award, with the Korean students being chosen over close
contenders from IED of Turin, Italy and London's Royal College of Arts.
Read More
According to UNICEF, there are currently over 110 million live land mines
buried in the soil of various countries around the world, left over
from conflicts that occurred up to 50 years ago. While various
organizations are working on locating and removing those mines, it’s
proving to be a long and laborious process. Instead of precisely
pinpointing and then disarming each device, however, one has to wonder
... wouldn’t it be easier to just go around thumping on the ground and
getting them to go off? Well, it just happens that DIGGER DTR’s hulking
D-3 robotic vehicle does exactly that. Read More
An ambitious solar energy project on a massive
scale is about to get underway in the Arizona desert. EnviroMission is
undergoing land acquisition and site-specific engineering to build its
first full-scale solar tower - and when we say full-scale, we mean it!
The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become
one of the world's tallest buildings. Its 200-megawatt power generation
capacity will reliably feed the grid with enough power for 150,000 US
homes, and once it's built, it can be expected to more or less sit there
producing clean, renewable power with virtually no maintenance until
it's more than 80 years old. In the video after the jump, EnviroMission
CEO Roger Davey explains the solar tower technology, the Arizona project
and why he couldn't get it built at home in Australia. Read More
A simple swine flu breath test is currently being
developed with the aim of preventing H1N1 vaccination shortages by
identifying those already infected with the strain. A recent study in
Glasgow, Scotland discovered that over 50 percent of the local residents
vaccinated during the 2009 swine flu pandemic had already been infected
with the virus. This ultimately means that they were vaccinated
unnecessarily and although this would not have caused any added harm, it
did expose health practitioners to the infectious virus whilst also
wasting already limited supplies of the vaccine. Read More
While I'm a big supporter of the push for the
electrification of the motorcycle, I'm not really a big fan of the sports bike or the street bike or off-road bikes - my tastes lean towards custom cruisers like the electric chopper
from Orange County Choppers. Come September, the electric cruiser camp
looks to be getting a new member in the utterly gorgeous shape of the
Dutch Orphiro Electric Motorcycle. Unfortunately details are scarce at
the moment, but read on for what we do know. Read More
Like all things digital, the technology in your
beautiful new camera is heading towards obsolescence at an alarming
rate. The same is true, though to a lesser extent, about that SLR lens
with its own processors and motors for focus, aperture and
stabilization. In the analog world of manual film lenses where a
lifetime of use is guaranteed there has been a renaissance in the
manufacture of high quality optics at all price points, driven in part
by the advent of digital SLRs and cheaper camcorder options that are
capable of delivering that "film look". But for serious moving picture
shooting, still camera lenses just won’t cut it. Let’s explore why. Read More
Have you ever wondered what happens to obsolete
electronics once they are discarded? How far do they travel and what are
the "second lives" of donated computers? MIT's backtalk project aims to answer those questions simply by tracing discarded devices with location trackers applied to a number of e-waste
items. The tracking data will be available to the public in the form of
real-time visualizations, exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New
York from July 24. Read More
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania-based medical device
technology developer Reflexonic has received FDA approval for its
Viberect device aimed at men with mild to moderate erectile dysfunction
(ED) symptoms, including those undergoing post-prostatectomy erectile
rehabilitation and those with spinal cord injuries causing ejaculatory
dysfunction. Instead of relying on a little blue pill to get things
ready for the bedroom, the device, which looks a bit like a hair
crimper, delivers targeted nerve stimulation to both dorsal and ventral
surfaces of the penis using medical Softpads. Read More
Owning one's own yacht must surely be one of
man's greatest indulgences. The ability to take your own tailored
environment anywhere you want. Yacht Island Design creates tailored
environment like no other. Following on from its "Streets of Monaco"
design is the "Tropical Island Paradise", a 90 metre island with a top
speed of 15 knots. The main deck is a beach “cove” of cabanas
surrounding a massive ocean view swimming pool, with a waterfall falling
nearby from the volcano. A bar area, outdoor dining, there's a private
spa and four VIP suites for friends, all with their own private balcony.
Great image gallery. Read More
One of the things that our brains excel at is the
ability to recognize what things are, even when presented with an
incomplete set of data. If we know only that an animal is sold in pet
stores and stuffs food in its cheeks, for instance, we can be pretty
certain that the animal in question is a hamster. Now, for the first
time ever, researchers at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) have created a DNA-based artificial neural network that can do
the same thing ... albeit on a very basic level. They believe that it
could have huge implications for the development of true artificial
intelligence. Read More
If you’re fortunate enough to have an employer
that lets you bring your bicycle inside, or if you keep your two-wheeled
steed in an apartment, then you probably know just how in-the-way its
handlebars can be in close quarters. Not only can they poke passers-by,
but they also have a tendency to whack into door frames, and
they prevent your bike from resting stably against walls. Loosening your
handlebar stem and turning the bars parallel with the front wheel,
while addressing the problem, is likely more work than most people are
interested in doing on a daily basis. With the new flipphandle stem,
however, riders can turn their bars sideways with just a press of a
button. Read More
It's been more than 20 years since Jordan Mechner
used videos of his brother running and jumping as a reference to design
in-game movements for the Prince of Persia video game. Things
have come a long way since 1989, with sophisticated motion-capture
technologies being developed. One of the latest innovations in digital
modeling technology is a miniature 3D motion-capture figure dubbed QUMA,
which is connectible to a PC via a simple USB plug. Read More
Joining the list of foldable
products, Foldaboat is a flat-pack recreational boat suitable for flat
water environments like canals and lakes. Designed by Arno Mathies &
Max Frommeld, the 2.5-meter (8.2-foot) boat is made from a solitary
piece of plastic, and after a few simple folds it packs nicely into a
150 x 60 cm (59 x 24 inch) parcel. Read More
The Parrot AR.Drone
quadricopter was one of the first smartphone-controlled RC toys ... and
it won't be the last. This example called BlueDrone (which isn't from
Parrot) is an RC car in the form of Nissan GT-R 1:20 scale model,
controlled by an Android-based device via Bluetooth connectivity. Read More
Although the technology is not exactly new,
I still find the look of a spokeless/hubless bike wheel somewhat
spell-binding. When combined with a frame design that wouldn't look out
of place on the pages of a Marvel comic strip, the effect seems
positively extra-terrestrial. Such is the case with the INgSOC concept
from Edward Kim and Benny Cemoli, a very strange-looking human/electric
two-wheeler design sporting sharp lines and some dangerous-looking
edges. Read More
Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute
have created a vaccine that stops the high one gets from from heroin.
Designed as a therapeutic option for those trying to break their
addiction, the vaccine produces antibodies that stop heroin as well as
other psychoactive compounds metabolized from heroin from reaching the
brain to produce euphoric effects. Read More
Cyclists have been enjoying the benefits of gears
for over a hundred years now but the wheelchair-bound have been stuck
with the single 1:1 speed ratio on manual wheelchairs come flat ground
or hilly since their invention centuries ago. Now Scott Daigle, a
graduate engineering student at the University of Illinois, is
addressing this oversight with IntelliWheels AGS (Automatic Gear-Shift),
an automated system that detects how the wheelchair is being pushed and
changes gears accordingly. Read More
Sometimes it would be really handy to have a
folding bicycle, that you could easily take with you on public
transportation, then open up and ride to your final destination once you
reached your stop. The question is, would you use it often enough to
justify the purchase price? If not, then you’re just the type of person
the Brompton Dock project was designed for. Users get a Brompton folding
bike from a dispenser, use it for as long as they want, then return it
and get billed for the time it was used. Read More
Although they’ve been around for ages, for some
reason paper airplanes have never been adopted for commercial use. It
could be because they get soggy when wet, they lack any kind of flight
controls, or because you would need an incredibly huge piece of paper in
order to make one big enough to carry a human passenger. In any case,
practical paper airplanes have now perhaps come a baby step closer to
reality, with Tailor Toys’ Power Up electric power module for paper
airplanes – it allows you to mount an electric propeller on your paper
airplanes, so they can fly under their own power. Read More
The Quail Lodge sale held during Pebble Beach Car
Week in August each year, always attracts extraordinary automobiles,
and this year, the most talked about lot at the auction is one of the
most delightfully eccentric for many a year. It is a handmade 1925
Rolls-Royce New Phantom, commissioned by the Maharaja of Kotah to be
specifically built for tiger hunting. The eight liter Roller has
spotlights for night hunting, a mounted Howdah gun (double-barrel
shotgun in pistol form), a rifle stand in the rear passenger
compartment, a mountable Lantaka cannon, and a machine gun mounted on an
attached, matching trailer. Just the thing for peak hour! Read More
Some living organisms feature an unusual muscle
structure, which allows them to control the stiffness of their body, or
various parts of it. Examples include elephants' trunks, our tongues,
and octopus tentacles. Researchers working on the Octopus Project have
so far successfully designed a robotic tentacle, with the ultimate aim
of creating a full-bodied robotic octopus. Read More
Panasonic has added another superzoom to its
FZ-series camera range. The LUMIX DMC-FZ47 features a 25 - 600 mm
equivalent zoom lens with a special coating that's claimed to reduce
ghost and flare, and a brand new sensor capable of recording 1080/60i
high definition video. It also features a host of creative photography
options, including those seen in the company's DMC-G3 camera announced in May. Read More
For visual learners, video guitar lessons
from musicians or teachers might seem the perfect tool to quickly nail a
killer lick but in truth they can be somewhat limited in the tuition on
offer. The mobile convenience of teaching apps
have added another useful layer to the overall learning experience but
nothing quite matches the expert guidance and hands-on approach of a
professional tutor. If you're looking for a similarly interactive
learning experience that's available whenever the mood grabs you and
allows you to zoom into the action, slow down the pace without affecting
pitch and view exactly what's going on from any angle - the iPerform3D
online tuition service warrants a closer look. Read More
The U.S. EPA estimated that servers and data
centers were responsible for up to 1.5 percent of the total U.S.
electricity consumption, or roughly 0.5 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas
emissions, in 2007. With companies such as Apple and Google strongly
pushing the move to cloud computing, that figure is likely to increase
significantly in the coming decade. Since a lot of energy is consumed
keeping the computer systems cool, colder climates are seen as more
favorable sites for data centers. But a new paper from Microsoft
Research proposes a different approach that would see servers, dubbed Data Furnaces, distributed to office buildings and homes where they would act as a primary heat source. Read More
While most people prefer using physical keyboards
and only tolerate virtual keyboards on their mobile devices for the
sake of portability, onscreen keyboards do potentially offer a
flexibility that can’t be matched by physical keyboards. It’s this
flexibility that IBM is looking to take advantage of with the company
recently filing a U.S. patent application for a morphing touchscreen
keyboard interface that would automatically resize, reshape and
reposition keys based on a user’s typing style. Read More
Rocking out with an imaginary guitar has gone
from appreciative concert mimicry to a very serious business. Next
month, finalists from around the world will head to Finland in the hope
of being crowned Air Guitar World Champion.
For those who aspire to get to the winner's podium in later years or
just want to rock out to classic tunes wherever they happen to be, the
newly released Air Pick could prove just the ticket. Rhythmically
strumming the chunky guitar pick produces one of three included tunes
from the built-in speaker. Read More
It's not often that a car has its first public
showing nearly fifty years after it was built, but that's what happened
at the recent Cholmondely Pageant of power when the newly-restored, one
and only factory-built Low Drag Lightweight Jaguar E-Type was seen. The
original crashed at very high speed testing at Montlhéry and was so
badly damaged that it sat for 47 years before a complete restoration
involving 7,000 hours of work and 90 per cent original parts yielded its
magnificent original state. Great gallery showing the many moods of
this priceless specimen of Jaguar DNA. Read More
Researchers have created an artificial lung that
uses air as a ventilating gas instead of pure oxygen – as is the case
with current man-made lungs, which require heavy tanks of oxygen that
limit their portability. The prototype device was built following the
natural lung’s design and tiny dimensions and the researchers say it has
reached efficiencies akin to the genuine organ. With a volume roughly
the same as a human lung, the device could be implanted into a person
and even be driven by the heart. Read More
The compact S.U.V. class looks set for some
serious competition over the coming 12 months when a completely
redesigned Honda CR-V will continue to sell against Toyota's RAV4 and
Volkswagen's Tiguan. Plus Mazda's CX-5, which is expected to be very
similar to Minagi and packed with the first comprehensive SkyActiv
efficiency technologies, will join the ranks. Honda is the runaway
leader in the segment and this update is a clear signal of its intention
to stay there. The "Walter Mitty" lives we all lead is exemplified by
the compact S.U.V. segment, where more than 95 percent of the vehicles
sold never venture offroad. Read More
Disney went into robotic toys market with a remote-controlled WALL-E robot
back in 2008. Canadian-based robotics enthusiast DJ Sures was
apparently not satisfied with the level of realism of the toy so he came
with his own, customized version of WALL-E. Utilizing The U-Command
Wall-E plastic toy, he modified it with EZ-B Robot controller hardware,
voice recognition and a movement-tracking camera - but no trash
compactor. Read More
The researchers who unveiled graphene
in 2004 and who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010 for
“groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material" have
led new research that reveals more about the electronic properties of
the wonder material. The team says their findings promise to accelerate
research looking at ways to build graphene-based devices such as
touch-screens, ultrafast transistors and photodetectors, and will potentially open up countless more electronic opportunities. Read More
Sony has announced a pair of compact cameras, the
Cyber-shot TX55 and WX30, both featuring a 16.2 megapixel Exmor R CMOS
image sensor and full HD 1080i AVCHD movie recording capabilities. The
TX55 is billed as world's thinnest full HD camera, at 12.2mm (0.48 in)
thick. The new arrivals are due out in September. Read More
As a child sitting in the back of the family car,
did you ever use your finger to doodle in the condensation on the
inside of the windows? Well, a group of engineers and designers from
Toyota Motor Europe’s Kansei1 Design Division and the consultancy arm of
the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) have taken
car-window-doodling into the 21st Century. They’ve created a prototype
system that could turn the side windows of Toyotas into touchscreen
augmented reality devices, allowing passengers to interface with the
passing scenery. Read More
The FIA (Fédération International de
l'Automobile) published its revised technical regulations for 2014
Formula One season last week. Having caused uproar amongst the engine
manufacturers and F1 fans with a proposal for replacing the naturally
aspirated V8s of today with turbo-charged 4-cylinder engines, an
agreement was finally reached amongst the various interested parties to
introduce turbo-charged V6s of 1.6 liter displacement. The continuing
effort by the the FIA to "green" the sport and push development still
provided a number of surprises in the published regulations, however.
Read More
Since the advent of compact digital cameras, tiny
tripods (or minipods, or whatever you want to call them) have become a
pretty common sight. They’re often even included as part of a digital
camera package, along with the ubiquitous lens-cleaning cloth. Given
that they appear to be a popular tool, Gerber has done the obvious, and
built one into its new Steady multitool. Read More
Fujitsu has launched what is claimed to be the
world's smallest Windows PC / smartphone. Available only in Japan at the
time of writing, the new F-07C phone has two modes of operation - one
which gives users all we've come to expect from a modern smartphone, and
another that launches a full version of Windows 7 to offer personal
computing in the palm of your hand. It's powered by an Intel Atom
processor, has system memory and solid state storage, and benefits from a
slide-out tactile keyboard. Read More
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