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Samsung Motors recently unveiled its concept car called the eMX (eco-Motoring Experience) at the Seoul Motor Show. The specific body shape and interior lines of the car were designed to be evocative of the organic lines occurring in nature. According...
POSTED Monday, April 6, 2009
Could we be getting close to nuclear fusion power? We'll find out in a couple of months, when scientists at the U.S. National Ignition Facility fire up their 192 lasers for a nanosecond or two, blasting 1.8 megajoules of ultraviolet...
POSTED Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Take a look at Creativi*tea, a design concept for a clever tea kettle that changes color as the water heats within, thanks to thermochromic paint. The two-quart kettle has a ceramic base to retain heat, a stainless steel body to...
POSTED Monday, March 30, 2009
As homeless populations in most major cities around the world increase, now is the time to begin creating sustainable housing solutions that defy convention. Dutch design group N55, in conjunction with the Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire, created just such a...
POSTED Friday, March 27, 2009
First there was smell-o-vision. Now we have the Emo Jacket with feel-o-vision. The folks at Philips Electronics are bringing out a jacket that lets you really feel what's going on in a movie. Using similar coding technology to D-box Motion...
POSTED Thursday, March 26, 2009
That Kindle 2 — we love it, especially for reading books without pictures. But for magazines, blogs and newspapers, color is essential, and that's where this Fujitsu FLEPia e-book reader represents a breakthrough, towering over all the rest. Shipping...
POSTED Wednesday, March 18, 2009
We've been following the progress of the Terrafugia Transition flying car for three years, and finally, the push-prop roadable airplane has successfully flown its first flight. It took off from an airport in Plattsburgh, New York on March 5, and...
POSTED Wednesday, March 18, 2009
A relic from the '80s, Reagan's "Star Wars" program, or Strategic Defense Initiative, involved lasers designed to shoot down satellites. Decades later, I'm happy to report that we're looking into how to turn those lasers on mosquitoes. Yep, you read...
POSTED Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The Segway still hasn't changed the way humans move, although they're rather cool to watch. Is it the wheels that keep skeptics away? If so, students from the University of Louisiana might have designed a winner. The Cajun Crawler uses...
POSTED Monday, March 16, 2009
In our three part series on the future of robotics, we've been trying to figure out just what it would take to build C-3PO for real. First we asked James Kuffner, a Carnegie Mellon professor who is working to build...
POSTED Friday, March 13, 2009
Whoever said playing in the dirt was bad apparently never met Dutch designer Marieke Staps. Staps has built a lamp that will run indefinitely on the power of mud. The soil lamp uses the chemical reaction between copper, zinc, and...
POSTED Friday, March 13, 2009
Researchers Biswajit Ghosh and Marek Urban at the University of Southern Mississippi are working on a self-healing polymer that would allow a phone or an MP3 player — or any gadget, really — to patch itself up with the help...
POSTED Friday, March 13, 2009
Behold, the hard drive of the future. Most of today's hard drives are metal boxes with rapidly spinning disks nestled inside, but this Fusio-io ioDrive Duo is all solid-state, has no moving parts, and reads and writes data ten times...
POSTED Thursday, March 12, 2009
Lithium ion batteries are in all kinds of consumer gadgetry, from digital cameras to video game controllers. They're also in cars, but the time it takes to charge an electric automobile — several hours at least — hasn't really swayed...
POSTED Thursday, March 12, 2009
In the first part of our expert roundtable, we asked AI whiz and CMU assistant professor James Kuffner what it would take to breathe life into C-3PO. Now we turn to Matt Denton, who runs an animatronic company in the...
POSTED Wednesday, March 11, 2009
A new way to fight fat might be on the way. The European Union just approved a clever way to trick your body into feeling full and less hungry, using a technique called VBLOC. The system works with laparoscopically-implanted electrodes...
POSTED Wednesday, March 11, 2009
NASA is looking into a promising high-pressure fluid that emerged as a result of studies on how the agency's underwater robots could power themselves far below the surface. Known as a phase-change substance, a system developed by NASA uses water...
POSTED Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Inspired by disabled children in Jerusalem, designer Shabatai Hirshberg concocted an ultra-cool tricycle for special needs children that never-the-less inspires a bit of geek envy. The A2B Trike is designed to allow a child to walk right into a mounted...
POSTED Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Science fiction has been teasing us with robots for decades. From Isaac Asimov's tome-like novels filled with law-bound robots to the helpful or menacing 'bots on the big screen, many of us grew up with the idea that a robot-filled...
POSTED Tuesday, March 10, 2009
While prosthetic limbs are common, real cyborgs remain in the realm of science fiction. That's because the trickiest part — creating a reliable brain-machine interface (BMI) — is a tough job, since we don't fully understand how the brain works....
POSTED Tuesday, March 10, 2009
When the world runs out of gas, we'll all be riding carbon fiber bicycles, weighing 15.4 pounds and hooking our bodies up to telemetry systems that rival the space program. With The Factor001, we don't have to wait for such...
POSTED Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Thought up by Italian architecture firm Studiomobile, vertical seawater farms sticking up out of the water could covert the salt-laden liquid into freshwater for crops. It's all about producing humidity. A series of vents would gather humidity from the seawater...
POSTED Friday, March 6, 2009
It may not look like much, but what you see up above is what a team of Malaysian students hope would be a solution for robotic trash collection. We're not talking about an automated garbage truck, but rather a rover...
POSTED Friday, March 6, 2009
Filmmaker Rob Spence lost an eye as a child, and now he's created the next best thing: a camera that fits onto his prosthetic eye. At a media conference in Brussels, he showed the first version of "Project Eyeborg," consisting...
POSTED Friday, March 6, 2009
You might think you're looking at the PC of the future, but this prototype by BMW, DesignworksUSA, and computer case and fanmaker Thermaltake exists now. "Level 10" is on display at CeBIT, the world's largest computer expo going on...
POSTED Friday, March 6, 2009
For a comic without all that much fighting in it, Watchmen sure has some awesome gadgets kicking around. We already know of a few things we can expect to see on the big screen from the trailers — the Owlship,...
POSTED Friday, March 6, 2009
A 73-year-old British gentleman named Ron may once again be able to discern light thanks to a bionic eye called the Argus II. For 30 years he's been completely blind, but the Argus — which consists of a camera and...
POSTED Friday, March 6, 2009
A group of UK scientists from the Universities of York and Warwick are attempting to bring us one step closer to a true Star Trek holodeck experience with the invention of the Virtual Cocoon. The helmet features a high-definition screen,...
POSTED Friday, March 6, 2009
At the worst possible time, Bugatti is waving around a car that costs so much, they're not even saying how many millions it would set you back. We offer the Mansory Veyron LINEA Vincerò here for your amusement, showing you...
POSTED Thursday, March 5, 2009
Take the shape-shifting sands of Spider-man's nemesis Sandman, mix him with the computer-controlled solids on Star Trek's Holodeck, and add the moldability of a lump of Play-Doh and you get Programmable Matter, the possibilities of which are beyond even...
POSTED Thursday, March 5, 2009
How would you like to dump your expensive cable TV service and get the same thing for free? That's the allure of ZillionTV, a new service that offers ad-supported HDTV shows as well as pay-video on demand, courtesy of the...
POSTED Wednesday, March 4, 2009
While I was skiing in Colorado this weekend, I had my first mid-hill collision, up-ending a kid while I was tearing down Jacque's Pique. Everyone was fine, but it might have been much worse if I had been on a...
POSTED Tuesday, March 3, 2009
DVICE writers take a closer look at the latest tech trends in our weekly column, Shift. If you live with lots of people, odds are you have an outlet strip in a common area chock-a-block with varying cellphone chargers. Maybe...
POSTED Thursday, February 26, 2009
Astronaut Donald Pettit loves his morning coffee, but it just wasn't the same drinking it out of an aluminum bag as he soared above the earth on Space Shuttle mission STS-126. That's when he invented the On-Orbit Coffee Cup,...
POSTED Thursday, February 26, 2009
Toshiba is working on an ultra-thin OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) display that could be used to wallpaper your home, turning any wall into a huge TV. From Toshiba:"The wallpaper uses light that has been redirected by an ultra-fine grating that...
POSTED Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Fuel cells are alive and well at Sony, evidenced by the kooky prototypes the shrinking Japanese giant rolled out today at the Fuel Cell Expo 2009 in Tokyo. What you see here are a couple of fuel cell-powered speakers and...
POSTED Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Bet you didn't know that bras need their own dryers, did you? This BraDryer is pitched as a device that can "dry bras fast, maintain their shape and protect wiring and padding, and not take your own time (as when...
POSTED Friday, February 20, 2009
We've uncovered more ecologically friendly goodies from KDDI's Design Project. The latest is a concept device is aptly named the GEM and looks as though it was carved out of a single slab of obsidian with an oddly organic form...
POSTED Thursday, February 19, 2009
When most people talk about bookshelf speakers, they're referring to speakers that fit on bookshelves. Polish designers Witek Stefaniak and Anielka Zdanowicz took it more literally. Their Soundshelf concept is speakers that can also be used to store books, CDs...
POSTED Monday, February 16, 2009
You know, a lot of concept designs pretend like they're based in some kind of reality, using plausible-sounding technology to make them seem practical when in fact they're based purely in fantasy. That's why I like the JetBike concept: it...
POSTED Friday, February 13, 2009
We used to joke about Smell-o-Vision, but now Portuguese designer Nuno Teixeira shows us how it might work in this design concept. His idea is called SMELLIT, and it brings contextual fragrances to viewers' noses via 118 aroma cartridges, each...
POSTED Thursday, February 12, 2009
The Kindle 2 has been revealed, and though it has some impressive new features, it's far from perfect. Don't get us wrong — it's a great device for today — but the black-and-white screen and clunky keyboard has us...
POSTED Tuesday, February 10, 2009
"It's science fiction made real," a doctor from Tel Aviv University told Reuters, as he demonstrated how a new laser the university has developed is better than stitching up a patient. The laser allows a wound to be welded shut...
POSTED Tuesday, February 10, 2009
If thousands of wind turbines are to be installed offshore, might as well get the most out of them. That's what Green Ocean Energy was thinking when it created Wave Treader, a wave power generator that attaches to a turbine's...
POSTED Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Come along with us, dear readers, and wallow in luxury on an airplane built for a zillionaire. Lufthansa Technik, the luxo-sport decorating and customization arm of the fabled German airline, gives us a peek, with a gorgeous group of unreal...
POSTED Monday, February 9, 2009
If the iPhone made you think that maybe you really did only need one gadget in your life, Google's Android may one day have you wanting hundreds. Mark Hamblin, CEO of Touch Revolution and one of the driving minds behind...
POSTED Friday, February 6, 2009
Did your dad build you a treehouse when you were a kid? Obviously, he didn't love you enough. If he did, he would have built you one that looked like this new tree hotel designed by Sweden's Tham & Videgard...
POSTED Thursday, February 5, 2009
At the TED2009 conference yesterday, Pattie Maes from the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab showed off a new way of getting info anywhere. Calling it a "Sixth Sense," she wore and demonstrated a $350 system consisting of...
POSTED Thursday, February 5, 2009
Japan is well known for its iconic Shinkansen, or bullet trains, and while the trains themselves aren't the fastest in the world anymore, they still win plenty of style points. Take, for instance, JR East's new E5 series, pictured above,...
POSTED Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Attention guitar heroes: your path to becoming a real guitar player may be on the way. Strap this Maestro contraption onto any guitar, load a music file of the song you'd like to learn into it, and using laser lights,...
POSTED Wednesday, February 4, 2009
2008 was a good year for gadgets, and we're hoping that '09 will be just as impressive. We're only a month in so far, but Palm, Dell, Sony and even Amazon have all dropped hints about what the companies have...
POSTED Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Take some Venetian blinds, put solar panels on them, store their energy with modern batteries, and later apply that power to electroluminescent foil, and you get yourself some ... Blight? Okay, Belgian designer Vincent Gerkens may not have known what...
POSTED Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Everything old is new again. The classic Matryoshka dolls that decorated thousands of Russian mantles are now iPod-ready. (Isn't everything?) Russian designer Alex Mamontoff set out to "bring this instantly familiar and archaic form closer to the younger audience." The...
POSTED Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Biofuel maker Verenium will break ground on its first industrial-grade cellulosic ethanol plant later this year in Florida. Most ethanol is made from high-sugar plants, like corn, but cellulosic ethanol is made from plant cellulose, the kind of vegetation we...
POSTED Tuesday, February 3, 2009
United Arab Emirates, land awash in petroleum, why are you so ahead of us with your gasoline-free Masdar City (a city-within-a-city in Abu Dhabi)? Well, the Emirates are awash in another key ingredient — petrodollars. But look at what they've...
POSTED Monday, February 2, 2009
If you thought the airport denizens of the TSA were already obnoxious, wait until they get their mitts on a Sick Traveler Detector. It's a software idea by Belgian company Biorics, which can determine if travelers are sick by the...
POSTED Friday, January 30, 2009
Taking the BioSphere a few steps off the deep end, the Waterpod is a self-contained floating habitat, getting ready to set sail in the waters around New York City. Wait a second… New York? Couldn't they think of more appealing...
POSTED Friday, January 30, 2009
With Super Bowl XLIII coming up, we're already thinking about what's in store for the next one, and the one after that. Besides replacing all the human players with robots, which might be the norm a quarter-century from now...
POSTED Thursday, January 29, 2009
Put on your tinfoil hats, everybody, because Intel has discovered there's enough energy in radio waves to fry an egg. Well, maybe those radio frequency (RF) waves aren't that powerful, but as you can see in the picture above,...
POSTED Thursday, January 29, 2009
Why mess around with flying microbots when you can get perfectly good bugs to do the work? That's what researchers are doing with these cyborg beetles, strapping on six electrodes that might someday turn the lowly insects into eavesdropping,...
POSTED Thursday, January 29, 2009
Meet Lancey, the first commercially cloned dog, delivered to Edgar and Nina Otto on Monday. The Ottos bid and won an auction to receive a genetic duplicate of their beloved Labrador named Sir Lancelot, who died in January of...
POSTED Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Fed up with politics? Start your own country at sea, living in your own utopia with its own laws, customs and peculiarities. Sure, it's been tried before with varying degrees of success, but now the nonprofit Seasteading Institute says...
POSTED Tuesday, January 27, 2009
As you gaze at this spy shot of the alleged Amazon Kindle 2 e-reader, read the tea leaves along with us: Amazon just announced a press conference at New York's Morgan Library & Museum, scheduled for Monday, February 9th....
POSTED Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Thanks to a new device called the Media Vehicle we now know what the future control-pods allowing us to manipulate our giant, super strong, battle robots will look like. Although the prototype unit can currently only accommodate an operator weighing...
POSTED Tuesday, January 27, 2009
"What is architect Zaha Hadid smoking?," asks the oldest Antwerp Port Authority board member. "We don't know," say the rest of the Belgian board members, "but give whatever it is to all the other architects." Apologies to Abe Lincoln...
POSTED Monday, January 26, 2009
Here's a dream come true for those of us lazybones who find ourselves unexpectedly snowbound more often than we care to admit. Dubbed "the world's smartest snow shovel," i-Shovel is so intelligently automatic, it's able to sense when there's...
POSTED Monday, January 26, 2009
Super Bowl 43 is coming up a week from Sunday (2/1/09), so it's about time to get your free 3D glasses so you can watch ... a couple of commercials? Whether you like 3D or not, Dreamworks is hyping...
POSTED Friday, January 23, 2009
Shelby Super Cars (SSC) might be bursting the bubble of the electric car derby in the second quarter of this year with its Ultimate Aero EV. Shelby says it'll be the world's fastest electric car, but didn't brag about...
POSTED Thursday, January 22, 2009
Engineers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have built the world's smallest working fuel cell, at 9 cubic millimeters — 3mm, or 1/8th of an inch, per side — and it could mean fewer batteries for you to buy and...
POSTED Thursday, January 22, 2009
In what could be an early sign of American pride in electric battery making for the auto industry, General Motors is going forward with plans to put together its own electric batteries in-house for its automobiles. Hybrid and electric vehicles...
POSTED Monday, January 19, 2009
This new concept city — to be called Gwanggyo, about 20 miles south of Seoul, South Korea — will feature slender, tapered buildings containing housing, offices, and retail space for its 77,000 potential residents. It looks a little sci-fi,...
POSTED Friday, January 16, 2009
Any fan of more than one science-fiction franchise has thought, "What if the two collide?" Superman versus Peter Petrelli, the Cybermen versus the Borg, Mortal Kombat vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For us, we like to ponder which tech...
POSTED Wednesday, January 14, 2009
To combat the continued thinning out of elderly Japanese countryside farmers the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology has unveiled a new robotic power suit. Although it appears a bit ungainly, the suit weighs in at a mere 55 pounds...
POSTED Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Most of the concepts for lunar bases we tend to see are dome-shaped, built locally here on Earth and then transported. The "Masons of Regolith," a team of seven Virginia Tech students named for the rock that is present on...
POSTED Tuesday, January 13, 2009
OEM innovator Bosch is looking to bring 3D to your dashboard for GPS applications, replace your mechanical gauges with a customizable LCD and allow for driver and passenger to simultaneously share a screen for disparate uses. The 3-D effect...
POSTED Sunday, January 11, 2009
A company called Green Peak has developed new low cost/low power radio technology for remote controls. Instead of that annoying point-it-a-device IR remote that needs new batteries every year, Green Peak's remotes could last the life of the device...
POSTED Sunday, January 11, 2009
The Mobile DTV standard - officially ATSC-M/H (mobile/handheld) - will be finalized later this year. You'll be able to buy the first portable digital TV products around Thanksgiving/Christmas this year, but LG already has working prototypes of Mobile TV...
POSTED Saturday, January 10, 2009
The lowly vending machine is due for an update, and here's Samsung's take. Judging from the huge line of people waiting for their free Cokes, these vending machines with their touchscreens, network connections, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and slick graphics are...
POSTED Saturday, January 10, 2009
Sony flaunts its exceptional technology prowess with its organic LED (OLED) TVs in an impressive tech demo. The biggest is 27 inches, the smaller is 21 inches. Both are less than 10 millimeters (or 0.4 inch) thick, with the...
POSTED Saturday, January 10, 2009
Everyone wants a thin TV, but is it possible to have one that's too thin? Not according to JVC, whose Ultra Slim LCD Monitor is the thinnest TV the company has ever made, at 0.27 inches, or about 7...
POSTED Thursday, January 8, 2009
For you plasma nuts out there, here's something to drool over. Panasonic teased the press today with a last-minute reveal of a plasma television that's only a third of an inch thick, and it uses 50% less energy than...
POSTED Wednesday, January 7, 2009
What's white and orange, can get you anywhere in the city in a jiffy and folds up like a Swiss Army Knife? It's the new Capella backpack electric bicycle developed by Vietnamese industrial design student Truong Minh Nhat. The vehicle...
POSTED Monday, January 5, 2009
Toyota is reportedly still working on that Prius with solar panels (pictured above) to partially power its air conditioning, but now a secret has leaked that trumps that by a mile. Get this: The company's goal is to create...
POSTED Friday, January 2, 2009
As most cell phone manufacturers have found out, it's pretty hard to top Apple's iPhone. But with a simple change in form factor that is decidedly old school sci-fi, Korea's LG may have a winner in the LG-GD910 touchscreen wrist...
POSTED Thursday, January 1, 2009
It's 2009, a new year dawning with promise and possibilities, or with foreboding and ominous signs of economic collapse, depending on your point of view. But we here at DVICE are optimistic about the techno-future. What technology would each...
POSTED Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Look out, everybody — here come the trigger-happy cops with even more non-lethal weapons. Pictured above is the PHaSR, the bad-ass "Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response" rifle that's just about ready for deployment. It puts the hurt on you...
POSTED Friday, December 26, 2008
We've heard of smart cars, but this is getting into a whole new dimension. Mercedes studied the brain waves of sleepy drivers, and matched those up with lackadaisical steering tendencies, resulting in a car that can sense if you're...
POSTED Friday, December 26, 2008
Encasing the wiring and circuitry of a gadget in a transparent shell is pretty popular, but a lot of the concepts we see — such as Nokia's morphing cell phone, pictured above — take it all one step further...
POSTED Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Students at the Royal College of Art in London were tasked with dreaming up what shape light, economical cars could take in this day and age. What did they come up with? Vehicles that are quirky and awesome —...
POSTED Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The same magnetic technology that allows a computer hard drive to read and write data could be used to spot cancer in its earliest stages — something that, for many forms of cancer, means the success in treating it is...
POSTED Monday, December 22, 2008
Dubai's new Palazzo Versace luxury hotel is going to be the first in the world to artificially cool the sand on its beach. A system of coolant-filled pipes buried under the sand will absorb heat. Working with giant fans...
POSTED Friday, December 19, 2008
In our latest installment of Jobs Robots Are Secretly Stealing From Humans we present you with the KAR (Kitchen Assistant Robot) dishwashing robot from Japan. Developed by teams at Panasonic and The University of Tokyo, the one armed robot can...
POSTED Thursday, December 18, 2008
The Consumer Electronics Show is just a month away, but the pre-show buzz is in full swing. Our parent company NBC Universal will be at CES 2009 with a huge interactive TV exhibit from the show floor that befits...
POSTED Tuesday, December 16, 2008
When it comes to new ways of generating energy, it doesn't get any greener than the contraption recently installed in Tokyo's Shibuya train station. Developed by Japan's Sound Power, the FB-0001 platform generates electric power when the hundreds of thousands...
POSTED Monday, December 15, 2008
Those iconic double-decker Routemaster busses are disappearing from London streets, now running on only a few "heritage routes" in the city. Industrial Designer Hugh Frost wants to bring back a similar bus with this radical idea he calls Freight*BUS,...
POSTED Friday, December 12, 2008
Science fiction movies have long been obsessed with the as yet unattained ability to project the thoughts of humans (dreams, intentions, etc.) onto a video screen. Now a group of Japanese researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Lab in Kyoto...
POSTED Friday, December 12, 2008
Before you think you're looking at some obscure and geeky computer part, realize this: You're looking into the future. This Fusion-io ioDrive prototype is a solid-state hard drive that plugs into the PCI bus, that place inside your computer...
POSTED Thursday, December 11, 2008
Anyone who had any doubt that the future of humanoid robots would inevitably veer towards the seedy side need only look to the example of Le Trung and his fembot Aiko. The Vietnamese-Canadian tinkerer put Aiko together and controls her...
POSTED Thursday, December 11, 2008
The era of handheld flexible displays just got a little closer when HP rolled out this prototype it developed with the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University. Said to be unbreakable, the plastic scrolling screens use HP's self-aligned...
POSTED Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Even those of us who don't have pools can appreciate the Ecolight, the pool light that's a microcosm of a hydroelectric plant. This design concept is super-easy to use — mount it on the water jet from the filter...
POSTED Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Clock radios don't get any greener than this. Minute Glass is a clock radio powered by magnetic induction so there's no need for batteries or electricity at all. It wakes you up in the morning with music, and its...
POSTED Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Is this a real electric vehicle or a clown car? It's as real as a prototype can get, put together by Fiat and a few other designers, all of whom must have a substantial sense of humor. The Fiat...
POSTED Monday, December 8, 2008
Someday soon, your entire broadband experience could be wireless — and blazing fast at the same time. You've heard of 3G? Now get ready for "Next G." Network-building heavyweight Ericsson took a big step toward that super-fast wireless goal today,...
POSTED Friday, December 5, 2008
That experimental broadcast of an NFL football game in 3D we told you about last month took place last night in specially-equipped theaters in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York. After a couple of lost satellite feeds and some...
POSTED Friday, December 5, 2008
Is there a 50-inch OLED HDTV on the way? We sure would like to see a home theater-sized OLED screen, because the only readily available unit thus far is that puny, $2,500 11-incher from Sony. But Samsung is mulling...
POSTED Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Amid all the talk of online video downloading and streaming, the optical disks still get bigger. Pioneer's future-looking roadmap now boasts of a 400GB optical disc, spread out on 16 layers and read by a head that's almost the...
POSTED Monday, December 1, 2008
If, like me, you grew up reading comic books, you may have been suckered in by those ads in the back selling X-Ray Specs, which promised a way to satisfy your pubescent curiosity about the girl next door. Unfortunately,...
POSTED Wednesday, November 26, 2008
We like the idea of fancy light switches, the cheapest, easiest way to modernize a room with eye-catching tech. Now here's a design concept that takes light switches into the next dimension, giving you trackpad-like control in a touch-sensitive...
POSTED Wednesday, November 26, 2008
The crazy idea of selling billions of gallons of water in everlasting plastic bottles to people who already have access to clean water sources is turning our planet into a gigantic garbage heap. Finally, somebody is doing something about...
POSTED Tuesday, November 25, 2008
The buzz about 2.5-inch 256GB solid-state drives (SSD) is building, and now Micron tells us more about its entry, the C200. At first, the company said its 256GB SSD would ship this Fall, but now it's been delayed until...
POSTED Monday, November 24, 2008
An NFL football game, broadcast in 3D? Believe it. Sunday Thursday, December 4th, the game between the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders will be produced in 3D, and shown in three specially-equipped theaters in New York, Los...
POSTED Monday, November 24, 2008
Unless you're a piercing fanatic, you're probably not crazy about the idea of getting stabbed when you go to the doctor's office. California company nanoBioSciences figured out a way to stop the violence with AdminPatch, a drug delivery system...
POSTED Monday, November 24, 2008
With venerable print journals like PC Magazine folding into online-only operations, many old school media titans are looking for an escape hatch and Samsung may have the key. At Japan's recent FPD International 2008 tech conference, the Korean cell phone...
POSTED Monday, November 24, 2008
While all kinds of ocean going vessels have been adding some sort of renewable energy source recently, who would have figured that you might soon add submarines to the list? A Swiss company called BKW has revealed plans for...
POSTED Sunday, November 23, 2008
We've mentioned Project Better Place before, the company that plans to create a network of charging stations and battery exchange locations for electric cars in Denmark, Israel and Australia. Backed by super-rich investors, now it's planning an ambitious expansion...
POSTED Friday, November 21, 2008
Everybody knows about solar and wind power, and using renewable energy was a big issue in the recent election. But a lot of amazing green technologies have been developed since solar panels and wind turbines captured the nation's attention....
POSTED Thursday, November 20, 2008
The Swedish company myFC (My Fuel Cell) wants to free you up from power cables with advanced fuel cell technology. Its latest prototype is a charger that uses a compact, flat alternative to the usual fuel cell stack —...
POSTED Thursday, November 20, 2008
Samsung is now cranking out the 256GB solid state drives (SSD). When the company ambitiously proclaimed in late May of this year it would deliver such a beast in quantity by the end of this year, most of us...
POSTED Thursday, November 20, 2008
"Breathtaking," says BMW. "I shall call him... Mini-E." With that, BMW jumps into the electric car derby, unveiling its electric version of the Mini Cooper. The high-profile test program/publicity stunt will involve a limited run of 500 of the...
POSTED Wednesday, November 19, 2008
40 years ago, science fiction writer James R. Berry predicted what the future would look like on November 18th, 2008 — today. His piece for a 1968 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, "40 Years in the Future," made some impressive...
POSTED Tuesday, November 18, 2008
We're stoked about that wave farm off the coast of Portugal, and now along comes another innovation that could top that: Searaser, a buoy-like device attached to the sea floor that uses wave power to pump water 650 feet...
POSTED Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Barack Obama has received more assassination threats than any president-elect in U.S. history. While Obama's Secret Service protection has obviously been flawless thus far, according to some speculative reports, any would-be assailants might be in for some major pain...
POSTED Monday, November 17, 2008
Remember how the touch of a caring hand to your forehead made you feel a little better? The Lunar Baby Thermometer is a concept by designer Duck Young Kong, aiming to combine that healing touch and its crude temperature...
POSTED Monday, November 17, 2008
We compare a lot of things to Minority Report around here — since it's so damn cool and all — but most of the technology we come across simply approximates the almost ridiculous amount of gesture controls presented by...
POSTED Monday, November 17, 2008
The National Ignition Facility out at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the size of a football stadium and equipped with the largest laser in the world. With said massive laser nearing completion — it'll be done...
POSTED Friday, November 14, 2008
We've been hearing about it for years, and now it's finally happening: There's a new version of USB on the way, and it's going to be ten times faster than its predecessor. Launching next Monday is USB 3.0, and...
POSTED Friday, November 14, 2008
The latest James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, debuts today. For fans of gadgetry, the Daniel Craig "reboot" of the Bond series hasn't given them much to chew on, since the new films leave behind the far-fetched tech toys...
POSTED Friday, November 14, 2008
Flying cars? We love 'em. As they get to be more real with Terrafugia and others gearing up their upcoming craft, the Pentagon and its research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), wants to get in on...
POSTED Thursday, November 13, 2008
Oakley sunglasses founder Jim Jannard's RED Digital Cinema Camera Company is at it again. This is the next episode of the endless hype about its Scarlet camera system that started last April, and now the company has finally released...
POSTED Thursday, November 13, 2008
We've been hearing talk of mini-sized nuclear reactors for a year or longer, but now it looks like Hyperion is actually starting to build them. The hot tub-sized fission nukes, each capable of cranking out 25 megawatts of clean...
POSTED Tuesday, November 11, 2008
With all this talk about electric cars, solar power, and wind energy being bandied about, we haven't heard much about how to power those gas-guzzling tin cans of the sky. That's why NASA tapped the smarty-pants engineers at MIT...
POSTED Monday, November 10, 2008
Check out this wind-powered battery charger. Febot is a design concept for charging up a single AA battery, where you attach its suction cup outside a window of your house or car, and the tiny generator uses the power...
POSTED Monday, November 10, 2008
Someone at Virginia-based Catch the Wind went to the Doctor Evil School of Making Things Better — just put a frikkin' laser beam on it. Catch the Wind has a fiber-optic, laser-based LIDAR system that can give wind turbines a...
POSTED Friday, November 7, 2008
The Mazda "KAAN" is an electric race car for the futuristic tracks of 2025, and part of the LA Auto Show's Motorsports 2025 Design Challenge. Like all of the crazy submissions, the KAAN has its own little back story:...
POSTED Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The realignment of our bio-tech reality has hit a new milestone courtesy a group of cloning scientists from Japan. For the first time in human history the group managed to clone an animal from 16 year-old frozen animal tissue. The...
POSTED Wednesday, November 5, 2008
In preparation for the time when man has completely ravaged our delicate planet, Korea's Chonnam National University has developed a robotic plant. According to the plant's creators the plant can produce oxygen, moisture, and plant-like aromas. In addition to mimicking...
POSTED Tuesday, November 4, 2008
As if the flying car stories weren't getting outrageous enough, now we're hearing about a flying Ferrari. Moller International, that company that keeps on saying there's a flying car just around the corner, now doubles down with its latest...
POSTED Monday, November 3, 2008
All voting methods, from paper ballots to punch cards to electronic voting, have their problems. Punch cards can leave hanging chads. Electronic machines may not give you a paper trail and may be more easily hacked. Lever voting machines...
POSTED Monday, November 3, 2008
In this day and age when dogs and cats regularly eat and dress better than many humans, yet another new device has been designed to serve our furry masters. Freelance industrial designer Andrew Au offers the Maitre D'og concept device...
POSTED Thursday, October 30, 2008
If the Ford Motor Company still exists by 2010, its Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan hybrids will roll out with some pretty snazzy instrument panels. In the middle, you see the conventional speedometer, but on either side, there are...
POSTED Wednesday, October 29, 2008
The newspaper business may be going down the tubes but if those ever-emergent thin displays get to market soon enough there might still be hope for those technology-challenged old school publishers. The latest entry in the thin display race comes...
POSTED Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Amazon just rolled out Windowshop, giving us a peek at the web shopping environment of the future. It looks simply gorgeous, similar to the iTunes Cover Flow where album covers float by in graceful 3D. Amazon populates its Windowshop...
POSTED Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Did somebody say "Interplanetary Internet?" I'm sold already. Internet co-creator and Google vice president Vint Cerf is working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to create an Internet for space, a standardized and upgradable form of communication for astronauts and...
POSTED Monday, October 27, 2008
The visionaries at Armadillo Aerospace have some big ideas. The most outrageous is this "Fishbowl Spaceship," giving two passengers a spectacular 360-degree view of suborbital space. The company, founded by iD software (Doom, Quake) chief John Carmack, plans to...
POSTED Monday, October 27, 2008
We're crazy about the all-electric Tesla Roadster, and now here's a first look at Tesla's second act, the four-door, 5-passenger Tesla Model S. Its specs are similar to the Roadster, where its range is about the same at 240...
POSTED Monday, October 27, 2008
With Lewis Hamilton hoping to capture the Formula One driver's championship next weekend in a McLaren-Mercedes, the German car maker has given us a glimpse of how they see the future of racing. Formula Zero racing will combine elements...
POSTED Sunday, October 26, 2008
Our sister site SCI FI Wire has some exclusive concept art from the new SCI FI Channel show Stargate Universe (the same SCI FI Channel that, um, happens to own DVICE). This "Ancient Console" concept really stands out, with...
POSTED Friday, October 24, 2008
You've probably noticed the term "clean coal" bandied about a lot lately. It's a great-sounding phrase, evoking images of plentiful, cheap energy generated by squeaky-clean power plants emitting a thin wisp of smoke that smells like a cross between...
POSTED Thursday, October 23, 2008
Get out of the way, everybody, because here comes Bloodhound, the world's fastest car. The British-designed Bloodhound SSC (supersonic car) was unveiled in London today, with plans for a record-breaking supersonic run in 2011. The 42-foot land rocket will...
POSTED Thursday, October 23, 2008
When you set designers loose with a theme like "the world of motorsport in the year 2025" you're bound to get some absolutely insane designs. Looking at the sleek, versatile Honda Great Racer, that's exactly what came out of...
POSTED Thursday, October 23, 2008
The grand prize winners of the recent Seoul Design Competition, Kim Woo-sik and Jun Yoo-ho of Korea's Konkuk University, inadvertently brought firefighting into the realm of sci-fi. Their creation is called the Life Pebble, a device that straps to...
POSTED Thursday, October 23, 2008
Among the myriad concept phones shown off recently by AU KDDI at CEATEC, one particularly beautiful model was the Voyager. Displayed on a moon-like surface at the event in homage to real life astronauts, the phone unfolds from the back...
POSTED Wednesday, October 22, 2008
It might take a few years (or decades) for this iBangle design concept to end up on your wrist, but for the time being, we can stare in astonishment at its ambitious design. You see that blue inner band?...
POSTED Tuesday, October 21, 2008
We're still in awe of that fantastic Battlestar Galactica PC we showed you last week, but take a look at this: Unlike that custom-built Battlestar, this one's a commercially-available PC. It looks like it has glowing nuclear fuel rods...
POSTED Monday, October 20, 2008
Moving one step towards a greener future, literally, Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo has unveiled a prototype shoe that generates enough energy to perpetually power a portable music player. The shoe has a small generator attached to water filled soles...
POSTED Monday, October 20, 2008
Is it us, or isn't it a bit ironic that the same week Sony's newest Playstation Portable (PSP-3000) becomes available, a fantastic design for a future model bursts on the scene? While the PSP-3000 has scant few innovations, this...
POSTED Thursday, October 16, 2008
It's been 100 years since Ford's first Model T hit the road, and to commemorate the occasion, Ford commissioned a design contest to create Model T 2.0. Of the two winners of $25,000 in scholarship money, the Model T2...
POSTED Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Straight out of Weta Workshop, the New Zealand prop-and-costumer Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson depends on, comes a steampunk rifle so well crafted and awesome that we can't help but wonder if a steampunk movie isn't in...
POSTED Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The robot masters at KIST (Korea Institute of Science and Technology) have updated their Mahru II robot with the new Mahru Humanoid Robot that is now a dead ringer for Sony's tiny dancing QRIO robot. Scheduled to make its first...
POSTED Monday, October 13, 2008
Take a glimpse into the future: This is the World Trade Center's transportation hub, revealed a few days ago after numerous redesigns. Created by one of our favorite architects, Santiago Calatrava, the soaring organic architecture features a glass and...
POSTED Monday, October 13, 2008
It had to happen. Now there's an electric Porsche, made by German Porsche modifier/carmaker RUF Automobile GmbH. The company dropped a 204hp electric motor into a Porsche 911 chassis, powered it with 96 lithium ion batteries from California battery...
POSTED Friday, October 10, 2008
Flying cars are all hat, no cattle. But wait. What's this? A flying car that will actually exist, roll on real streets and highways and then take off into the wild blue? You betcha. Pony up your $194,000, and...
POSTED Thursday, October 9, 2008
More proof that the obsession in America with all things Japan has infiltrated the design field comes in the form of this new concept vehicle by industrial designer Seyhan Sitti. The three-wheeled Dune Buggy is called the Kawaii ("cute" in...
POSTED Thursday, October 9, 2008
The 2008 Tokyo Game Show in Japan is currently underway, and there's more than just awesome new games to look forward to. Game developer Square Enix — known for the widely popular Final Fantasy series — is planning an...
POSTED Wednesday, October 8, 2008
The hydrogen breakthroughs just keep on coming. Here's another one, where Greek scientists have figured out how to store more hydrogen-per-liter than ever by using the newfangled carbon nanotubes you see in the illustration above. This is good news,...
POSTED Tuesday, October 7, 2008
In the middle of the deep woods, electrical outlets are rare. So if you want to apply power to sensors that alert firefighters of an impending conflagration, what do you do? Those smarty-pants scientists at MIT have it all...
POSTED Tuesday, October 7, 2008
It's been a holy grail of display technology for a long time: true 3D holograms that you don't need special glasses to see. Think R2-D2's projection of Princess Leia in Star Wars, only not as fuzzy and in full...
POSTED Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The Japan-based CEATEC conference has come and gone, but one incredible item we neglected to mention at the show was the NTT Docomo Separate Keitai. The prototype device lives up to its name with the ability to break into two...
POSTED Monday, October 6, 2008
Behold, the flexible OLED screen growing up into maturity right before your eyes. After wowing us with OLED screens at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last January, Sony's next OLED trick is this flexible 11-inch display that's a mere...
POSTED Friday, October 3, 2008
We're nuts about tiny electric cars, and this Nissan Nuvu concept car rolled out at the Paris Motor Show is the coolest one yet. The 9-foot minicar seats the driver up front, a passenger seat alongside, and room for...
POSTED Friday, October 3, 2008
When Dell commissioned a design contest for green computers, Mexican industrial designer Luis Luna took the term "green" literally. He created O Project, a design concept featuring a couple of round PCs that take Dell's bamboo-clad Studio Hybrid idea...
POSTED Thursday, October 2, 2008
This year’s CEATE has already packed more punch than the last few years combined, and the latest offering from NTT Docomo unveiled at the event continues the new trend. The company, known for its powerful grip on the Japanese cell...
POSTED Thursday, October 2, 2008
The X Sting Wish: stupid name, drool-worthy design. UK-based designer Adam Scott bills this monster as an extinguisher of fires, but we'd readily believe it as an exterminator of aliens in an action-packed sci-fi flick. Scott designed the X...
POSTED Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Making things invisible is a pretty neat trick. In 2006, a team of Duke University scientists bent rays of light around a copper ring (which was still visible, thanks to pesky visible light). Now researchers say they are getting...
POSTED Tuesday, September 30, 2008
It's about time the whole restaurant menu/payment ritual was streamlined. To the rescue comes EPOS-lite, a design concept for a tablet that serves as both a menu and wireless payment device. It even wirelessly recharges itself as you place...
POSTED Friday, September 26, 2008
Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Honcho Craig Mundie spoke at the MIT Emerging Technology Conference and prophetized up a techno-storm. Evidently he sees technology taking us toward a world where virtual presences inhabit a 3D space and use that...
POSTED Friday, September 26, 2008
We're big fans of the designers at Art.Lebedev studios. For their next trick, the creators of that hyper-ambitious keyboard with a video screen behind every key are trying their hands at a touchscreen cell phone. Its simple yet functional...
POSTED Thursday, September 25, 2008
Okay, we were just kidding around yesterday with that (actually legitimate) idea for a lie-detecting headband, but now we've found another device that takes a similar concept way, way too far. Here's FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technologies), a system...
POSTED Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Yet another fictional invention from the late sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke appears to be one step closer to reality. The Japan Space Elevator Association hopes to be instrumental in getting the first real working space elevator built, a device...
POSTED Wednesday, September 24, 2008
A failure within the Large Hadron Collider facility caused around a hundred magnets to overheat. As if that wasn't bad enough, a leak caused by a faulty electrical connection saw its 27-kilometer-long ring to be flooded with a ton...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Just what we need right about now: a new lie detector. Scott Bunce of the Drexel University's College of Medicine in Philadelphia has applied for a patent for a lie-detecting headband, using a near-infrared light that shines through the...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Never mind that people all over the world have repeatedly shown that they don't want 3D-anything — filmmakers, HDTV set purveyors, and now camera manufacturers apparently have yet to hear the news. Fujifilm is the next techno-fashion victim, rolling...
POSTED Monday, September 22, 2008
In a world gone electric-car crazy, Mitsubishi wants to show its mettle by taking over Iceland. The company's i MIEV (Mitsubishi Innovative Electric Vehicle) apparently passed its tests in Japan, and starting next year, Mitsubishi plans to roll out...
POSTED Monday, September 22, 2008
GM's Chevy Volt electric car is said to be on track for its late 2010 delivery date, but there might be a problem or two with the batteries. The nearly 300 lithium ion batteries will be strapped together in...
POSTED Thursday, September 18, 2008
If you feel like you're being spied upon now, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Designer Benjamin Males presents Target Project, part performance art and part tech demo that shows how easy it is to automatically gather and record racial...
POSTED Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid has done it again. Look at her Symbiotic Villa, a house that's more like an exotic, angular beehive than a mansion. She designed this dwelling for the Next-Gene 20 project in Taiwan, where twenty...
POSTED Wednesday, September 17, 2008
When the dust of the presidential election settles, whoever claims the throne big chair in the White House will get briefed on all kinds of stuff. Said stuff includes a report titled Global Trends 2025 — put together by...
POSTED Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Badass as they are, military snipers are sometimes humbled by heat haze, which can make a clear target look like murky soup. If the boys at DARPA have their way, though, a new kind of sniper scope could turn...
POSTED Tuesday, September 16, 2008
So, what's the next step in video games? Graphics are already pretty incredible, and it won't be too much longer before we hit a point after which graphics can't get much better. Then what? What will we advance? It will...
POSTED Tuesday, September 16, 2008
We've been hearing a lot of talk and seeing a handful of demos of pocket-sized projectors, but now there's one going on sale September 30th. The first one out of the gate is from 3M, hawking its MPro110 model...
POSTED Monday, September 15, 2008
Filmmakers rejoice! Now you can abandon those rolls of expensive film for digital video, recorded uncompressed on this odd-looking Ikonoskop A-cam dII camera. Using the array of lenses available for super-16 film cameras, this baby slams 1080p video onto...
POSTED Monday, September 15, 2008
Our Air Force has a couple different sources of fuel for its jets, one of them being a blend derived from coal. Problem is, both the process used to turn coal into fuel and burning said fuel in flight...
POSTED Friday, September 12, 2008
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a Webstar! Actually, none of those are far from the truth. It's a Superstar. A floating, self-powered, self-regulated, self-contained metropolis. Think that sounds nuts? Even when Beijing-based MAD designs something grounded in...
POSTED Friday, September 12, 2008
Those super-sharp 3mm-thin Sony OLED TVs captured our imagination, big time. The real eye-opener is the company's demo of a group of completely wireless versions of the screen that run on battery power. The 11-inch displays include an HDTV...
POSTED Thursday, September 11, 2008
Porsche Design apparently wants to get its talented fingers into everything. Next is a line of yachts it's designing for high-end Singaporean yacht builder Royal Falcon Fleet, starting with this model RFF135, for which Porsche will create the exterior...
POSTED Thursday, September 11, 2008
When those scientists get together to build a huge gadget, they don't mess around. The Large Hadron Collider — the world's largest machine ever — fired up for the first time at 4:28am EDT this morning (see the first...
POSTED Wednesday, September 10, 2008
When we all started texting on numerical pads, we needed a system to make it bearable. T9 texting, the system of predictive text that made tying on a number pad doable, revolutionized texting. And now the guy behind it,...
POSTED Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Finally, we get a full-on look at Chevy Volt electric car! You saw a sneak peek at its center console and a few spy shots, but now here's a clear look at (almost) the entire car. Weird, though —...
POSTED Tuesday, September 9, 2008
A concept like the Touch-Hear is something we're probably a while off from realizing, but it represents a very attractive technology: putting a world of knowledge at your fingertips. The advent of the Internet, especially in its current form,...
POSTED Monday, September 8, 2008
Here's the next generation of e-reader, taking the same E Ink tech used in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader to the next level. Made by Plastic Logic, this flexible (but not foldable) electronic newspaper is the size of...
POSTED Monday, September 8, 2008
NBC blasted out of the gate with the debut of its NFL Live webcast last night, offering multiple camera views and interactive features that gave viewers more options for football watching than ever. We tested the Adobe Flash-based interface...
POSTED Friday, September 5, 2008
Leave it to those sophisticated creators at legendary firm Frog Design to re-invent the light bulb. The same masters who designed some of the first Apple computers, Sony TVs, and lots of other neat stuff tackled the LED bulb,...
POSTED Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Besides ensuring your Precrime officer keeps on the straight and narrow, the applications a double-sided touch screen would offer are numerous. Thus it was a special treat to see Japan's Teraokaseiko debut their double-sided touch display at last week's Sign...
POSTED Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Sometimes, I just want to pet my chicken. The problem? My chicken is so far away. Oh, woe is me. But my problem won't be a problem much longer thanks to an enterprising group from the National University of Singapore's...
POSTED Tuesday, September 2, 2008
The days of Sony leading the pack in terms of innovative products on the retail market may be in the rear view mirror of history, but in the lab the company continues to push the boundaries of technology. The IP...
POSTED Tuesday, September 2, 2008
The Experience Recorder is a high tech glove that will actively and passively archive everything about your day. On its automatic setting, it'll record sounds around you, touch sensations and even take pictures of things that may interest you...
POSTED Friday, August 29, 2008
We can hardly wait for GM to roll out its $40,000 Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid car in late 2010, but the company is teasing us. After showing off an early prototype, we heard the company was trashing that first...
POSTED Friday, August 29, 2008
Korean designer Jin Woo Han recently worked up a brilliant concept design for what he calls the Snow Mobile Portable PC Theater. The all-in-one device would allow you to easily carry your desktop PC with you anywhere and then project...
POSTED Friday, August 29, 2008
This speedy Sikorsky X2 helicopter completed its first test flight yesterday, proving that next-generation helicopters have leaped way beyond that old criticism of them as “a collection of spare parts flying in formation.” When it’s done with testing, this...
POSTED Thursday, August 28, 2008
The Shooter is a conceptual fire extinguisher thought up by designers Eunjung Kim, Yangwoo Kim and Junyi Heo. It makes putting out a fire as easy as aiming and pulling the trigger, which will send a cannon round full...
POSTED Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Instead of piercing the tongue with metal barbells, let’s embed a tiny magnet and use that mouth muscle as a pointing device. That’s the idea of Georgia Tech researchers who’ve turned the tongue into a joystick that could steer...
POSTED Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Pyramids and ziggurats represent an oddly survivable form of architecture. Built by civilizations such as the Egyptians, Mayans and Babylonians, several of these testaments to ancient ingenuity are still standing after thousands of years. Timelinks, a design firm based...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008
Never mind strapping a flashlight to your head like an old miner, or around your ear like a Borg — this fiber optic light glove brings the light literally to your fingertips. Powered by a battery pack embedded in...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008
The delicate aircraft you see here just broke a world record for the longest-lasting unmanned flight. It stayed aloft for 83 hours, 37 minutes, charging up its lithium-sulfur batteries with its solar panels during the day, allowing it to...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008
What do you get when you bring together a pizza oven, some nail polish and inkjet printers? Solar cells. You and I may be scratching our heads, but the woman behind the process known as iJet, Nicole Kuepper, won...
POSTED Friday, August 22, 2008
The final frontier of wireless tech is upon us, with Intel showing off its electricity flying through the air with better efficiency than ever. While it’s not the first wireless power transmitting device we’ve seen, this one uses resonance...
POSTED Friday, August 22, 2008
Of all the electric car designs we’ve seen, this one is the most puzzling yet. The Hinterland Project starts with the shape of an airplane fuselage and turns it into a sustainable vehicle. However, it looks more like an...
POSTED Thursday, August 21, 2008
A couple of Japanese companies just announced a giant leap in OLED (organic LED) screen tech, making the displays last 30 times longer and use a tenth of the power. Toshiba Matsushita and Idemitsu are showing off a high-performance...
POSTED Thursday, August 21, 2008
The NASA concept car (which, as far as we can tell, has nothing to do with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, though it looks like astronauts are driving it) has some pretty radical features that are immediately appealing....
POSTED Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Strap on this Lunocet Monofin, and you're instantly the fastest swimmer in the world. You’re not going to be moving through the water at 60mph like a sailfish, but its 8mph top speed would beat the measly 5mph of...
POSTED Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Concept devices are sometimes made stronger when the design is kept simple and the focus is a great new idea. The Touch Sight is just such a concept that would essentially revolutionize the world of the blind by giving the...
POSTED Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Here’s a breakthrough in video effects. Researchers at the University of Washington have figured out a "Spacetime Fusion Technique" that uses pictures from a digital still camera to enhance video in a variety of ways. For instance, you can...
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008
Monday morning is often a rude awakening, especially with an obnoxious alarm jarring you out of sleepy-time paradise. That must be why designers keep flirting with the idea of a silent vibrating alarm clock for two, complete with twin...
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008
Researchers at Australia’s Monash University have come up with a nanoparticle coating that could make self-cleaning clothes a reality. The particles, made of anatase titanium dioxide, will coat fibers in wool and silk. Once the fabric is coated, you need...
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008
Just as the world is getting used the cool-glowing, coil-shaped Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs), Seattle-based Vu1 has come up with a whole new bulb technology that's even better… and greener. Instead of heating a filament like in an...
POSTED Thursday, August 14, 2008
Solar cells just keep getting better and better. Day4 Energy is the latest innovator, figuring out how to squeeze higher efficiency and lower costs out of its newest design, which the company says will be ready for market within...
POSTED Thursday, August 14, 2008
Take a trip with us down into uncanny valley, where animated human faces look almost real. Studio Pendulum's AlterEgo division pasted tiny sensors on actors’ faces and ran that data through their latest facial performance software, and this is...
POSTED Monday, August 11, 2008
Oscar Pistorius isn't competing in this year's Olympics, and that's a good thing. In case you missed it, Pistorius is the double-amputee sprinter who occasionally has carbon-fiber artificial limbs stand in for his missing lower legs. His amazing Cheetah...
POSTED Thursday, August 7, 2008
The Museum of Modern Art's current show, Home Delivery: Prefabricating the Modern Dwelling (through October 20) surveys the history of prefab homes in the U.S. It shows old ideas that never caught on as well as the latest in...
POSTED Thursday, August 7, 2008
Researchers at Stanford University may have just gotten us one step closer to creating a cyborg. They've developed a new kind of artificial cornea, one that's "showing promise" in animal studies and could eliminate the need for cornea transplants...
POSTED Wednesday, August 6, 2008
We really like the whole saving-the-earth thing, but now Nissan’s gone too far. The ECO Pedal, to be offered as an option in Nissan vehicles next year, is designed to start pushing back when you step on the gas...
POSTED Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Anyone who's seen Minority Report would love a piece of the hologram technology that Tom Cruise uses to flip through holographic images in the air like they were CDs in a jukebox. Obscura Digital has something that's pretty close....
POSTED Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Isn't science wonderful? The day after I bashed fuel cell tech for being impractical, MIT scientists break the news of a major discovery that might change everything. In what’s being called a “revolutionary leap,” MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera...
POSTED Friday, August 1, 2008
Is this a cell phone, or a magic wand? This design concept for a Nokia 9900 cell phone shows what the future may hold for flexible E-Ink screens, hidden inside a pen-shaped device. Beyond being rolled up like a...
POSTED Friday, August 1, 2008
There are many concept devices that promise to fill our futurist needs, but those needs don’t usually fall under the heading of babysitter, overseer and judgmental therapist. The FuChat concept phone fills all those needs and more as a cordless...
POSTED Friday, August 1, 2008
Who wouldn’t like the idea of a fuel cell car running on clean, pure hydrogen, the universe’s most plentiful element? Its byproduct is sparkling, drinkable water, with none of that pesky pollution spewing out the tailpipe. And then if...
POSTED Thursday, July 31, 2008
Let’s just leapfrog all those other ideas for energy-saving car tech and hop into this magnetically-driven ride, shall we? While Slovak designer Matúš Procháczka’s concept is prettier than sexy four-inch spike heels, it’ll definitely take some major infrastructure modification...
POSTED Thursday, July 31, 2008
The U.S. military has been working on the next generation of weapons for our armed services — from infantry laser rifles to truck-mounted ray guns — so it's understood that we'll also need a defense from such things. That's...
POSTED Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Maybe that old jetpack idea is just wrong. If you’re willing to drop $250,000, you can fly around for three minutes at a time in an old-style unit that looks like that James Bond model from the '60s. But...
POSTED Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Take an imaging chip out of a digital camera, modify it a bit, and what do you get? A minuscule microscope that doesn’t even need lenses to see into the world of inner space. The revolutionary imaging system, developed by...
POSTED Wednesday, July 30, 2008
We can’t seem to get enough of OLED lighting, those glowing paper-thin sheets that our cross-company pals at GE (disclosure: DVICE is part of NBC Universal, which is part of GE) are working on. Now they’ve given us a...
POSTED Tuesday, July 29, 2008
While we've known about Microsoft's fancy Surface touchscreen table for a while now, the bit M isn't done coming up with fancy new touchscreen devices. Take a look at the new Surface Sphere, a giant ball that's completely covered...
POSTED Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Cloaking technology doesn't only exist in the realm of science fiction: researchers at Imperial College London are trying to create a cloaking blanket to hide objects in visible light — something that has never been done. Visible light's small...
POSTED Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Earlier this year, Virgin Galactic space pioneers Richard Branson and Burt Rutan showed us a model of WhiteKnightTwo, the workhorse aircraft that will launch SpaceShipTwo into suborbital space. Today in the Mojave desert north of Los Angeles, the space...
POSTED Monday, July 28, 2008
If you’re a member of the Long Now Foundation, you think about vast spans of time. That’s why the futurist think tankers put a 0 before every year to show how cool and forward-thinking they are (for example, this...
POSTED Thursday, July 24, 2008
Anyone who's seen Murderball knows how serious wheelchair athletics can be, but it's always struck me as more than a little inefficient that the athletes need to use their hands to both play ball and steer their wheelchairs. Short...
POSTED Thursday, July 24, 2008
Professor Tomiki Ikeda of Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology has been working on light-activated motors since 2003, and it looks like his research is yielding some amazing results. The research team has completed a plastic motor, powered only by ultraviolet...
POSTED Wednesday, July 23, 2008
We were impressed when GE engineers showed us OLED (organic light emitting diode) lighting that was twice as efficient as regular incandescent light bulbs, but get a load of this: Princeton and U-Michigan scientists have just beaten that by...
POSTED Wednesday, July 23, 2008
The problem with shooting a gun at someone is that you just can't control how fast the bullet is going. More than likely, it's going very fast and will seriously hurt or kill them. But geez, you didn't want that!...
POSTED Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Who says a PC has to be rectangular, or even square? Designer Apostol Tnokovski thinks the PC world is round, and conceived this 6-inch orb-shaped number as his proof. Not only is E-Ball oddball shaped, it’s called “the smallest...
POSTED Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Imagine watching any HD video wirelessly from any Blu-ray player, PC, TiVo, set-top box, video camera, Xbox — any video source, anywhere in your house, up to 100 feet away. Now add the ability to instantly control that video...
POSTED Wednesday, July 23, 2008
The wellspring of spectacular tech ideas that is Art.Lebedev Studio has just come up with another dance along the lunatic fringe, and this one’s a smaller keyboard called Optimus Pultius. Positioned between the not-yet now-shipping Optimus Maximus keyboard ($1877)...
POSTED Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Britain's ubiquitous CCTV video surveillance network has nothing on Japan's Orwellian nightmare in the making. One of the country's top electronics firms, NEC, has just announced a new plasma display fitted with a tiny camera that can accurately identify a...
POSTED Tuesday, July 22, 2008
When space agencies start undertaking more ambitious projects on the Moon, it'll be important that their astronauts know where they are. Recreating the most reliable global positioning technology we have Earth-side for the Moon's surface is tricky, as our...
POSTED Monday, July 21, 2008
LCD screens have their plusses — they're cheap; don't consume as much power as, say, plasma displays; and look totally sleek and hot — but their weaknesses are just as plentiful: They have difficulty displaying true blacks. Their pixel refresh...
POSTED Monday, July 21, 2008
Korean designers Sungchul Yang and Woonghee Han think we’re going to be living in waterworld some day soon, so that’s why they put together Aqua. It’s a design concept for a versatile little one-person runabout, equally at home skimming...
POSTED Monday, July 21, 2008
Graphene is an extremely common material that scientists are continually discovering new properties of. It's somewhat of a wonder material, apparently! A few years ago it was discovered that due to its electrical properties, one-micron sheets of it are ideal...
POSTED Friday, July 18, 2008
Never mind that this solar-powered car looks like a streamlined humpback whale covered with high-tech barnacles. The SolarWorld No.1 can hit a top speed of 75mph, and averaged 45mph over an 1864-mile race course without once stopping at a...
POSTED Friday, July 18, 2008
Popular Science has a feature on the sports stadiums of tomorrow, one of them being Cisco Field, future home of the Oakland A's. Apparently Cisco needed something to do with a bunch of spare cable it had lying around,...
POSTED Friday, July 18, 2008
Besides being in tip-top shape and having a detective's intuition that rivals Sherlock Holmes, billionaire Bruce Wayne has an arsenal of high-tech toys and vehicles that would make even James Bond's Q drool. It's part of the Caped Crusader's...
POSTED Thursday, July 17, 2008
Meet the curious "M.01," otherwise known as the Car for Paris 2030. It's described by its designer Ashley Chichocki as exploring "what is really necessary in a vehicle," and as such it addresses a major issue that cities are...
POSTED Thursday, July 17, 2008
As China continues to ramp up its status as an industrial global power, some of its best and brightest are working to come up with innovative new auto solutions to serve the new middle class. Yet another concept vehicle...
POSTED Thursday, July 17, 2008
Most of the scientists at NASA say they have the design for the Constellation program with its Ares moon rockets nailed down, and they’re set for flight testing a year from now with hopes for a moon landing by...
POSTED Wednesday, July 16, 2008
The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) may have just inadvertently introduced the future of the 3D movie experience with the debut of the gCubik. The tiny box feeds video through a batch of lenses on each side,...
POSTED Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Among the legions of new iPhone consumers, I personally know at least five people who will never buy the iPhone due to what some gadget mavens refer to as "fat finger syndrome." For these unlucky souls, no amount of maneuvering...
POSTED Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Braggadocio about electric car designs runs rampant, but the CityEl’s claim of 200mph beats all. This working prototype was built for a mere $2500, and spends most of its life as an ultralight 3-wheeled electric runabout. But if its...
POSTED Monday, July 14, 2008
Looks like telepresence really will be all the rage in the future. The TMSUK-4 created by Japanese robotics developer Tmsuk will let shoppers enjoy the full tactile experience of browsing shelves without having to step into the store. We...
POSTED Friday, July 11, 2008
Good lord. Did an alien spacecraft leave some kind of death-ray weapon behind? Nope, that’s just the latest rendering of the upcoming RED Scarlet camcorder, the ultra high-rez shooter from Oakley founder Jim Jannard that’s due early next year....
POSTED Friday, July 11, 2008
Telecommuting. It’s just a bunch a lazy ne’er-do-wells hanging around the house in their pajamas, soaking up a paycheck and doing nothing, right? Why should they get to do their work at home, relaxing in that favorite chair, while...
POSTED Thursday, July 10, 2008
One of the things that makes flying saucers so fascinating is that they clearly use some crazy alien technology to zip around. No human-built planes can maneuver like that! If only! Well, now it looks like someone has figured out...
POSTED Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Good news for anyone living near an airport: someone's just thought of a way to quiet down those noisy jet planes. Dimitri Papamoschou at the University of California filed a patent earlier this year for a jet-engine silencer. Recognizing...
POSTED Monday, July 7, 2008
The idea of LED-embedded bathroom tiles has useful written all over it. But unless you’re completely remodeling, they’re going to give you some installation challenges. This Tile + Light concept created by Korean designer Hyomi Kim makes it easier,...
POSTED Monday, July 7, 2008
Rumors run rampant about a Toyota Prius redesign coming up next year, but little did we know that the new version would have solar panels added to the hybrid vehicle’s roof. That’s a first for any automaker. The optional...
POSTED Monday, July 7, 2008
Now you’ll be able to rest easy in that skyscraper with The Wizard, a design concept for an emergency escape system that lowers you safely to earth if all hell breaks loose. Strap on its all-encompassing belt system, firmly...
POSTED Monday, July 7, 2008
As if we didn’t already have enough acronyms and TV types to decipher, Sony now tells us to get ready for FED displays in 2009. Invented in the 70s, Sony and Motorola have stepped up research of Field Emission...
POSTED Thursday, July 3, 2008
Crazy plumbing aficionados rejoice! Now a slot in the wall can automagically dispense water, sensing the presence and position of your hands and acting accordingly. Not only does the Hidden Tap's water begin to flow as your hands draw...
POSTED Thursday, July 3, 2008
Genetic testing to see how susceptible you might be to things like baldness or cancer is pretty common. What you might not know is how involved the analysis can be — it needs fancy chemical labeling and sophisticated instruments, stuff...
POSTED Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The word on the tech street in Japan is that Docomo is still in super secret negotiations to offer the iPhone, but in the meantime the company is still trying its best to show consumers it has innovative chops on...
POSTED Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Who needs a 360-degree camera and lens? Olympus thinks surveillance mavens will eat this up, this camera with eyes in the back of its head, capturing images of all that takes place within its all-encompassing line of sight. It...
POSTED Monday, June 30, 2008
The interactive table race is on, and here comes Interactive Scape, a 58-inch touch surface that’s a whole lot like the Microsoft Surface table that’s being shown all over the world but sold nowhere. Yet. Well, there is the...
POSTED Monday, June 30, 2008
Let’s take a step back from conventional automobile design for a minute and take a look at Ozone. This rolling cylinder created by Istanbul designer Özkan Koral is a design concept for a Peugeot hydrogen-powered car, where each of...
POSTED Friday, June 27, 2008
Listen to the smokin’ licks played by this prize-winning robotic clarinetist. Wow, that thing is fast. No wonder it won first prize at the Artemis Orchestra Competition, honoring scientists who could best lash together computers, machines, and musical instruments....
POSTED Friday, June 27, 2008
The promise of e-readers is great — replacing all your books with one, light device — but they've been around for a while and last I checked my neighborhood Barnes & Noble was doing just fine. A team of...
POSTED Friday, June 27, 2008
When Mitsubishi unveiled its snazzy laser rear-projection LaserVue HDTV in an elaborate and overwrought press event at CES back in January, to my eyes, its vivid colors and tack-sharpness were second to none. The big questions were when can...
POSTED Wednesday, June 25, 2008
This may come as a shock, but apparently breasts tend to bounce around while the person they're attached to is exercising. All juvenile kidding aside, could it be possible to harness this movement to store energy, turning those bouncing bosoms...
POSTED Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Ever since we first laid eyes on the aptly-named Smart Car, we were in love. But why was the $14,000 Smart fortwo from Mercedes maker Daimler equipped with just a 1-liter 71HP internal combustion engine? With gas pushing $5...
POSTED Tuesday, June 24, 2008
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics the chief concern for many athletes has been the poor air quality, prompting the government to enact a myriad of odd new measures to decrease pollution. Perhaps a look at Jamie Tomkins 2020...
POSTED Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Those kooky designers. Now they’ve gone and bent a really long piece of metal and created a living room full of wall accessories. Aykut Erol’s Line Furniture System takes the concept of drawing a complete image without lifting the...
POSTED Friday, June 20, 2008
Good news for Google Earth gazers: Those images are about to get a whole lot sharper. A new satellite named GeoEye-1 will be lifted into geosynchronous low earth orbit on August 22, and will deliver peeps at double the...
POSTED Friday, June 20, 2008
Telecommuting. It's the green way to go to work. We're doing it right now — how virtuous is that? But there are other situations that involve travel-related resource consumption that really shouldn't have to, for example when universities fly...
POSTED Friday, June 20, 2008
What’s this? Another crackpot saying he can generate power out of water, thin air or garbage? Blacklight Power is more than sketches and talk: The well-funded company says it has built a prototype of its power generator, claiming it...
POSTED Thursday, June 19, 2008
Here's a somewhat unsettling proposition: using your skin as an antenna for wireless devices or medical implants. Yes, your skin would be the conductor, sending signals along the outside of your body and saving energy by using the energy already...
POSTED Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Doing their best to show off some sci-fi style future tech, Chinese company Harbin Smart Special Aerocraft recently unveiled a real, working flying saucer. The only catch is that the "vehicle," at only four feet in diameter, is unable to...
POSTED Wednesday, June 18, 2008
We never tire of bringing you new and even stranger tales of Japanese pet obsessions. The latest over-the-top gadgetry meant to comfort Japanese dogs is called the Wan Love Yu. (In Japan, dogs are thought to utter "wan, wan" rather...
POSTED Tuesday, June 17, 2008
World-class chefs will tell you to put a prep sink near your cooktop, and Kohler hooked up with world-class designer Anne Kitzmiller to make it so in grand, futuristic style. The Kohler Crevasse rinsing sink looks like a 33-inch...
POSTED Friday, June 13, 2008
Could a 300mph train from Disneyland to Las Vegas be on the way? A transportation bill just signed into law chips in $45 million to study the idea, which has a maglev (magnetic levitation) train similar to the Shanghai...
POSTED Friday, June 13, 2008
A former Air Force F15 pilot rolled out this personal aircraft yesterday, and he’s calling it Icon A5. The $139,000 plane can take off and land on water or dry land, and has controls that are more like a...
POSTED Friday, June 13, 2008
The No-key Keyboard is a design concept by Kong Fanwen, whose graphical artwork is so compelling that we couldn’t resist showcasing his dubious idea. The keyboard’s edge-lit glass has the keys etched into it, and a small camera and...
POSTED Thursday, June 12, 2008
If looking like a super-villain caressing the ultimate weapon controller appeals to you, then SMK's two concept remote controls might be worth a look. The first would offer a stationary LCD, allowing you to peer into the future of the...
POSTED Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Now you can tell exactly when the best time would be to make babies, or maybe more importantly, to avoid such activities. Accurately measuring basil body temperature (BBT) is the key to predicting ovulation, and DuoFertility does that with...
POSTED Friday, June 6, 2008
Look out, everybody, because 3D TV is on its way whether you want it or not. Philips just announced a 52-inch 3D display showing “2D-plus-depth” pictures without requiring you to wear dizzying, headache-inducing glasses to get the full effect....
POSTED Thursday, June 5, 2008
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA) is working on "Deep Green," a tactical interface that is designed to give military commanders greater options and control over the field of battle. The project joins a variety of technologies...
POSTED Thursday, June 5, 2008
Astronauts ferried to the International Space Station by the Discovery space shuttle are hard at work this week to get its latest addition online: the $1 billion Kibo science lab module. The Kibo module, named for the Japanese word...
POSTED Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Open up your palm. That’ll give you an idea of the minuscule size of this Honlai Technology MP100 mini LED projector. The company says this mighty mite can toss a 37-inch 640x480 image onto a nearby wall or screen,...
POSTED Tuesday, June 3, 2008
We're not sure the Chessmobile would actually work, but here's the idea driving it: the cabin rests atop a platform that can move it around in the event of a crash, keeping the passengers out of the deformation zone...
POSTED Friday, May 30, 2008
Part of Japan's ability to grab the technology spotlight so often is the country's ability to showcase new breakthroughs in interesting ways. The latest Japanese milestone via gimmick comes from professor Masayuki Nakao of the University of Tokyo who recently...
POSTED Friday, May 30, 2008
Brain-machine interface technology just went bananas. Researchers successfully trained two macaque monkey test subjects, equipped with small sensor grids the size of a freckle in their noggins, to manipulate robotic limbs. The monkeys use the arms to reach for...
POSTED Wednesday, May 28, 2008
There was so much coolness at the Museum of Modern Art’s Elastic Mind exhibit, it was hard to absorb it all in one shot, but look what else was there: It’s a Pong table, updated to incorporate the physical...
POSTED Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Put on this outfit, and your whole body turns into a musical instrument. That’s the promise of the Pacer Suit, a design concept that measures electrical impulses of your muscles and turns them into music or sound effects. Akin...
POSTED Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Cats, largely supposed to be deeply evil creatures, are deigning to allow researchers to study them for mysteriously altruistic reasons: to work on technology that may give the gift of vision back to the terminally blind. Advancements at the...
POSTED Tuesday, May 27, 2008
The Smartchair Biofeedback Computer Chair looks like an ejection seat, but this ergonomic design concept keeps track of your muscle tension and adjusts itself for maximum comfort. It has dozens of embedded sensors, raising and lowering springs built into...
POSTED Tuesday, May 27, 2008
The Avcen Jetpod T-100 is a proposed flying taxi, a VQSTOL (Very Quiet Short Take-Off and Landing) vehicle that, if you believe the company that wants to produce it, could be airborne by 2010. It would be used as a...
POSTED Tuesday, May 27, 2008
While we’re lusting after this 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) just announced by Samsung, it's a frustrating piece of news. Why? Because the main piece of info, the price, is a secret. Adding to the want-fest is the blazing speed...
POSTED Monday, May 26, 2008
Clever dudes Pierre Dragicevic and Gonzalo Ramos have figured out a way to let you browse video clips by manipulating moving objects directly on the screen rather than moving sliders. Take a look at the video and you’ll see...
POSTED Monday, May 26, 2008
Lockheed's Multiple Kill Vehicle-L space superiority platform promises to be the final word in the event of an intercontinental ballistic missile attack. Part of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense System, the MKV-L is designed to deal with the multitudinous...
POSTED Friday, May 23, 2008
The brains at NTT Docomo's research lab have been hard at work trying to figure out yet another way to tie Japanese salarymen closer to work, and their latest invention just might do the trick. The system, ominously called Firmo,...
POSTED Friday, May 23, 2008
Okay, fellow firebugs, here’s the epitome of fireplace tech. Digifire uses continuously-fed ethanol for a clean-burning fireplace, and these babies are so steeped in forward design, they could be right at home on the set of a science fiction...
POSTED Thursday, May 22, 2008
It's looking increasingly like the incandescent lightbulb is going the way of the dodo, with more and more efficient alternatives to the energy-sucking bulbs appearing daily. The latest new light source are Planilum Light Emitting Glass. These bulbs consist of...
POSTED Wednesday, May 21, 2008
A technique pioneered at Bristol University in England and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will allow for aircraft built with fiber-reinforced polymer (or FRP), which most commercial planes use, to automatically repair minor wear and...
POSTED Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Lots of people aren’t thirsty enough to drink a whole can of soda. Ukranian inventor Johan De Broyer figured out a clever way to re-seal those cans, and opens up new possibilities for advertisers at the same time. You...
POSTED Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Those geniuses at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have figured out something profound. If you think about it, this makes sense: It takes a tenth of a second for visual information to get from your eyes to your brain, so everyone...
POSTED Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Facebook just announced the launch of a Japanese version of the site to compete with the local social network of choice Mixi. But one Japanese designer (Takumi Yoshida) is already looking to the future of social networks with a concept...
POSTED Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Let’s take a quick look around the world of crazy watches, with one a real product and two design concepts that might turn a head or two in a few years. First, above we have the Orbit Watch, a...
POSTED Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Someone at famed design firm Frog Design must have been having a bad day when this Digital Escape design was conceived. Don’t like your world? Strap on this “lifestyle product of the future” and transport yourself to a different...
POSTED Monday, May 19, 2008
We don’t usually follow what all the other blogs are doing, but in the case of this Samsung OLED laptop prototype, there’s good reason why everyone’s jaws seem to be dropping. First of all, there’s that 12.1-inch 1280x768 OLED...
POSTED Friday, May 16, 2008
If the innovators at the California High-Speed Rail Authority have their way, you might be able to hop on a bullet train that can zip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just under 2.5 hours by 2030. The...
POSTED Thursday, May 15, 2008
Here’s a body mod that might do you some good: A doctor implants this gizmo from EnteroMedics just under the skin, and hooks up its two electrodes that can electrically block the nerve that makes you hungry. The result? A...
POSTED Thursday, May 15, 2008
How do you get Minority Report-style invasive biometric security ingrained in society? Tie the technology to something millions can't do without—like cigarettes—and you're on your Orwellian way! Japanese company Fujitaka is planning to roll out face recognition cigarette vending machines...
POSTED Thursday, May 15, 2008
Rui Pereira, another NYU ITP student, doesn't think that Guitar Hero gets you close enough to feeling like a rock star. That's why he invented the TUIST (short for Transformable Uber Interface for Stardom), an electronic instrument that you...
POSTED Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Previously, we told you about the real-life-meets-science-fiction trend of video messages popping up on gravestones. But a new technological twist from Japan takes paying respects to your loved ones a step further. A company called Ishinokoe has implemented QR technology...
POSTED Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Here’s a design concept for cool-tool vacuum makers to consider: the BakVac. Why drag around all those moving parts when you can wear them on your back like a turtle? Makes sense. Adding to the convenience factor is an...
POSTED Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Fujitsu, in concert with game developer Ongakukan Co., has unveiled the world's first full scale Train Simulation System using high definition video. The system is designed to offer trainees real-time feedback using HD video taken from the Japanese rail system....
POSTED Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Check out this new key fob from Delphi, using E Ink and destined for a futuristic auto near you. Using the same E Ink tech in the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader but 40 percent thinner and on a...
POSTED Monday, May 12, 2008
There's certainly no shortage of odd, annoying, beautiful and unusual places to store books, but we’re betting you never thought a bookshelf could also function as a internet-connected, live-updated display. Prepare for enlightenment, because WaSnake has four panels on...
POSTED Thursday, May 8, 2008
A few days ago we showed you how to build your own robot suit, à la Iron Man. Our northern neighbors must have liked the idea, because on Monday the Canadian Defence Department put out feelers looking for companies...
POSTED Tuesday, May 6, 2008
While the media business debates the death of print, technologies are being developed that will preserve and ultimately replace the paper news dynamic. One concept device called the Ori-Ori Moshi-Moshi borrows from the Japanese practice of origami (artistic paper folding)...
POSTED Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Fast forward to the future: What will life be like without cable TV, Blu-ray discs and DVDs, or any other spinning, removable disc-style means of entertainment delivery? What if you downloaded all the titles you watched, and got everything...
POSTED Monday, May 5, 2008
We’ve been hearing rumblings about the U.S. Navy’s triple-hulled ships, but here’s one that was launched last month, the U.S.S Independence. Built by General Dynamics, it’s called a “littoral combat ship” (LCS), and the trimaran can move huge weapons...
POSTED Monday, May 5, 2008
Since the introduction of the Nintendo Wii with all its Wiimote goodness, videogame controllers have gotten more and more sophisticated, going way beyond button pushes to read gestures and even emotions. Add eyeballs to that list. Researchers at Britain's...
POSTED Monday, May 5, 2008
You can understand the U.S. military’s fascination with insect-like weapon and surveillance designs. If you’re looking to create a smart and sneaky organism from the ground up, why not tap the wisdom of millions of years of evolution, borrowing...
POSTED Friday, May 2, 2008
Now that Iron Man is here, it got us to thinking: Could we build our own Iron Man suit? Not just a costume, but a functioning apparatus that could perform the miracles the spectacular marvel in the movie does?...
POSTED Friday, May 2, 2008
Got an extra million dollars hanging around? Put down a $100K deposit on the upcoming Cirrus “The-Jet,” a tiny single-engine aircraft that doesn’t exist yet. Full-sized models are now touring the world, and when it does fly, the personal...
POSTED Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Sharp announced a wireless option to its super-thin X-series LCD displays today. Sharp will incorporate Amimon WHDI (Wireless High Definition Interface) 1080p wireless tech into its thinnest flat panels, meaning you won't have to connect any cables to your...
POSTED Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Take a look at the Hy-Bird, a hydrogen-powered electric airplane that gets 10% of its power from the sun. Made of super-lightweight (and expensive) carbon fiber, there’s talk of this fuel-cell aircraft flying around the world this summer, and...
POSTED Tuesday, April 29, 2008
When you think about cutting-edge environmental technology, an oil pump probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. The SmartJack may not change that impression, but it does offer an energy-efficient, economical alternative to conventional regular see-saw beam...
POSTED Thursday, April 24, 2008
We’re at the dawn of a new era. Electric cars promise to soon be ubiquitous, saving energy with their ability to plug into our power system that theoretically is more energy-efficient than directly burning fossil fuels. But keeping electrics...
POSTED Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Want to save gas? Pack yourself into a tiny and lightweight car like this Space-Efficient Vehicle (SEV) designed by Ralph Panhuyzen and Steven van der Veen. It was another finalist in the 2008 Michelin Design Challenge, whose cars were...
POSTED Tuesday, April 22, 2008
After a false start almost two years ago, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is talking more about a set-top box in the company’s future. In addition to dropping the bomb that prices will go up for Blu-ray discs on the...
POSTED Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Wedging yourself into an economy-class airplane seat is one of the atrocities of our age, but there’s help on the way. The Cozy Suite is a revolution in airline seating, giving you more room to yourself while giving the...
POSTED Monday, April 21, 2008
Researchers at Osaka University in Japan aren't kidding around about cyborgs. They are looking into ways for robotic limbs to be controlled in real-time by the power of thought, and one such method is by performing invasive (or open-skull)...
POSTED Thursday, April 17, 2008
What if you could have an entire room wallpapered in flexible, paper-thin light? Maybe you could even control that light’s color and intensity in different areas. That's the goal of General Electric researchers (disclosure: GE owns DVICE's parent company,...
POSTED Thursday, April 17, 2008
The sneaky folks over at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts have a three step plan to improve fishing. Step one: train fish to respond to specific sound frequencies. Step two: let fish go out into the...
POSTED Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Music recording software just took another giant leap, now able to do what was thought to be impossible. Direct Note Access individually manipulates groups of musical notes (chords), giving recording engineers the ability to completely and undetectably create pitch-perfect...
POSTED Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Get out of the way, everybody! Here comes the one-wheeled Audi Snook. Maybe this auto-stabilized monowheel design concept isn’t such a bad idea, though, because it won German student Tilmann Schlootz a Michelin Challenge Design Award 2008 at this...
POSTED Tuesday, April 15, 2008
You may remember hearing about China's plans to control the weather during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing by attacking shady clouds with artillery and aircraft. Along similar lines, scientists in New Mexico decided to mess with thunderclouds, but...
POSTED Monday, April 14, 2008
Good news! IBM scientists have been hard at work on a new type of memory that holds 100 times more data than the memory we're dealing with today. Dubbed "Racetrack" by the eggheads at IBM, this new memory has no...
POSTED Friday, April 11, 2008
If you’re a Second Life player, you know how cumbersome the keyboard and mouse feel when you’re trying to move around that virtual world, interact with others and construct stuff. Second Life creator chairman and designer of groundbreaking spreadsheet software...
POSTED Friday, April 11, 2008
Now here's a little piece of technology I didn't know existed: retinal projectors. This pair of eyeglasses has a retinal scanning display on board, weighing a mere 25g and sitting comfortably on your face. It then "irradiates low-intensity light on...
POSTED Friday, April 11, 2008
The Guggenheim Museum has established a tradition of building structures to house and display art that are themselves works of art. Following the lead of the original Guggenheim in New York designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and the stunning...
POSTED Friday, April 11, 2008
You're looking at a pretty amazing idea for generating solar power: Solar Balloons. These gigantic, helium-filled balloons would be tethered to the ground and hoisted far up into the air, allowing them to generated electricity and send it back down...
POSTED Thursday, April 10, 2008
Sure, there are a lot of concept car designs floating around, but when Toyota cranks out a futuremobile, everyone remembers the Prius and stands at attention. This 1/X plug-in hybrid concept shaves off plenty of pounds to save energy,...
POSTED Thursday, April 10, 2008
We all know that the current generation of light bulbs are woefully inefficient, sucking up juice and not converting all that much of it into light. So what are we going to replace them with? Well, we know there are...
POSTED Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Those kooky scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have gone overboard with this programmable tattoo concept. It uses hair-sized nanotubes embedded in the skin to display an image of your choice, which persists even after you turn off the...
POSTED Tuesday, April 8, 2008
A wireless newspaper with a flexible color touchscreen the size of a tabloid may be on the way within the next two years. Media giant Hearst Corp. has been pumping cash into a stealth startup called FirstPaper, whose flagship...
POSTED Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Parasols are good for more than just decorating those fruity tropical cocktails. For example, Parasolar, a design concept by Oded Shorer, has an easily carried case that opens up to reveal a cloth canopy with integrated photovoltaic panels. Neat....
POSTED Monday, April 7, 2008
Right under our noses, those Swiss wizards have been creating The Grid, a worldwide data network that’s 10,000 times faster than the slow-poke Internet we know today. It’s happening at CERN, that hotbed of technology where Web daddy Tim...
POSTED Monday, April 7, 2008
The Sensisphere is a really cool multi-touch display that takes the shape of half a sphere sticking out of the wall. Reminiscent of the fancy displays seen in the movie Minority Report, it lets you rotate and move objects...
POSTED Friday, April 4, 2008
No, this is not some new supersonic aircraft or UFO. It’s a house designed by Jérôme Olivet, who learned his stuff from the great Philippe Starck. Jet House is designed to look like it’s moving fast even though its...
POSTED Friday, April 4, 2008
Okay, I’ll be up front with you. I just can’t stand April Fool’s Day. We’re supposed to be telling you the truth, gaining credibility every day and becoming a site upon which you can rely. Then along comes this...
POSTED Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Pantech, maker of some pretty innovative phones, recently challenged students at a variety of universities across Korea to design a phone for 2010. Pantech asked and they received, but some of the winning designs look like phones better suited...
POSTED Monday, March 31, 2008
Electric cars could soon be free. Well, free if you sign up for a six-year contract for batteries and charging, that is. A new company called Project Better Place aims to solve the biggest problems of electric cars —...
POSTED Monday, March 31, 2008
This Luna Watch design concept by John Pszeniczny is as luminous as it is beautiful. As the story goes, such a bauble would be somehow made of Spessartite Garnet with stainless steel and crystal in there somewhere. Embedded within...
POSTED Friday, March 28, 2008
Here’s a design concept that old-school artists who wear berets and paint with palettes will like. The gorgeous Palette-Digital Artist is an entry into the Microsoft NextGen PC Design Competition for 2008. It's a handheld touchscreen PC, and looky...
POSTED Thursday, March 27, 2008
Solar energy has enormous appeal, but until now it’s been just too expensive. Maybe not any more. A Massachusetts startup called 1366 Technologies has created solar cells in its lab that company scientists are saying are 27% more efficient, bringing...
POSTED Thursday, March 27, 2008
Footlume is a new idea that looks to revolutionize floor fashion from a team at London's South Bank University. I didn't think floor fashion needed to be changed, but this isn't a bad idea. Footlume is electroluminescent flooring that...
POSTED Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The manhunters are coming. Air Force pal and defense contractor Northrop Grumman has been tinkering with this X-47B drone since early in this century, but now things are getting serious. How serious? The sophisticated radio-controlled jet might be flying...
POSTED Saturday, March 22, 2008
We wrote about this flying car last week, and some of you wanted more information. Fortunately, we were lucky enough to run into Chris Milner, the younger half of the father-son team that runs Milner Motors, yesterday at the...
POSTED Thursday, March 20, 2008
It’s awfully difficult to build a flying robot with spy gear built in, so why not just implant that paraphernalia in a living bug? Scientists are making progress on the idea of a cyborg butterfly, with a Georgia Tech...
POSTED Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Imagine looking at an entire wall built of these LED Glass Bricks, with the square shapes of LED light stretching into infinity and colors changing in countless computerized configurations and patterns. The possibilities are mind-boggling. The Red Dot Design...
POSTED Monday, March 17, 2008
The United States Naval Research Laboratory and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are fixing to put a telescope on the Moon, placed there by robotic rovers. Called the Dark Ages Lunar Interferometer, the DALI mission is still in its conceptual stages,...
POSTED Monday, March 17, 2008
The latest idea to come from the big-brains at MIT is Siftables, a modular interactive computing system. Each Siftable is a 20MHz computer that includes a full-color OLED screen, infrared, 3-axis accelerometer, Bluetooth, flash memory, rechargeable battery and more....
POSTED Monday, March 17, 2008
What will San Francisco be like 100 years from now? The History Channel sponsored a City of the Future contest for architects to show us their vision of Utopian metropolises from 2108, and the winner for the San Francisco...
POSTED Friday, March 14, 2008
You know that feeling when you misplace something, but in your mind you can picture the item sitting on a shelf, counter or somewhere else? Personally, it's one hell of an annoyance, but now a new device from Japanese...
POSTED Friday, March 14, 2008
Our jaws dropped at LucidTouch, a great see-through touchscreen idea Microsoft showed us last October. Now the company’s photoshopped up a really pretty simulated tablet PC using the technology that lets you see your hands on the other side...
POSTED Wednesday, March 12, 2008
As the first hints of spring creep up into our consciousness, grill designers are getting ready for the upcoming barbecuing season with some creative concepts. Here’s what the outdoor grill of the future might look like, a pendant hanging...
POSTED Wednesday, March 12, 2008
How do you distract a bunch of reporters at a tech-heavy media event? Give them a big interactive display to play with. Reminiscent of the interface from the movie Minority Report, this media wall at CeBIT 2008 works a lot...
POSTED Tuesday, March 11, 2008
As gas prices get higher and higher, Europeans build vehicles that are smaller and smaller. This three-wheeled Sidam Xnovo is more motorcycle than car, leaning with the turns and offered in enclosed and open-air versions. The first iteration will...
POSTED Monday, March 10, 2008
As global warming gets worse, the ice caps will melt. This will raise the levels of the world's oceans, flooding costal areas and cities. So long, NYC! It was nice knowing you, Tokyo! Boy, it sure will be interesting to...
POSTED Monday, March 10, 2008
Let’s get away to the lake house for the weekend. If you don’t mind a long plane flight, imagine taking off to your own 2153-square-foot villa at the Hingarae Residences and Resort on Lake Taupo in northern New Zealand,...
POSTED Friday, March 7, 2008
Here’s a design concept that uses nanotech teamed up with photovoltaics to make windows that light the night using organic LEDs (OLED). Winner of a Dyson Student Award, Lightway uses panels shaped in a style that harkens back to...
POSTED Friday, March 7, 2008
All the official scenarios for going to Mars involve a multi-person crew, and a return to Earth. But what if we sent just one man, without a plan to return him to our world? That’s an idea dreamed up...
POSTED Wednesday, March 5, 2008
The conspiracy theorists among us decry the use of finger print laptop security devices and iris scanning ATMs, but one eye-based technology is likely to grow in popularity despite the tin foil hats out there. The Kome Kami Switch is...
POSTED Wednesday, March 5, 2008
What goes up, must come down … eventually. That’s the principle U.S. military research agency DARPA wanted to stretch to its limit when it dreamed up the Vulture project, an unmanned spy plane that could stay aloft for five...
POSTED Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Toyota’s being coy about iQ, its latest pocketcar that just rolled out in its shipping trim at the Geneva Motor Show. Clearly aimed to compete directly with the Mercedes-built Smart Fortwo car, the company’s not saying if iQ will...
POSTED Tuesday, March 4, 2008
OK, the Cyberdesk isn't really a desk — that's clear enough. The misleading name aside, it's a pretty wild piece of concept bling from the minds at Krohn Design, who asked, "Why not overlap the real and the virtual?" The...
POSTED Monday, March 3, 2008
How long do you expect your flashlight to last without needing a recharge? A few hours, perhaps? How about 80 years, how does that sound? Because that's just how long newly developed micro LEDs can last on just a single...
POSTED Saturday, March 1, 2008
If you’re thinking about going green with a Toyota Prius, hold on a second. Underneath this spectacular spacecraft-like exterior by Italdesign Giugiaro beats the frugal heart of a Prius. Well, almost, because the Quaranta concept car, to be rolled...
POSTED Friday, February 29, 2008
Someday, when curved organic LEDs (OLED) are cheap enough, an arc-shaped iMac will actually be possible (to give you an idea, a 11-inch non-curved OLED screen costs $2500 today). Until then, we’ll have to settle for iView, a design...
POSTED Friday, February 29, 2008
Hey, automobile industry, we need to talk. You've been making a lot of promises lately and, well, we're not really sure if we believe you anymore. How can you even ask why? Remember that whole "flying car" thing? Yeah, It's...
POSTED Wednesday, February 27, 2008
“Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” Can’t you just hear that sentence in your head as you look at this 1/12 scale model of the Discovery EVA pod from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Wish we had more information about...
POSTED Monday, February 25, 2008
That Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope out in the New Mexico desert isn’t quite large enough, because soon it’ll be the Expanded Very Large Array. Its analog innards, in place since the beginning of the disco era in...
POSTED Monday, February 25, 2008
The Morph is a concept device designed by Nokia and the United Kingdom's University of Cambridge that explores the future of portable gadgetry when married with nanotechnology. Ever wonder what technology designers see when they dream at night? This is it.
POSTED Monday, February 25, 2008
Car maker Tata Motors announced the world’s first air-powered car last year for India, and now it’s going to be delivering a version to the U.S. starting in 2009 or early 2010. The company’s Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) division...
POSTED Friday, February 22, 2008
If you’re from the South, you know that there’s hardly anything more plentiful than algae, especially on a quiet pond in the middle of nowhere on a hot late-summer day. Now all that green goo will be put to...
POSTED Friday, February 22, 2008
Google is sponsoring the Lunar X Prize, paying $20 million to the first team that can land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. Once the robot craft arrives at the lunar surface, to win the money it must transmit...
POSTED Friday, February 22, 2008
A Japanese firm is working on a new technology that may make keys of any form, even keycards, obsolete. By using human contact as a key, it allows people who are verified to have access to an area to open...
POSTED Thursday, February 21, 2008
Want to see how cars might run 20 years from now? Look no further than Corgi's H2Go, a toy car that runs on the most common gas in the universe: hydrogen.
POSTED Thursday, February 21, 2008
Alternative living spaces are all the rage lately, but some of the most interesting solutions continue to come from Japan. This inflatable Japanese teahouse, designed by Kengo Kuma, was created for an exhibit at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt....
POSTED Thursday, February 21, 2008
After Arquitectura Organica's Javier Senosiain created his organically-inspired Nautilus House, he's done it again, this time with a wild design that looks like a serpent in repose. Quetzalcoatl Nest, named after the Aztec snake/bird god of learning and knowledge,...
POSTED Wednesday, February 20, 2008
You might think a computer is pretty useless without its keyboard and mouse. That is, unless you’ve met the Wizkid. What looks like a simple computer screen with a robotic neck is a much more complex, emotional creature. Wizkid’s screen...
POSTED Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The crazy kids are at it again, this time teaming up with NASA to proceed with a project that would plant hundreds of telescopes over a two square kilometer area on the far side of the moon that always...
POSTED Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Few things suck more than running out of battery power for your iPod or cell phone, but if Zhong Lin Wang's power generating yarn ever makes it to market, this problem could be relegated to the trash can of...
POSTED Saturday, February 16, 2008
If you've even poked around the back of your fridge to dig out that stray bag of catnip the cat batted behind there, you might have been surprised to notice that the coils on the back of the fridge...
POSTED Saturday, February 16, 2008
Designer Marta Antoszkiewicz unifies table and chairs with Kitchenette, a smoothly rounded set that hides away its four chairs when you're not using them. While it might look a bit like a painted cardboard box, its construction is sturdy...
POSTED Thursday, February 14, 2008
Who cares what the neighbors think? Let's build a house that looks like a snail shell! That's just what a Mexico City couple did, with the help of the astonishing imagination of those wild and wooly architects at Senosiain...
POSTED Thursday, February 14, 2008
The future will soon arrive. The House of the Future is coming back to Disneyland, and this time around, Microsoft, HP and LifeWare will be paying the bills instead of Monsanto, which originally sponsored the first House of the...
POSTED Wednesday, February 13, 2008
This tiny single-seater can fly more than a mile into the wild blue at faster than 100 mph, but wait just a second here. There are no wings anywhere in sight. Wingless flying isn't all it can do, says...
POSTED Wednesday, February 13, 2008
What if New York City were totally trashed in a disaster? That was the premise for a design competition that spawned this Cloud City idea by Studio Lindfors. It was one the Selected Entries in the "What if New...
POSTED Friday, February 8, 2008
The revolving door, now that is one heck of an invention! This door has been an active part of hotel and office life for decades and just now someone has though to turn it into a human hamster wheel....
POSTED Friday, February 8, 2008
One last look at the NEC concept gadget lab yields us this War of the Worlds style mobile device called the Palette. With a built-in color LCD monitor, a transparent onscreen keyboard and an array of bubbly menu buttons,...
POSTED Friday, February 8, 2008
The tragic and only crash of a Concorde airliner, Air France Flight 4590, marked the end of supersonic travel for some and, at the very least, a colossal step backward for others. Well, if you thought The Future was pretty...
POSTED Thursday, February 7, 2008
Designer Fred De Garilhe was apparently thinking more about makeup packaging and jewelry than cell phones when he designed this Chanel Choco phone concept. The slim slider collapses into a square piece of shiny glass, festooned with a latticework...
POSTED Thursday, February 7, 2008
Here's H2GO, the first fuel cell model car that you can actually steer. Toy maker Corgi teamed up with Horizon, the company that pioneered the concept last year with its uncontrollable H-Racer, a $99 fuel cell toy (now available)...
POSTED Thursday, February 7, 2008
Many of our day-to-day necessities rely on processing chips: cell phones, MP3 players, computers, calculators and so on, and many of these devices use already efficient chips that require one volt of energy. Texas Instruments just isn't satisfied, it...
POSTED Wednesday, February 6, 2008
A rather strange device we recently discovered in the SGI concept gadget lab is the KOTOHANA Emotion Communicator. The KOTOHANA (literally "event flower") would communicate human emotions via color spectrums undulating across the surface of the device's flower-like surface. The...
POSTED Wednesday, February 6, 2008
The TicketTime concept's purpose is to address the issue of time zones when flying, but more so I see this idea as just a downright convenience. Attached to the boarding pass is a digital watch that syncs with and...
POSTED Wednesday, February 6, 2008
CNN's been trailing Fox News in ratings for years now— how can it gain viewers on an important day like Super Tuesday? By imitating Minority Report, of course. Recently the cable news network introduced what it calls the Magic...
POSTED Tuesday, February 5, 2008
There are badass data input devices and then there's the AXES Intuitive Information Terminal. Looking more like a "Stargate" secret of all universal knowledge artifact rather than a cleverly crafted concept device, the AXES Intuitive Information Terminal would serve...
POSTED Saturday, February 2, 2008
The sci-fi world of Robin Williams' "Final Cut" -- a reality in which anyone can perpetually record their every waking moment on video -- is fast approaching. But until we develop the embeddable technology from the movie we'll probably...
POSTED Friday, February 1, 2008
You can tell fuel cells are just about to hit it big. There are toy cars (and real cars) that run on the things, and heck, they might even be safe enough to take on an airplane. NEC wants...
POSTED Monday, January 28, 2008
MIT's Media Lab is always looking for new and creative ways to mess with our heads, and at a recent corporate event in Tokyo, it came up with a doozy. Lab researchers pinned sociometric badges on 70 attendees to...
POSTED Monday, January 28, 2008
How does the famous quote go? Why settle for e, when z is available? It's something like that. Polaroid is looking to eliminate the hassles of ink, ink cartridges and the like with the Zink printing products. Zink stands...
POSTED Monday, January 28, 2008
There's been plenty of discussion over the last couple of years of NHK Japan's's plans to develop a 7680 x 4320 high definition video system called Super Hi-Vision, but most reports I've seen tend to gloss over the associated...
POSTED Saturday, January 26, 2008
While it looks a bit like a motorcycle helmet with PC fans slapped all over it, researchers at the University of Sunderland in England believe that patients affected by Alzheimer's who wear their apparatus will experience improvement. The helmet...
POSTED Friday, January 25, 2008
That's not a UFO lighting up your shower stall—it's the Hansaclear Lux, a shower head with LEDs that let you choose a different lighting color every day. The prettiest color-changing shower head we've seen yet, its unique design clearly...
POSTED Thursday, January 24, 2008
Sure, gigantic Gundam robots aren't real, existing mainly in the imaginations of Japanese youths, but what if they were? What if we really could build building-sized robots to do our bidding? How much would such an endeavor cost? Important, heady...
POSTED Thursday, January 24, 2008
The VW diesel station wagon I had in high school was the most unsexy car imaginable: it took about 5 minutes to warm up, rumbled like a farm tractor, and did 0 to 60 in about 2 minutes flat....
POSTED Thursday, January 24, 2008
We've heard lots of guff about the kitchen of the future, but French designer Antoine Lebrun takes the concept to the next level with Aion. His fanciful concept for the Fagor Brandt group works the way the earth does;...
POSTED Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Sure, the idea for the Eco-cook may be based around energy consumption. By using one pot and convenient dividers, less energy is requires to cook food and less water is needed as well, which in turn saves the earth...
POSTED Monday, January 21, 2008
Though some of you may have seen it in science class as a kid, we love this video of hydrophobic sand in action. The sand (sometimes known as magic sand) was originally invented to help contain large ocean oil...
POSTED Monday, January 21, 2008
What's the most painful part of everyday life for you? For me it is grocery shopping, easily. Remember Supermarket Sweep? That show made shopping seem so glamorous and in all reality shopping is a giant pain in the rear....
POSTED Monday, January 21, 2008
The big brains at DARPA are at it again, this time teaming up with Oklahoma State University to develop unmanned aerial vehicles that will be small enough to fit into a soldier's pocket. The heart of the project is...
POSTED Monday, January 21, 2008
Imagine if you could have bionic eyes that gave you a display overlaid over your vision. You could see information about things that you were looking at, just like the Terminator. It sure would make life more interesting, wouldn't it?...
POSTED Friday, January 18, 2008
Here's a sure sign that the International Space Station is a solution looking for a problem: The space platform might be launching a Space Shuttle-shaped paper airplane that will glide back to earth at 5300 miles per hour. The...
POSTED Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Athlete Oscar Pistorius, a 21-year-old from South Africa, has been ruled ineligible to compete in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on the grounds of an unfair mechanical advantage. Pistorius lost both his legs when he was 11 months old...
POSTED Tuesday, January 15, 2008
After a long week in Las Vegas, something about these domino-shaped flash drives seems so right. The design concept by Brazilian designer Marcos Breder takes the form of interlocking halves of dominoes. The design is practical, too. Besides the...
POSTED Monday, January 14, 2008
We’ve all heard the high school lesson about wave interference — like when sound waves hit an object, bending around it and crashing into each other to create a whole new pattern when they reach the other side. Now researches...
POSTED Monday, January 14, 2008
Floating lights are so trippy, man. And now medical assistance won't be needed to achieve the effect of floating lights thanks to the SCHOTT LightPoints. SCHOTT LightPoint is essentially two panes of glass sandwiched around LED lights. I know...
POSTED Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Hiding in shadows or using darkness for concealment won’t do any good — not from the FLIR digital video cameras, which use heat rather than light to see in the dark. These cameras, which are based on the same...
POSTED Monday, January 7, 2008
Thick, chunky batteries can only mean gadgets that are thicker than they need to be and weigh much more than they should. Thankfully Zhang Xiachang has come up with a battery that is so thin, you can roll it...
POSTED Monday, December 31, 2007
Sure, a nice, five second cartoon would be great for these digital billboards that are going up in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and 15 other cities, but that isn't a feasible option for these new, high-tech billboards...
POSTED Thursday, December 27, 2007
Talk about the separation of science and religion. A group of Israeli scientists printed the entire text of the Hebrew Bible on to an area smaller than half a grain of sugar, no doubt enraging anti-science religious zealots and...
POSTED Wednesday, December 26, 2007
When most people think of the SCI FI series Battlestar Galactica, they think of super-sophisticated synthetic lifeforms (a.k.a. Cylons) and starships that travel faster than light. But those aren't the show's only high-tech wonders; check out these mind-blowing futuristic...
POSTED Monday, December 24, 2007
Being able to see through walls was something that only certain superheroes have ever been able to do, and it's something that many people have dreamt about, mostly for perverted reasons. Well, mortal crime fighters and perverts, I have good...
POSTED Friday, December 21, 2007
It's the time of year: Stockings are hung by the chimney with care, and you hope that the saint of all things high-tech soon will be there. After one too many eggnogs, you slip off for a fitful night's...
POSTED Thursday, December 20, 2007
Why purchase a generator for your compound when you could power your home or apartment building with a mini-nuclear reactor, built by a reliable, brand name company? Why indeed. Toshiba has designed what it calls a micro nuclear reactor....
POSTED Wednesday, December 19, 2007
It starts off as an ordinary shipping container, but throw a switch and ninety seconds later the Illy Push Button House has magically expanded into a five-room abode. Architect and designer Adam Kalkin created this jack-in-the-box-like dwelling, whose sections...
POSTED Tuesday, December 18, 2007
We've told you before that SSD flash memory drives are the future, but we've been waiting for them to catch up with our expectations. While laptop and mp3-player-sized drives are still pretty prohibitively expensive, they're dropping in price rapidly....
POSTED Monday, December 17, 2007
Even though the United States may think otherwise, soccer is the most popular sport in the world. And when each game if filled with tens of thousands of angry, drunk hooligans, it is important for a referee to make...
POSTED Friday, December 14, 2007
The race to build a working and dependable scramjet is happening all the world over — the United States, China, Australia and who knows who else all want one. DARPA's HTV-3X, also known as Blackswift, is an unmanned scramjet-powered...
POSTED Friday, December 14, 2007
Scientists in Japan have created a thin sheet of plastic that allows gadgets sitting on it to communicate with each other wirelessly. The sheet also serves as a wireless charger for the devices touching it. That makes it an...
POSTED Friday, December 14, 2007
Remember those glow in the dark stars that you could stick on your ceiling and that would glow for a few minutes before you fell asleep? MPK Co., a company that makes glow paint, is working on a technology...
POSTED Thursday, December 13, 2007
You know how you will see movies like Minority Report and always wonder when and if the technology used will be really available? Yeah, O'Neill has kind of done that, but backwards with the recently announced Navjacket. This jacket...
POSTED Thursday, December 13, 2007
Neurosky has been in the mind-control business for quite some time, but its bio-sensor and signal processing system is finally getting put to good work. NeuroSky and Sega Toys will be teaming up to create mind-controllable toys capable of...
POSTED Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Lots of people take issue with wind power systems. They're unsightly, loud, can be unreliable if the wind slows down, and their windmills kill innocent birds. A company called Magenn aims to change all that with the Magenn Air...
POSTED Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Neuromancer Krischan Schallenberger of Germany must be tired of those unwieldy appendages he was born with — some call them fingers — because he's created a mind-to-sound hood that, when coupled with a synthesizer, allows him to crank out...
POSTED Thursday, December 6, 2007
We're constantly searching for these electronic monstrosities so far ahead of their time that only concept designers dare tackle giving such products a face and a name. After the jump, take a peek into our future fetish and 10 nonexistent — but awesome — tech toys that take our gadget lust to a more advanced level.
POSTED Tuesday, December 4, 2007
When you're floating around on your super yacht, sometimes you need to make a quick getaway, and that's where this Focus 21 France design concept might be just what you're looking for. You can configure it for 15 passengers,...
POSTED Monday, December 3, 2007
Constantly trying to improve energy efficiency inside today's airtight houses makes the air stale, so homeowners are going to great lengths to freshen their indoor environments with high-tech heat exchangers and air purification systems. But French designer Mathieu Lehanneur...
POSTED Friday, November 30, 2007
The Segway was supposed to be revolutionary, but somehow it just didn't do it for us. However, this Vertipod is like a flying Segway. Now that's different. Fueled by gasoline or ethanol, its 440cc lawnmower-like engine can propel the craft...
POSTED Wednesday, November 28, 2007
The Volitan, or the "Flying Fish," is a concept design for a boat that would run green over the great big blue. It harnesses both the power of the wind and the Sun, using solid sails and an array...
POSTED Thursday, November 15, 2007
Why are there so many wind turbines becoming available lately? Wind energy is irresistible because it's so clean and cheap. But if the wind's barely blowing, we're just tilting at windmills. Even in a light 3.3-MPH breeze, this new...
POSTED Friday, November 9, 2007
NBC Universal's Green Week is here, focusing on topics that affect the environment. All week long we'll be bringing you special stories to help get you on Gaia's good side. Renewable energy is still just a small part of...
POSTED Thursday, November 8, 2007
Going deaf and blind? That is unfortunate, but there is a solution to both of those problems with the Varibel "hearing glasses" that are being developed by scholars at the Delft University of Technology and Philips. The arms of the...
POSTED Thursday, November 8, 2007
Benjamin, I want to say one word to you, just one word. Are you listening? Starch. Hawthorne, CA, based Cereplast is changing the world of plastics, creating a more eco-friendly version made from the starches in corn, tapioca, wheat and...
POSTED Wednesday, November 7, 2007
The British Ministry of Defense is cooking up a nasty surprise for enemy infantry and armor with a system it hopes will render its tanks invisible by 2012. Sounds a little shaky, but the invisible defense would employ a...
POSTED Thursday, November 1, 2007
Maybe I have been asleep for too long, but a New Zealander has come out of nowhere with a homemade hovercraft. The designer, Rudy Heeman, has been working on this craft for the past 11 years and has experienced...
POSTED Sunday, October 28, 2007
Pardon us while we go nuts over this teaser photo of an upcoming hybrid sports car that auto industry wonks say will make its debut at the upcoming North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) this January. To be built...
POSTED Friday, October 26, 2007
Although Canon still rules the day when it comes to digital cameras the company shouldn't rest on its laurels. New from the concept lab of independent designer David Munscher comes the Canon Snap camera. Able to fit snugly on...
POSTED Friday, October 26, 2007
One of the recent CEATEC innovations we neglected to tell you about was the wearable computer called TextileNet from Kanazawa University. The rather funny image above was created by the research group to illustrate the difficulties of current wearable...
POSTED Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Those geniuses at Samsung are at it again, and this time they've crammed together so many memory cells so tightly, they've come up with the world's densest flash memory chip. Using a process that packs the cells just 30...
POSTED Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Hitachi's finger vein authentication system represents a decade's worth of development and improvement and the technology has already been included in computers, ATMs and used for cardless payment authorization. Every finger has a vein configuration that is unique to...
POSTED Tuesday, October 23, 2007
We were surprised at Hitachi's 32-inch HDTV whose thickness was just 0.74 inches. Now it looks like Samsung has topped that, creating a flat-panel HDTV that's half that thick. Imagine a TV that's just 10mm thin — just over...
POSTED Monday, October 22, 2007
Well, almost. Hitachi is developing hard drives that combine an older technology called Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR), with new more densely packed data regions, which they say will allow for a 4 TB (4000 GB) drive within the next three...
POSTED Friday, October 19, 2007
Researchers at UC Irvine have designed the first radio using nano-sized parts. Why? Even they didn't have a convincing answer in this interview. Not all the parts in this AM radio are tiny; so far only the demodulator is...
POSTED Thursday, October 18, 2007
Inventor Richard Palmer takes few shovel shots to the head and kneecap as he demonstrates the effectiveness of his D30 foam at absorbing incredible impacts. In this case, a Sky TV news reporter takes a few vigorous swings at...
POSTED Thursday, October 18, 2007
With all of the talk about breaches of private personal information these days, the mere thought that Microsoft wants to read your, uh, thoughts should scare the crap out of anyone. Apparently, the folks in Redmond are attempting to secure...
POSTED Thursday, October 18, 2007
We've been teasing you with the idea of wirelessly charging up your cellphone or iPod for the past year, first introducing you to the gee-whiz tech and then letting you know it would soon be available. Now Wild Charge...
POSTED Wednesday, October 17, 2007
It is pretty dang surprising that this technology trend is so slow to take off. With displays so small they can be rolled up, everyone and their hamster owning an iPod and wireless everything existing; it was only inevitable...
POSTED Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Lately we've been hearing a lot about alternative ways of generating electricity, and the idea of a solar power-gathering satellite sounds like the best plan yet. Its proponents say an orbital power station placed in a position where it's...
POSTED Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Anyone who's seen Back to the Future knows how awesome a power source lightning is. Now an inventor from Illinois is getting serious about harnessing lightning storms as an alternative energy source. Steve LeRoy has developed a system whereby...
POSTED Monday, October 15, 2007
This, my friends, is the future of portable gadgets. Sure, touchscreens might be all the rage with the iPhone crowd, but it's not the best input method out there. I mean, when your fingers are over the screen, you...
POSTED Friday, October 12, 2007
Toyota's most recent personal mobility concept car called the I-Unit won rave reviews for it's futuristic looks, but was just too weird for most to imagine actually buying one. Now the automaker has updated the concept with a new...
POSTED Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Honda takes the jellybean car a step further with a concept vehicle it calls PUYO, meaning "touching the vehicle's soft body" in Japanese. The company's designers tried to make this car feel like a jelly bean, too, filling it...
POSTED Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Look out: science is about to get crazy. The UK government is rethinking their laws on hybrid embryos, possibly allowing for experiments on human/animal hybrids if approved by regulators. Yes, in the near future people might be creating half-man/half-tigers...
POSTED Tuesday, October 9, 2007
As Japan's population grows older and the youngsters keep their heads buried in digital recreations, the nation is increasingly looking to robotics to care for the elderly. But if the Kanagawa Institute of Technology has its way, the elderly...
POSTED Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Jeff Han is the father of the multitouch display. Sure, Apple made a mini version of one famous on their iPhone, and Microsoft has a fancy new table that uses the technology, but Han's is the original. And now...
POSTED Monday, October 8, 2007
The CREATEC Japan conference is a place where the technology and chips "inside" gadgets are the primary focus, but one piece of hardware really stood out: The Trigon pyramid touchscreen interface. (Link to PDF spec sheet in Japanese.) Set...
POSTED Saturday, October 6, 2007
You know LEDs are getting tremendously bright when you can put together seven of them for this bicycle headlight and end up with a fixture that's as bright as many car headlights. You can either mount the "Betty" lamp...
POSTED Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Sick of your laptop's battery dying after an hour or two of use? Wish you could get a battery with a more useful lifespan? How's 30 years sound? Should that be long enough between charges for you? Because that's just...
POSTED Tuesday, October 2, 2007
How thin is too thin? No such thing if you're Sony, who just announced a TV that's a mere 3 millimeters — or just 0.12 inches — thick. The secret to the XEL-1's trim figure is the quickly spreading...
POSTED Monday, October 1, 2007
Not all swarming robot vehicles fly through the air like maple tree seeds—some of them creep along the ground on tiny tank tracks, and are so small they're hardly even the size of your high school class ring. This...
POSTED Sunday, September 30, 2007
Today in New York City, HP revealed "for the first time outside of the lab" a concept handheld for the company's Mediascape (or "Mscape") gaming software. The handheld has been sighted before, though — specifically in an HP commercial...
POSTED Thursday, September 27, 2007
We've shown you some seriously tiny cameras, but now Lockheed Martin is looking to supply the Pentagon with flying cameras that are many times smaller. A miniature payload module about the size of an Altoid can be carried by...
POSTED Monday, September 24, 2007
As a self-avowed Coca-Cola fanatic, I'm downright excited about word that the soda giant is preparing to come out with self-cooled bottles that chill on the inside as soon as a thirsty consumer twists off the top. Sodaholics know there's...
POSTED Thursday, September 20, 2007
NASA is hiring astronauts, and if you have The Right Stuff, you might be one of 10 to 15 spacemen and spacewomen who will get to hang out (literally) at the International Space Station, float around in space like...
POSTED Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Forget the pulse-pounding feeling you get from steampunk computers — here's one of the most alluring laptop concepts we've seen in a long time. If designer Eno Setiawan had his way, the Sony Vaio notebook would look sleek and...
POSTED Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Fashion-wise, Benjamin Hubert's "Insense" home virtual-reality headset (as opposed to all those office virtual-reality headsets) is miles ahead of other similarly themed gadgets we've seen. But these VR goggles are a little hazy on the function side, with Ben's...
POSTED Monday, September 17, 2007
Some posts are almost completely picture-driven and this one about Japan's Super-Kamiokande is one of them. The Super-Kamiokande, or "Super-K," is a neutrino observatory located one-thousand meters underground in Gifu, Japan. Originally built in 1983, and renovated just last...
POSTED Friday, September 14, 2007
Solar energy is attractive because of its abundance and negligible impact on the environment, but reliably collecting it in large quantities can be pretty tricky. The most common method of using ground-based, stationary solar collectors only works during the...
POSTED Thursday, September 6, 2007
One thing digital technology has all but done away with is the venerable slide projector. Portable screens and individual slides have given way to photo memory cards and slim TVs. One problem with the new-school method is those TVs...
POSTED Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Ever since Princess Leia uttered her famous words, years of research and development have gone into constructing a true holographic display. The research papers are filtering out of SIGGRAPH 2007, and a team from USC, Fakespace Labs and Sony...
POSTED Friday, August 31, 2007
Remember in Back to the Future II how Doc Brown overcame the plutonium problem by installing a "Mr. Fusion" in the DeLorean? Well, that might have seemed like a joke of some kind, or at least wishful thinking, but...
POSTED Friday, August 31, 2007
Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does what ever a spider can. And in the next few years you might be able to pull off some of those crazy wall-crawling stunts, too. Professor Nicola Pugno thinks nanotubes built into gloves and shoes could...
POSTED Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Touchscreens are so hot right now thanks to the iPhone, but they haven't been perfected yet. No, there are plenty of places that touchscreens can and will go that the current generation of models couldn't even dream about. One of...
POSTED Monday, August 27, 2007
As the specter of peak oil and energy depletion looms here on earth, eyes turn to the moon with hopes of mining helium-3 (He3), a gas that's plentiful on the lunar surface but extremely rare back here on terra...
POSTED Friday, August 24, 2007
In research that has far-reaching ramifications into my favorite field of study — video games — a couple of scientists have figured out how to trigger out-of-body experiences in subjects. Yes, you could be made to feel like you...
POSTED Friday, August 24, 2007
Japan is a country full of crazy ideas, but their plan for the world's tallest building makes every single one of their insane USB devices look downright reasonable in comparison. It's a 13,123-foot-tall superstructure. To give you an idea...
POSTED Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Japan's a country known for looking towards the future, which is probably why it seems like it's kind of in the future already. In fact, they've already started work on a "replacement" for the Internet, something they hope to have...
POSTED Monday, August 20, 2007
Earlier this year we gave you a preview of the Fujitsu hand scanner called the PalmSecure, but at the time the device was a just another creepy/cool gadget bound for the clearance bin of some Akihabara recycler. Now news...
POSTED Monday, August 20, 2007
There's power to be found everywhere, from our footsteps to tornadoes. The trick is just figuring out how to harness it. Some German scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute have figured out a way to run electronics off of our...
POSTED Friday, August 17, 2007
Let's face it, cigarettes are a crude nicotine-delivery system. They add dozens of toxic substances to the smoke, when all those smokers wanted was just a dose of their favorite drug. Now there are much safer ways than old-fashioned...
POSTED Thursday, August 16, 2007
Having a powerful computer is all nice and dandy, but if you want your PC to last, you have to keep that sucker cooled. Using fans to pump up airflow inside a computer case is the standard method, though water...
POSTED Wednesday, August 15, 2007
There's been a lot of talk about ray guns and we've even seen a whimsical-looking classic model, but now Optima Technology Group says its MEDUSA Mobile Energy Device might someday be able to actually do some serious damage. It's...
POSTED Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The days of recharging your laptop may be numbered if Samsung's fuel-cell notebook catches on. The Direct Methanol Fuel Cell laptop supposedly carries enough fuel in that chamber beneath the monitor to keep it running for a month. If...
POSTED Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Think cyborgs are purely science fiction? If the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has anything to say about it, they'll be reality by the end of the decade. The APL has given itself until 2009 to create a prosthetic hand...
POSTED Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Physicists may have solved the mystery of levitation, figuring out how to make objects, and even people, float in midair. Star Wars aside, there really is such thing as the Force, that strange phenomenon holding molecules together that scientists...
POSTED Monday, August 6, 2007
Here's a Z-car that's different from any you've ever seen, created by architect Zaha Hadid who earned her designing wings drawing plans for auto plants, not the cars themselves. Her Z.Car is a small single seater, just over 12...
POSTED Thursday, August 2, 2007
The next time some crazy homeless guy comes up to you saying that the government planted a microchip in his brain, he just might be telling the truth. That's because the US Department of Defense has already started a...
POSTED Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Military minds at DARPA are figuring out ways to replace cumbersome satellites with groups of mini-spacecraft that are easier and quicker to launch, are more versatile, and best of all, that cost a lot less than their oversized big brothers....
POSTED Tuesday, July 31, 2007
OLEDs are a hot topic these days, with it being a display technology that allows for super-thin and flexible full-color displays. They aren't perfect, however, often running too hot to be placed inside of devices. Rather than trying to...
POSTED Tuesday, July 31, 2007
United Airlines stepped up its level of service in Business Class, adding lots of gadgets and a 6'4" "lie-flat" seat that's 23.5 inches wide to its list of creature comforts. Leapfrogging rival American Airlines' video players on board, United...
POSTED Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Apparently, flying saucers are the future of eco-friendly vehicles. Who knew? While highways being full of hover saucers might not be happening anytime soon, some aeronautical engineers envision airports loading passengers up into flying saucers and sending them off...
POSTED Wednesday, July 25, 2007
First we heard about a projector small enough to slip into the bottom of a cell phone, and now that component is on its way into a Motorola handset. The PicoP, a miniature projector created by Microvision from a...
POSTED Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The days of a GPS system's monotonous robotic voice giving you directions may be numbered, because these vibrating rings can now quietly indicate which way to go. Designer Gail Knight of the Royal College of Art in the UK...
POSTED Monday, July 23, 2007
Among technophiles, there are those who prefer simplicity and functionality, and those who look for attention-grabbing conversation pieces. This conceptual media player from designer Can-Hong Huang looks to be directed squarely at the latter. The latest gadget to take...
POSTED Friday, July 20, 2007
Through the ages, Man has searched for a crystal ball that can tell the future, and now super salesmen/researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are telling the Pentagon they're working on a remarkable suite of software that...
POSTED Friday, July 20, 2007
California researchers are using electromagnets to make nanoparticles gush a whole rainbow of colors. This, they say, may provide more brightness in flat-panel displays than existing LCD technology. It might also give birth to a new kind of electronic paper....
POSTED Friday, July 20, 2007
Tick off another science-fiction idea that's entered the science-fact column: A dog in the U.K. just became the world's first to receive a prosthetic limb. The pooch, named Storm, developed a tumor in his leg earlier this year and needed...
POSTED Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Maybe you haven't noticed, but world oil production is peaking and renewable energy sources are heating up along with the planet. Any improvement in solar (and wind) power is a big deal. So let's hear it for the latest...
POSTED Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Here's a hands-free video camera concept by industrial designer Johan Frossen that's worn around the neck or head, and its video is transmitted via Wi-Fi to a cellphone capable of editing its footage. Using a fisheye lens, the camera...
POSTED Monday, July 16, 2007
Getting people potable water in underdeveloped nations is a difficult and important problem. There are far too many places where people don't have access to clean drinking water, and it's a serious global health crisis. That's why this new...
POSTED Thursday, July 12, 2007
It looks like technology is finally catching up to comic books. Well, not all of them: Spidey's web isn't coming anytime soon, nor will you be able to fly like Superman. The protective suit, however is here and ready...
POSTED Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Today's soldiers carry around a lot of battery-operated techno-gear, and the Pentagon is trying to figure out a way to lighten their load. Military brass are offering a million-dollar prize to anyone who develops a wearable electric power system that...
POSTED Friday, July 6, 2007
Do you lay awake nights worrying what would happen if Vice President Cheney's pacemaker battery ran out? I certainly do. Thank heaven British scientists have invented a miniaturized generator that goes places where batteries are hard to replace. Invented...
POSTED Friday, July 6, 2007
Behold the car of the future, a three-wheeled single-seat vehicle using special fuel vapor technology that its maker says gets 92 miles per gallon. Don't let that high mileage fool you, though — this speedster still zips from zero...
POSTED Thursday, July 5, 2007
While fuel cells have to potential to cut the carbon emissions of cars down to zero, they do nothing about the other major concern with automobiles: car accidents. Don't worry, though — defense-research agency DARPA is tackling that one,...
POSTED Thursday, July 5, 2007
If you don't mind placing an object that looks like an egg beater on your roof, you might someday be able to use a personal wind turbine like this to make your electric meter spin backwards. Ben Storan's design...
POSTED Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Soft-tipped bullets have been developed that, rather than killing the victim on impact, instead explode in a cloud of laughing gas. So instead of dealing with a bunch of people with gunshot wounds, you've got a whole bunch of people...
POSTED Tuesday, July 3, 2007
California architect Gregg Fleishman knows how to put together a house in a hurry, and that's just what he's done with this DH1 Disaster House. Unlike the Fab Tree Hab house we showed you here that needs to be...
POSTED Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Ever chopped part of your finger off in a bagel slicer? I'm more of a waffle man myself, but if you've ever sacrificed a chunk of skin to the bagel gods, you know that getting skin grafted on is...
POSTED Tuesday, June 26, 2007
This is about the most extreme sport anyone's ever dreamed up: space diving. A group of space scientists who aren't actually insane aim to give it a try by 2009, jumping from 120,000 feet in a specially designed space...
POSTED Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Look out, compact fluorescent. There's a new kid on the block, and compared to him, you're a dim bulb. Ceravision, a British company, has developed a lamp that uses no filaments or electrodes. Instead, the Continuum 2.4 generates a...
POSTED Tuesday, June 26, 2007
If you're looking for the house of the future you just found it: the Wired magazine LivingHome is not just some design concept, its construction has already begun. There's an old structure on the house's building site that will...
POSTED Monday, June 25, 2007
You know how in the classic piece of cinema Independence Day the alien spacecraft have that sweet laser than can blow up and building beneath it? Such as, most famously, the White House? Well, it looks like the government wants...
POSTED Monday, June 25, 2007
Picking fruit is backbreaking, time-intensive labor, so why not get the robots to do it? Good idea, says Vision Robotics, a California company that's figuring out the best way to accomplish a variety of farming tasks, starting with the...
POSTED Thursday, June 21, 2007
Nothing says "the future" quite like jetpacks. Well, guess what, bub? The future is now. Don't believe me? Just check out that video above! No, that isn't from a movie, it's a real test of Jetpack International's new product....
POSTED Thursday, June 21, 2007
Photo by Guy Plante/Laval University Pretty soon, to see back to the early days of the universe, we'd only need to look up at the moon. Astrophysicists at Laval University in Quebec have proposed a new way to create...
POSTED Thursday, June 21, 2007
Space travel for the rest of us just got a bit closer to reality when Astrium showed off plans for its spiffy space plane, a four-passenger jet that can take off from a conventional runway and blast 62 miles...
POSTED Monday, June 18, 2007
The Wi-Fi robots are coming! The Wi-Fi robots are coming! Yes, those wacky cats at DARPA, the U.S. military's technology R&D center, are at it again. This time, though, the idea is a little more plausible than some of...
POSTED Sunday, June 17, 2007
Attention workaholics and stressmeisters of every stripe: AlphaSphere is a piece of relaxation furniture that might just be able to calm you down, if only for a few minutes. It's a concept by award-winning designer named Sha, who picked...
POSTED Monday, June 11, 2007
Wireless charging, a way of juicing up your gadgets and devices that involves no plugs or cords, is one of those things that people breathlessly talk about when discussing the future of technology. It's seen as a far-off, pie-in-the-sky...
POSTED Monday, June 11, 2007
LEDs are changing the world, and this Koncept Z-Bar lamp makes it immediately obvious how useful they can be. The $130 lamp packs 66 tiny LEDs into a neat little row, and that rank of electronic marvels can crank...
POSTED Friday, June 8, 2007
NASA isn't screwing around with its next Mars mission. They're sending a new rover, the Mars Science Laoratory (MSL), and it's a big one. Weighing nearly 1,800 pounds and nearly the size of a small car, it packs so...
POSTED Thursday, June 7, 2007
The problem with putting stuff in space is that it's just so damn expensive; otherwise everybody would be doing it (apart from just governments and eccentric billionaires). Sending a mere pound of material into space these days costs over...
POSTED Wednesday, June 6, 2007
What do you think — meat grows on trees? Maybe not, but how about in Petri dishes? Scientists in the Netherlands and the United States are working (separately) to create edible meat in the lab from animal stem cells. The...
POSTED Monday, June 4, 2007
Money doesn't grow on trees, but this house does. It's not really built, it's grown over five years, with its supporting trees trained to grow in the right direction with scaffolding holding it in place. Its creators, architects Mitchell...
POSTED Saturday, June 2, 2007
When disaster hits, keeping lines of communication open is essential. With that in mind, Paul Gierow developed the GATR-Com: a beach ball-shaped balloon that's actually a floating satellite dish. Tested during in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the GATR-Com...
POSTED Friday, June 1, 2007
The brave men and women in Nokia's research department apparently watch the Discovery Channel on a little too often, since I can't think of much other inspiration for this lightning-detecting phone they've conceived. Since lightning bolts generate powerful radio waves...
POSTED Saturday, May 26, 2007
Sony knocked our socks off earlier this year with its ultra-thin OLED TVs, and now the company takes that tech a step further with a flexible OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display that could end up in thinner, lighter or...
POSTED Thursday, May 24, 2007
Remember those sliding puzzles that served as cheap party favors? Sometimes you'd find them nestled at the bottom of a cereal box. Here's a computer desk based on that idea, where its storage compartments are conveniently located and have...
POSTED Wednesday, May 23, 2007
If world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking can go zero-G, so can you. Now, if you have $3500, you can be weightless without even taking a space flight. What do you get for your thousands of dollars? You get the ride...
POSTED Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Ruined your hearing with too much loud music? Take a peek into the future with Wirear, a fashion-conscious hearing-aid concept by Australian student designer Sun Kyung Sunwoo. She noticed a number of problems with current hearing aids, and attempts...
POSTED Monday, May 21, 2007
We've gotten so accustomed to that ripping sound that Velcro makes, it might take us a while to get used to Leonard Duffy's invention, an improved fastener that not only eliminates that annoying noise when unfastened, it can hold...
POSTED Friday, May 18, 2007
Remember last summer when laptop batteries were exploding left and right causing the airline industry to place a ban on powering your precious laptop when in the air? While the fault was with poorly manufactured lithium-ion batteries, fuel cells...
POSTED Thursday, May 17, 2007
A video display no thicker than a human hair is the latest breakthrough from LG.Philips. The 4-inch prototype has resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, can reproduce 16.77 million colors, and is just 150 μm thick. The underlying technology...
POSTED Thursday, May 17, 2007
E-paper displays are already thin. Now they're getting flexible, thanks to a breakthrough announced by LG.Philips. (Have you heard the one about the Dutchman and the Korean? Never mind.) The first color "e-paper" display measures 14.1 inches wide and...
POSTED Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Take a look at that tablet PC on the upper left, and imagine it folding up into that palm-sized package you see on the right. That's the idea of designer Daniel Alexander, whose concept for a foldable tablet PC...
POSTED Monday, May 14, 2007
The folks at Tokyo's University of Science may be watching too much '70s television. One of their latest projects is the Muscle Suit, which isn't quite a suit really — more like a pair of borgified hockey shoulder pads....
POSTED Monday, May 14, 2007
Those bright folks at Purdue University are at it again. The game-changing technology in the works this time: a new engine for vehicles that's drastically more efficient than current designs. The key innovation is creating intake and exhaust valves...
POSTED Saturday, May 12, 2007
Scientists have developed a synthetic, "plastic" blood substitute that could be used in emergency situations when real blood isn't available. Lightweight and able to be stored at warm temperatures, the fake blood would be much easier to transport than the...
POSTED Friday, May 11, 2007
The European organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has been building the Large Hadron Collider for many years, but it's finally taking shape and prepping to operate at full power in 2008. The New Yorker has a great feature and...
POSTED Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Ready to have your mind blown? Let's see if we can work our way through this. A scientist at the University of Rochester has figured out a way to create an electromagnetic "wormhole" that bends light and makes it appear...
POSTED Tuesday, May 8, 2007
The first affordable Desktop Factory 3D printer is just about to ship, paving the way for even more sophisticated manufacturing in the future. This first home 3D printer will cost between $5,000 and $7,000 and will be roughly the...
POSTED Monday, May 7, 2007
Has IBM hacked mother nature? The company has harnessed the secret that enables snowflakes, seashells and tooth enamel to generate themselves, using the process to make computer chips that work 35% faster and use 15% less energy than the...
POSTED Saturday, May 5, 2007
Beer power. Yes, beer power. Interested? Let me explain. Foster's brewery in Australia is installing an experimental technology that will generate electricity from brewing waste. Essentially, it's a gigantic fuel cell that contains bacteria that consume water-soluble elements from...
POSTED Thursday, May 3, 2007
The discovery of possibly habitable planet Gliese 581C last week by European astronomers (working from a telescope in Chile) caused a stir in the stargazing world. Some people are already wondering how they can get there. But let's not...
POSTED Wednesday, May 2, 2007
A new lithium-ion battery from Toshiba sucks up juice at 60 times normal speed, recharging 80% of its capacity in just a minute. Heck, it takes longer to cook a hard-boiled egg. Longer to make tea. Longer for most...
POSTED Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Insomniacs, rejoice! Studies are underway into what exactly happens when you fall into a deep sleep and how to cause those sleep waves to happen. Check it: A TMS instrument sends a harmless magnetic signal through the scalp and skull...
POSTED Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Taking a significant step toward a faster future, Japan plans to launch its first maglev train by 2025. Magnetic levitation is a completely different system from regular rail transport, using magnets to float the train above the tracks, reducing...
POSTED Monday, April 30, 2007
This strange-looking device is supposedly the future of gaming. A company called NeuroSky is developing a new type of controller, one that reads your brainwaves. The NeuroSky folks aren't so ambitious that they claim you'll be able to control...
POSTED Monday, April 30, 2007
Good news! A British research team as developed a tool that allows computers to read lips of people on video and then text the transcripts to people. They hope to use it in security cameras, making the whole privacy-free police...
POSTED Thursday, April 26, 2007
You know, I've been saying for years that my TV just isn't as furry as I'd like it to be. I'm glad a major consumer-electronics company has finally stopped treating me like some sort of crackpot and realized that...
POSTED Monday, April 23, 2007
The thing about surgery is that it involves cutting. Which hurts. Yeah, there's anesthetic and everything, but when you're conscious again, all that cutting can add to an already a long and painful recovery. What if there were a...
POSTED Monday, April 23, 2007
If the British have their way, we'll never have any superheroes created by cosmic-ray mishaps in space. Scientists from across the pond are working on a Star Trek-like energy shield that would protect spacecraft from harmful — and potentially superpower-bestowing...
POSTED Friday, April 20, 2007
Way back in 2000, when the Internet was still wild, I started a new writing gig that required me to move from Atlanta to Southern California. While I had no problem moving some of my most valuable possessions (computer,...
POSTED Thursday, April 19, 2007
Samsung recently showed off three completely crazy concept PC designs, computers that have about a zero percent chance of ever hitting store shelves but show off the fact that Samsung has some creative designers on their payroll. First off...
POSTED Monday, April 16, 2007
The Pentagon is working on a plan to put some Internet routers in space. Unfortunately, they aren't going to be there to provide a global WiFi hotspot. Instead, the wireless routers will be there to connect satellites in the same...
POSTED Saturday, April 14, 2007
Here's an unusual circular cell-phone design concept by Dennis Wostrodowski that looks more like a UFO than a phone. Given the intrusive nature of cellphones, we're not sure we would want to call one The Intruder. But once we...
POSTED Thursday, April 12, 2007
Some researchers in Finland have made a machine that can manufacture "human spare parts." Yikes. Apparently what that means is, in their words:The methodology enables fabrication of nano and micrometer scale structures that can be used as parts of...
POSTED Thursday, April 12, 2007
DARPA, the research arm of the Pentagon that's responsible for inventing new and exciting technologies for our soldiers to use to kill people, is hard at work on making a famous sci-fi item a reality: Luke Skywalker's binoculars. Yes,...
POSTED Thursday, April 12, 2007
Who knew there was a demand for this, but a team of researchers in Japan has figured out a way to create cement that conducts electricity. Normal cement is a poor conductor because of its asymmetric crystal structure, but...
POSTED Thursday, April 12, 2007
Back in junior high, my school forced the kids to gather every textbook for all five morning classes before the day started, so you'd have to lug something like 500 pounds of books from class to class, leading to...
POSTED Wednesday, April 11, 2007
A team of Swiss aircraft designers are now flying a small model prototype of SmartFish, a lightweight and fuel-efficient hydrogen fuel cell-powered aircraft that's been in development for five years. So far the team has flown a radio-controlled test...
POSTED Monday, April 9, 2007
Science fiction may soon see another of its concepts defect to the realm of science now that engineers at Purdue University have an invisibility device in the works. Still just a concept at this point, the plan would be to...
POSTED Monday, April 9, 2007
Leave it to the brainiacs at MIT to come up with a huge leap forward in artificial feet while my efforts at the project are stalled out at the conceptual phase. Go figure. Anyhow, the folks at the MIT...
POSTED Thursday, April 5, 2007
A hot-from-the-lab optical chipset from IBM promises to reduce the download time of a movie to as little as a second. It moves data at 160 gigabits per second by replacing electrons flowing through wires with light pulses. Of...
POSTED Monday, April 2, 2007
The days of keeping your thoughts to yourself may be numbered, as scientists in Switzerland have begun developing a machine that can actually read minds. Adapting the same thought-reading technology that allows paralysis victims to type with their brains, the...
POSTED Sunday, April 1, 2007
I feel like lately we've been seeing all sorts of crazy crap that leads me to believe that this is, in fact, the future that we are living in. I know, I know, technically it's the present, but we've...
POSTED Friday, March 30, 2007
Thinking about enjoying a bit of underwater adventure in your own personal submarine? Spanish designer Guillermo Sureda-Burgos has created concepts for three subs that'll let you take one or two of your closest friends along with you. One of...
POSTED Wednesday, March 28, 2007
When a blimp is too slow and a plane can't lift heavy-enough payloads, what's a pilot to do? How about an Aeroscraft, a partially buoyant airship with a rigid hull structure? Made lighter than air with helium, it has...
POSTED Tuesday, March 27, 2007
As humanity spreads far and wide across the globe, we're running out of real estate. Why not just build a private island like visionary engineer and developer Riley Nordell is planning? Just offshore, south of Cancun, Mexico, he'll construct...
POSTED Monday, March 26, 2007
Japanese scientists at Waseda University have designed an organic polymer film (i.e. see through and plastic) that can be used as a rechargeable battery. But this isn't your normal rechargeable battery that you have to replace in a year or...
POSTED Sunday, March 25, 2007
Virgin Galactic has huge wads of cash and NASA has lots of research chops, so the two plan to combine those strengths to develop this hypersonic plane that could go Mach 5, taking you from New York to LA...
POSTED Thursday, March 22, 2007
If you've ever been through the haunted house ride at Disney World, this digital interactive mirror might look familiar. At the end of the ride, you're thrust in front of a mirror and next to you sits the image...
POSTED Wednesday, March 21, 2007
This concept medical gear aims to provide first responders with the best information possible about the people they're treating. As soon as they get to the scene of an accident, they can stick Bluetooth Band-Aids (pictured right) on each...
POSTED Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Dude, physical controllers are so 20th century. Keyboards? Mice? Joysticks? Puh-leeze. The way I see it, if I'm using my hands I might as well be in the stone age. I want my technology to be able to read...
POSTED Saturday, March 17, 2007
Future spacecrafts may use the magnetic fields around Earth and other planets to bounce around the Solar System, providing a completely new method of space travel. It's all very complicated if you aren't some sort of rocket scientist, but...
POSTED Thursday, March 15, 2007
Besides the slow-selling Sony Reader introduced last year, there's been precious little action on the E Ink front. But now here's another contender (pictured above left) aimed specifically at pilots, the eFlyBook. Pilots will like its 8.1-inch screen that's...
POSTED Monday, March 12, 2007
How many times have we watched Mr. Spock take a tricorder reading and furrow his brow? The handheld analytical device has stepped over the boundary between fantasy and reality thanks to researchers at Purdue University. Their invention is a combination...
POSTED Thursday, March 8, 2007
Well, it's official. Life is turning into a mediocre science-fiction movie and our remote control is out of batteries. Israeli defense firm VIPeR has developed an army of small cyborgs that can enter combat zones and exchange fire with...
POSTED Thursday, March 8, 2007
We've seen some odd bicycle designs before, but none were as collapsible as this folding bike concept by British designer Thomas Owen, called "One." Look how it folds into that nicely portable rounded shape, resembling a hatbox with an...
POSTED Monday, March 5, 2007
This prototype of a gaming helmet, dubbed Project Epoc, looks to take your Xbox 360 obsession to a whole new level through your brainwaves. Yup, strap this baby on your head and you'll be mentally (and virtually) killing enemy...
POSTED Friday, March 2, 2007
Is there anything scarier than the thought of an army of cyborg animals, programmed to rip out your jugular with no fear of death? I say no. Which is why the photo here keeps me up at night. Look at...
POSTED Friday, March 2, 2007
This Lexus looks like the car of the future, but it's very real, here today and for sale to the highest bidder. It's a custom-designed Lexus from the 2002 movie Minority Report, depicting the world in the year 2052...
POSTED Wednesday, February 28, 2007
We've seen some cool products come out of the idea of using sea creatures as a basis for design, so kudos to Richard Rogers Partnership for looking at dwellers on the bottom of the ocean for inspiration in creating...
POSTED Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Witness the power of the Control Glove from U.K.-based Engineered Fiber Structures. This spinoff from the University of Manchester looks to have designed a topnotch wireless-gaming gadget which is much cooler looking than a homebrewed Wii gaming glove. The Control...
POSTED Monday, February 26, 2007
Adtron accelerates the race to change the way all data is stored, rolling out 160-GB solid-state flash disks in both IDE and Serial ATA (SATA) configurations. They're the highest-capacity solid-state disks (SSD) yet, besting those small UMPCs' 32-GB drives, and...
POSTED Friday, February 23, 2007
3DLabs gives us a sneak peek at future GPS navigation systems, making GPS maps even easier to follow by showing rendered 3D environments on the screens of smartphones and GPS devices. At a recent trade show in Barcelona, the...
POSTED Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Solar panels that will be more efficient and a whole lot cheaper are on their way, ready to match the cost of old-fashioned fossil fuels within five years. The secret? Researchers are moving away from heavy silicon solar panels...
POSTED Tuesday, February 20, 2007
In the spring, we told you about an extremely promising technology that restored some limited sight to the blind. Still in the experimental stage, the artificial eye, developed by the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California (USC),...
POSTED Sunday, February 18, 2007
Change is in the air, and I'm not talking about the still far-off season of spring. I'm talking about improvements in cameraphone optics, which have been fast and furious recently. Varioptic, a Chinese technology firm, has engineered a cameraphone lens...
POSTED Friday, February 16, 2007
Just look at these sunglasses. Is this a joke? Uber Shades are said to be created by Not-So Bright Sunwear of Germany, and the design concept crams just about everything but the kitchen sink inside their overlarge temples. Even though...
POSTED Monday, February 12, 2007
At first we thought this autonomous snowplow robot was similar to a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner or its worthy competitor, the ROMI. Digging deeper, we realized that Yuki-taro is much more. The 800-pound robot is guided by GPS along...
POSTED Friday, February 9, 2007
Sometime in the next decade, you may be able to say you're helping save the world by ordering some Szechuan beef from the Chinese place on the corner. BiOil, a biodiesel company in California, has plans to buy waste oil...
POSTED Thursday, February 8, 2007
This might look like some sort of loom for making rugs, but in actuality someday it might be knitting new cartilage for the knee you mangled on your ski trip out to Breckenridge. By loading up with stem cells,...
POSTED Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Do your vacation snapshots of the Midwest annoy you because they don't live up to your high photographic standards? Feel like your pictures of the Grand Canyon don't give you enough of the view? Next vacation, you could lock...
POSTED Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Tiny particles are making big news today at the University of Edinburgh, where scientists have created a motor mechanism for a nanomachine. Last year researchers at the University of Georgia developed minuscule nanogenerators to power the nano world, but this...
POSTED Thursday, February 1, 2007
This little Peugeot Dauphin might look like a harmless toy tricycle, but it's a sophisticated concept for a full-fledged electric vehicle by Portuguese designer Ricardo Baiao. It doesn't make those horsey sound effects like that Girasole electric car we...
POSTED Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Made up of millions of photodetectors, the sensors in today's digital cameras don't come cheap, and they don't go easy on the juice either. At Rice University in Houston, Texas, developers are determined to make a single-pixel camera that...
POSTED Monday, January 29, 2007
According to today's New York Times, scientists have built a memory chip the size of a white blood cell with wires as thin as proteins. It holds 160,000 bits and is 40 times as dense as today's memory chips...
POSTED Thursday, January 25, 2007
Disappointed that we won't all have our own personal helicopters by 2010? Never mind that — if you live in the U.K. you might be able to take a ride in this driverless electric and biofuel hybrid bus by...
POSTED Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Who says video games separate kids from reality? The way I see it, video games give kids a more interesting reality to aim for. Take Halo, for example. Would you sign up for military service if you knew you would...
POSTED Monday, January 15, 2007
If thin TVs are hot, then these OLED sets Sony was showing off at CES are supermodels. The body of each display is a superslim 10 mm or 0.39 inches in depth. That's for 27-inch screen — for an...
POSTED Friday, January 12, 2007
The research arm of the military is responsible for inventing a pretty sizable chunk of the technology that we enjoy on a daily basis, from the internet to GPS, so it's no surprise that soldiers get the hottest new...
POSTED Saturday, January 6, 2007
So I was just packing yesterday for my annual trip back home for Chirstmas, determined to try out a few select gadgets while I'm out of action, and I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed at all the charging cables...
POSTED Friday, December 22, 2006
Nanotechnology isn't just for researchers and scientists… no, it's also something that geckos came up with long before we got our brains wrapped around the idea. I'm no scientist, so we'll let an actual doctor take it from here:...
POSTED Friday, December 22, 2006
Tipped by my colleague Chris, I found this YouTube video of a crazy plate-controlled table computer intriguing. Much like some other cool furniture we've seen in the past, we have no data whatsoever on this piece of concept gear,...
POSTED Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Whether it's something as basic as Orange Tang or a far more sophisticated gadget like the GPS navigation network, a surprising amount of the cool stuff we use every day has its origins in taxpayer-funded research done by the...
POSTED Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Eat your heart out, Dyson — Electrolux has done one better than your "properly" working vacuum cleaner with these floor-cleaning shoes. Just slip 'em on when it's time to clean the house and they'll suck up dirt from the...
POSTED Monday, December 18, 2006
Earlier this week, NEC Electronics, along with Elpida Memory and Oki Electric announced their findings for squishing a massive amount of memory into a very small space, keeping Moore's Law — the observation that the number of transistors on a...
POSTED Monday, December 18, 2006
Among innovations for the blind, Braille ranks pretty highly. But not every book and magazine gets the bumpy treatment — are the sightless just supposed to go without reading those Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanzines? A gadget called the...
POSTED Friday, December 15, 2006
LG, probably best known these days for popularizing chocolate as a gadget category, is extending some of those design chops to laptops. This slick concept notebook, called the "E-Book," uses an OLED screen for the monitor, so on top...
POSTED Monday, December 11, 2006
We love Bluetooth technology, since it lets us go all hands-free with our cell phones (and iPods) with no wires, but it has its limitations. One big one is battery life — you may have noticed that your cell phone...
POSTED Wednesday, December 6, 2006
GM's design for an environmentally friendly Hummer (called the Hummer O2) won The Los Angeles Auto Show's 2007 design challenge award yesterday. The concept car's roof opens to become a propeller-like canopy full of algae. The idea is that the...
POSTED Tuesday, December 5, 2006
The piping-hot slice of transportation from the future comes our way from Mazda, who showed it off at the L.A. Auto Show earlier this week. Called the Nagare, the concept car is named after the Japanese word for "flow."...
POSTED Sunday, December 3, 2006
Sharp Japan has shown off a new 5-megapixel CCD camera module for mobile phones. By the numbers, it is no match for Samsung's 10-megapixel camera phone, even if the megapixel myth has been debunked. The LZ0P3770, as close friends...
POSTED Thursday, November 30, 2006
You know what's lame about those sexy all-white Apple-influenced keyboards? They sure do get dirty really easy, especially when you're constantly wolfing down Doritos in front of them. I'm talking to you, Reinhold. Yeah, you can always wipe clean...
POSTED Wednesday, November 29, 2006
There's been no shortage of gadgets and proposals to make charging up our gadgets easier, but what if you didn't have to charge them up at all? That's the gist of a new approach to the power problem from...
POSTED Wednesday, November 15, 2006
While we've written about batteries powered by jet engines before, a new battery created by Japanese inventor Susumu Suzuki gets its power from an even cooler source: water. The size of a AA battery, the little energy source gets juiced...
POSTED Thursday, November 9, 2006
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a system that can determine the "mood" of a room by sensing all sorts of factors in an environment. The mood data is then transmitted to LED lights that change based on...
POSTED Wednesday, November 8, 2006
We've seen plenty of crappy holograms out there purporting to be 3D displays, but none of them have really stolen our hearts and made us want one… until now. Cheoptics360 is a big pyramid that projects 3D images in...
POSTED Thursday, November 2, 2006
Look out, Band-Aids — you're about to become obsolete. Researchers at MIT and Hong Kong University have come up with a liquid that can seal wounds in seconds. Composed of peptides (fragments of proteins), the liquid forms a gel when...
POSTED Thursday, October 26, 2006
We're long past the deadline for building the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1992 in the movie, '97 if you prefer the book), and a computer that can actually have a conversation with you is still a...
POSTED Monday, October 23, 2006
"Sometimes I get so embarrassed I wish I could just disappear." Sound familiar? Are you a sad person that wants to just disappear? Well, stop your sniveling, cause science has your back. We told you it was possible, and...
POSTED Friday, October 20, 2006
A jet-powered laptop may sound like the sort of gadget Q would give James Bond for his next adventure, but Professor Alan Epstein at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has been working to make the concept a reality....
POSTED Sunday, October 8, 2006
We generally avoid the sci-fi related posts around here despite the fact that we're run by the SCI FI Channel, but we can't pass up on two super-nerdy Star Trek-themed posts in one week. It may have taken 40...
POSTED Saturday, October 7, 2006
Star Trek nerds rejoice! Teleportation is getting closer to being a reality, with a couple of scientists in Denmark successfully transporting an object about a foot and a half. Don't squeeze into that monochromatic jumper just yet, Scotty — they're...
POSTED Thursday, October 5, 2006
We just saw a robot suit in person at NextFest, but this one here looks even more impressive than the one we checked out. Designed to help nurses pick up and carry the infirm around, the robotic exoskeleton seems like...
POSTED Friday, September 29, 2006
We got a chance to check out Wired magazine's NextFest here in New York City last night, and, in addition to overdoing it on the plentiful tacos, we experienced some serious futuristic technology that the Javits Center will be...
POSTED Thursday, September 28, 2006
You gotta love technology designed to remove as much human interaction as possible from our days, moving us closer and closer to the dream of everyone existing in private spheres, completely cut off from any legitimate human contact. Designed...
POSTED Monday, September 25, 2006
We sure enjoy the OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens, since their impressive efficiency means they consume less power than other types of displays, not to mention their potential to make the screens flexible. They work on the principle of...
POSTED Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Philips Research has taken their foray into digitally enhanced clothing to a new level, creating garments that react to the emotions of the wearer. This "blushing dress" consists of two layers: an inner layer that detects the wearers emotional state,...
POSTED Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Nothing is worse than having your cell phone or MP3 player die when you're out and about, which is why the possibility of new battery technology that has 100 times the capacity of today's cells is so exciting. Researchers at...
POSTED Monday, September 18, 2006
Researchers at Cornell University are developing a fancy-pants napkin that uses nanotechnology to detect bacteria and viruses on any surface it's wiped over. The napkin will contain nanofibers that are bound to certain antibodies, and when those antibodies latch...
POSTED Friday, September 15, 2006
There's absolutely no way you'll hurt yourself using these: Russian-made "rocket boots." Created by Ruskie scientist Viktor Gordeyev, the boots consist of a diesel cylinder on each foot that can launch you 13 feet per step at up to 25...
POSTED Friday, September 15, 2006
Taser guns may be getting a boost in range thanks to some new developments in the field. While traditional tasers are limited in range by air resistance to the electrical charges, a new method could deliver charges of up...
POSTED Friday, September 8, 2006
While there actually are sanitation cops in a few larger cities, in most places, getting us to divide our household trash into recyclable and non-recycleable containers relies primarily on our own sense of personal responsibility and concern for the...
POSTED Friday, September 1, 2006
A security company by the name of Panoptics Systems has developed a security system that allows one to view, in real time, a three dimensional layout of large areas complete with the location of everyone there. Designed for use...
POSTED Thursday, August 31, 2006
Since taking a vacation in space still looks to be a long way off for people who haven't been in boy bands, taking a vacation at the bottom of the ocean seems like the next best thing. Poseidon Resorts...
POSTED Monday, August 28, 2006
The Onyx phone has a lot going for it: besides looking slimmer and sexier than LG's Chocolate phone, it sports a type of touchscreen technology called ClearPad. Developed by Synaptics, ClearPad eliminates the need for any "hard" buttons on...
POSTED Monday, August 21, 2006
Which is a more frightening idea — getting caught in a fire, or being confronted by a 10-foot-long mechanical snake? If you're stuck in that fire, trust me, you'll be happy to see the snake. The "Snakefighter" is a...
POSTED Monday, August 21, 2006
Japan, always a few steps ahead of us in the technology department, is currently developing a new smart-road technology that would alert drivers to upcoming hazards and keep the island countries roads a bit safer. The Driving Safety Support...
POSTED Friday, August 18, 2006
Drilling through materials such as concrete with a traditional drill can be a difficult and messy experience. At least I assume so; I haven't been drilling many holes in concrete lately. But for those of you who do, a...
POSTED Thursday, August 17, 2006
Do you ever find yourself alone in a room full of people talking into cell phones? Do you get the vague notion that your identity has been stolen and sent around the world? Well, the experimental art collective Stanza...
POSTED Wednesday, August 16, 2006
A new technology in body armor is under development, one the Pentagon hopes to use to replace the cardboard "plz don't shoot" signs they've been equipping the troops with for the past couple years. Shear Thickening Fluid (STF) is...
POSTED Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Scientists from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) are developing a true three-dimensional display using lasers, bringing us ever closer to the nerdy dream of holographic entertainment. While most "3D" displays are really 2D and...
POSTED Monday, August 7, 2006
How will people get around in the future? Motorized unicycles? Off-road Segways? Skateboards with treads? Reasonable contenders, all, but much too land-based. No, we're waiting for Rick Herron to finish up his real-deal, so-wild-you-just-have-to-see-it jet pack before we commit...
POSTED Friday, July 28, 2006
If you're a king of finance, getting across the country fast is important, and the luxuries of first class won't help you. No, you'd prefer to travel a touch faster than a normal plane — say, faster than the...
POSTED Thursday, July 27, 2006
Fruit is not my forte. Do you want your avocados firm or soft? What about peaches? And do you keep them in a brown paper bag to ripen? Bah! Too much work, I say. Luckily, science is coming to...
POSTED Thursday, July 27, 2006
Digital technology has made cameras and camcorders ubiquitous. Most of the time this is great news, except when someone snaps a pic of something they shouldn't (just ask Cameron Diaz) or — in a big pet peeve of the...
POSTED Wednesday, July 26, 2006
As we approach 2015, the year Marty McFly traveled to in Back to the Future, Part II, we're still woefully far away from the dream of having a flying car in every garage. The Terrafugia Transition hopes to change...
POSTED Wednesday, July 26, 2006
If you thought using a skywriter to propose to your girlfriend was a clever way of spelling something out, take a look at this. Researchers at Akishima Laboratories have developed a way to spell out words and draw pictures...
POSTED Monday, July 24, 2006
It's a mobile phone. It's a watch. It's a desk clock. It's really a bit too bulky to be any of those (well, except maybe the desk clock) from the looks of it, but we have to give the...
POSTED Monday, July 17, 2006
I know what you're thinking: "I've always wanted to get into extreme sports, but they're just not high-tech enough for me." Let me introduce you to the Moov, a seriously badass concept bike conceived by student Jean-Michel Raad. He...
POSTED Friday, July 14, 2006
Russia has become the place for the extremely rich to live out their astronaut fantasies, and hotel magnate Robert Bigelow has taken full advantage of the Ruskies willingness to accept money for pretty much anything. The Genesis I rocket...
POSTED Thursday, July 13, 2006
Think you're real tough, riding around on that street bike of yours, popping wheelies and showing off? Try scooting around on this Bombardier Embrio, a combination of motorcycle and unicycle, letting you show off that remarkable balance all the...
POSTED Thursday, July 13, 2006
Pretty much camera-ready for a cameo in the next Steven Speilberg movie, the Zooop is everything you'd want in a car from the future, minus the coolness. Its round orange chassis may lull you into thinking the Zooop is...
POSTED Wednesday, July 12, 2006
New thin-film solar-power technology could come in handy in a field that I personally have a lot of personal investment in: keeping beer cold. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are working on Active Building Envelope technology, a new science that...
POSTED Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Designers are always trying to find creative ways to fit big screens in small packages, and this Tripod MP3/video player is a neat twist on that goal. A small triangle that fits easily in your pocket when used for...
POSTED Monday, July 10, 2006
You're looking at the aquatic version of the International Space Station: the Sea Orbiter, designed by French architect Jacques Rougerie. A 170-foot-tall vessel, it's designed to float across the ocean with the help of currents and wind, taking a...
POSTED Friday, July 7, 2006
As electronic gadgets have evolved and multiplied, the typical wall power outlet has remained a stubbornly primitive and occasionally elusive beast. Power strips can help, but most get too crowded too quickly — especially when you have more than...
POSTED Thursday, July 6, 2006
Part virtual-reality controller, part hamster ball, the VirtuSphere is a new attempt to make total immersion in video games possible. By sticking the player inside a giant sphere, it allows a player to walk or run without ever running...
POSTED Thursday, July 6, 2006
Taking some inspiration from Herbie the Love Bug, Volkswagen has developed a self-driving Golf GTi and named it the "53+1" in homage to the adorable sentient Beetle's racing number. Developed by VW engineers and Lindsay Lohan, the fancy GTi...
POSTED Wednesday, July 5, 2006
One day, we'll all be carrying around hydrogen fuel cells for powering our portable gadgets. At least that's the vision of Voller, a British energy company, which created this Automatic Battery Charger (ABC) to supply power to things like...
POSTED Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Good news for those of you on the Snickers and Pepsi diet: researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada are developing a low-intensity pulsed ultrasound that can actually regrow damaged or missing teeth. A tiny pea sized device...
POSTED Friday, June 30, 2006
When I shop for fancy cheeses online, I always feel like I'm missing out on something by not being able to take a deep, hearty whiff of that cave-aged sheep's milk blue I'm considering. Fortunately for me, engineers at...
POSTED Thursday, June 29, 2006
Engineers at Ohio State University have developed a radar system that's both more accurate than traditional radar and completely undetectable, allowing one to see objects through solid material such as walls and floors. By using random noise rather than a...
POSTED Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Whenever people ask me what are the downsides of traveling faster than the speed of sound, I always say drag. I tell them, "Drag is such a drag, man," then I start laughing. Then people leave. It's quite awkward,...
POSTED Thursday, June 22, 2006
By the look of the Wearable Gaze Detector — with its many protruding wires and Cyberman-esqe design — it would have to do something pretty amazing to be worth committing the fashion felony of actually putting it on your...
POSTED Thursday, June 22, 2006
We love fun, implausible concept designs as much as the next guy, but this one in particular seems kind of far-fetched. The "Nokia Open" is/would be a cell phone that opens like a fan with a "scrollable touch screen,"...
POSTED Monday, June 19, 2006
Technology may one day eliminate blindness altogether, but cybernetic eyes are likely decades away. Until the cyborg age begins, the blind may still be able to get a view of their surroundings with a new system called vOICe (as in...
POSTED Friday, June 16, 2006
One of the big things holding back your favorite gadget makers from slimming down your cell phone, PDA, or MP3 player to the extreme is the battery. No matter what your gadget poison is, it needs power, and if...
POSTED Thursday, June 15, 2006
Epson has developed new 7.1-inch piece of electronic paper that's bendable and has a very respectable resolution of 1,536 x 2,048 pixels. Electronic paper is a thin material that acts as an electronic display, allowing for text and graphics to...
POSTED Monday, June 12, 2006
You think Brita is a high-tech way of getting clean water? Faucet filters have got nothing on a new kind of plastic developed by researchers at MIT that both attracts and repels water droplets — at the same time....
POSTED Friday, June 9, 2006
China, much like villains in James Bond films, has a weather-modification office whose sole purpose is to, just like the sign on the door says, control the weather. It has already developed methods for bringing rain to drought-stricken areas...
POSTED Thursday, June 8, 2006
Hydrogen fuel-cell cars may be hitting the streets sooner than everybody thought if Honda lives up to recent promises. Despite predictions that the prohibitively expensive nature of hydrogen fuel-cell technology meant that consumer vehicles would be over a decade...
POSTED Wednesday, June 7, 2006
The day may soon come that you can replace a severed limb with a cybernetic one, and you'll have Yukiyasu Kamitani to thank. Kamitani, a researcher at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, has just developed a robot...
POSTED Thursday, June 1, 2006
What will our cities look like as technology progresses? Will space constraints mean we build up rather than out? Will new materials change the way buildings are designed? These are some questions asked — and answered — by the...
POSTED Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Micro Reactor System has unveiled its Flexible Electronic Curtain, a window that turns from transparent to opaque when activated. Using liquid-crystal molecules between two sheets of plastic, the windows blind themselves in any number of colors when turned on....
POSTED Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Invisibility, the optical trick occasionally utilized by Kevin Bacon for evil, may be more possible than originally thought, according to some researchers. Two separate teams of researchers have theorized ways to use special materials to hide objects from specific types...
POSTED Friday, May 26, 2006
TV networks are fighting tooth and nail against innovations that continue to pummel their tried-and-true advertisement-based business model, most recently filing suit against Cablevision for its "network DVR" service. The service involves Cablevision remotely recording all of the big networks'...
POSTED Thursday, May 25, 2006
A new chip designed by Micron Technology will allow digital still cameras to shoot up to 30 shots per second, capturing fast motion or creating photomontages à la A Hard Days Night. Able to capture 30 photos per second at...
POSTED Friday, May 19, 2006
Here's a taste of the future of vehicles: the H-racer toy car, said to be the smallest car on the planet to use a hydrogen fuel cell for power, which of course means no toxic emissions whatsoever. The green...
POSTED Friday, May 19, 2006
Here's another cool-looking concept with dubious chances of actually becoming a real product: the slide box camera, designed by Jessica Nebel, separates your digital cam into two parts: the lens, on a little cylinder, and the rest of the...
POSTED Thursday, May 18, 2006
Sharp has begun showing off its two-way LCD screen, which shows different images depending on what angle you view it from. The company plans to use the technology in things like car navigation systems, allowing the driver to see...
POSTED Wednesday, May 17, 2006
The human cannon: when you absolutely, positively have to get to the roof of a building but refuse to take the stairs. Accept no substitutes. Designed by researchers at DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, the launcher could shoot a...
POSTED Tuesday, May 16, 2006
I've always been a little mistrustful of vehicles with treads, I think because when I was a kid the treads on my G.I.Joe battle tank kept falling off, leaving the Joes at the mercy of the bad boys at...
POSTED Monday, May 15, 2006
The Proteus is a yacht combined with a submarine, a boat that can dive underwater on a whim to give you a fish's-eye view of the murky depths. Built by submersibles-manufacturer Exomos, based out of the United Arab Emirates, the...
POSTED Friday, May 12, 2006
Researchers in Germany are developing a system for cars to anticipate side-impact crashes and then actually change shape to reinforce the frame just before the moment of impact. Using cameras mounted on the front and back of the car,...
POSTED Friday, May 12, 2006
The superhero-inspired gear just keeps on coming; first the Octarm and now the Gekkomat. Bestowing its wearer with the ability to climb walls just like… well, a Gecko, the Gekkomat has four separate pads for the hands and feet along...
POSTED Friday, May 12, 2006
It's either a Herculean effort in editorial restraint or a stunning example of pop-culture cluelessness that this New Scientist article about the U.S. military developing robots with tentacles makes no mention of Spider-Man nemesis Dr. Octopus. I mean, the robot,...
POSTED Thursday, May 11, 2006
Stem-cell research is all the rage these days, with the prospect of being able to grow rejection-free organs for transplants a revolutionary idea that could save thousands of lives. Still, growing a new organ to replace your faulty one...
POSTED Thursday, May 11, 2006
One of the coolest possibilities of using hydrogen fuel cells in cars, other than the fact that they don't need gasoline, is that the entire engine can be made into a flat rectangle, eliminating the bulky engine block that...
POSTED Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Scientists have developed a robotic cockroach that can influence the behavior of groups of real cockroaches. The tiny roachbots would infiltrate groups of the disgusting bugs, gain their trust, then lead them out of the shadows and into the light,...
POSTED Wednesday, May 10, 2006
There's no way to change the weather, but the next time it rains, your My Day umbrella will let you look up and see sunshine. Confused? My Day's fabric is made from ePaper, so the umbrella can display any...
POSTED Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Nothing would scare you into living healthier than looking into the mirror and seeing a fat, zombie-like creature staring back at you — at least that's what researchers at Accenture think. They've developed a "persuasive mirror" that shows how...
POSTED Wednesday, May 10, 2006
When you hear "color-changing fabric," you probably think of those cheesy T-shirts from the '80s that turned a shade darker when worn by a warm body. Well, now we have the real deal: Dr. Greg Sotzing from the University...
POSTED Tuesday, May 9, 2006
The alarm clock buzzer: is there a more unpleasant sound in existence? There's no way there could be, and that's the whole point. Taking that idea to new heights is the BlowFly Alarm Clock from designer Ena Macana. Rather than...
POSTED Monday, May 8, 2006
Following in the footsteps of the $100 laptop, designer Andre Miloni has come up with a simple cell phone aimed at developing nations where electricity might be scarce. The phone is quipped with a hand crank for recharging its...
POSTED Friday, May 5, 2006
With television arguably acting as our national religion, the remote control should really look the part of a religious object. That might have been what Russian designer Dima Komissarov had in mind when he designed the Remobeads, a string...
POSTED Thursday, May 4, 2006
Studies have shown that Americans waste large amounts of valuable time learning to speak foreign languages. The national obsession with understanding other countries and their cultures has threatened to damage our own productivity here at home, and frankly, it's somewhat...
POSTED Thursday, May 4, 2006
Fresh from Korean robotics: the EveR-1 humanoid robot, which sort of looks like a real person, but is just unrealistic enough to look kind of terrifying. The creepy machine is built to look like a young woman in her...
POSTED Thursday, May 4, 2006
Ah, toast… so simple, so versatile, so delicious. But burnt toast? No thanks. If you had one of these transparent toasters, you'd never have to worry about burning your toast again, since you'd be able to see it turning...
POSTED Wednesday, May 3, 2006
You can't raise hell if you can't stand up — that's the idea behind a slimy substance designed by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The institute has developed a super-slimy goo that can be sprayed...
POSTED Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Microsoft has patented technology to allow instant messaging on televisions during regular viewing. Splitting the screen up into multiple frames, it would allow you to watch My Super Sweet 16 while simultaneously chatting with a friend about, say, the...
POSTED Friday, April 28, 2006
The technology that lets you carry around USB flash drives in your pocket could soon be replacing the regular hard drives you have in your computer. Samsung has developed a 32-GB SSD, the technical name for a flash drive,...
POSTED Wednesday, April 26, 2006
When we think about how technology is going to give sight back to the blind, we usually think of things like cybernetic eyes that fix up or replace faulty eyes. Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition,...
POSTED Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Philips envisions the future of your home theater to be simple. No ten-piece speaker system, no stack of components, no jumble of wires, no pile of 100-button remote controls… just the company's Illusion system: a flat-panel television, a wall-mounted...
POSTED Monday, April 24, 2006
According to NewTechSpy, Boeing is developing the 797 to compete directly with the massive, but more traditionally built, Airbus A380. Featuring a blended wing/body co-developed with NASA, it introduces a completely new design, looking more like a stealth bomber than...
POSTED Monday, April 24, 2006
Keeping track of your workout can be a pain. Who can remember how many reps and sets you're supposed to do at every station of your routine, especially when it changes week to week? And those little notepads make you...
POSTED Monday, April 24, 2006
Take it from us: it's tough being an astronaut, but it's even tougher to need emergency surgery while you're in space. Your options are pretty limited up there, as your fellow astronauts might be really smart, but generally they aren't...
POSTED Friday, April 21, 2006
Fujitsu's e-paper is an electronic surface that uses liquid-crystal technology to display a still image. What makes it remarkable is that once that image is loaded, it stays there without consuming any energy. Shown above is a prototype of...
POSTED Thursday, April 20, 2006
Zaha Hadid designed this futuristic kitchen model for Milan Design Week, including lots of fun electronics so you can use the Internet and play music while you cook up your culinary masterpieces. The kitchen consists of two islands, one...
POSTED Thursday, April 20, 2006
The human body is like a giant battery, creating energy all the time. The power to harness that energy for such important uses as powering our iPods is not too far off, now that researchers at the University of Georgia...
POSTED Monday, April 17, 2006
Bifocals aren't really socially acceptable unless you're over the age of 60, and even then that old goat Earl Wheeler down at the shuffleboard court might still make fun of you for wearing them. Luckily, technology has once again come...
POSTED Monday, April 17, 2006
The drive to make every piece of consumer electronics thinner and thinner continues, with Toshiba today unveiling LCD screens between 0.11 and 0.18 inch thick, the world's thinnest. The 12-inch panels can handle resolutions up to 1,280 x 800...
POSTED Thursday, April 13, 2006
From the wish-I'd-thought-of-that department: the Flashbag. Designed by Dima Komissarov, it's a standard USB flash drive that has a tiny pump in it that inflates when you load it with data. So if your drive is full of stuff,...
POSTED Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Many parents who take trips on the road will call home and talk to their kids every day. That's great, but it deals with only one of our five senses, sound. Now a group of scientists in Singapore are developing...
POSTED Tuesday, April 4, 2006
A new procedure can provide sight to people who've lost their eyes: a camera is attached to a pair of glasses, the camera sends signals to a portable computer, which — here's the fun part — stimulates electrodes implanted in...
POSTED Friday, March 31, 2006
A device developed by MIT Media Lab researcher Rana El Kaliouby could one day make socializing a little less worrisome. Designed for people with autism who struggle to pick up on social cues, the emotional social intelligence prosthetic device uses...
POSTED Wednesday, March 29, 2006
The details are appropriately sketchy, but Japanese company Takara claims they've invented a gadget that can control — or at least influence — your dreams. Supposedly, you stare at a picture of what you want to dream about (say, the...
POSTED Friday, March 24, 2006
Checking out photos and videos on portable devices is definitely a big perk of today's gadgets — as long as you can stand squinting at micro-size screens. But if Polymer Vision gets its way, your view of portable entertainment...
POSTED Tuesday, March 21, 2006
While James Bond relies on Q Branch for high-tech gadgets, the U.S. military has DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to dream up far-fetched military gizmos. The BBC reports DARPA has plans to develop a living cyborg butterfly. Yeah,...
POSTED Friday, March 17, 2006
Japanese researchers are sweeping old timers off their feet with a 5-foot robot. A government-backed institute has developed a seeing, hearing, and smelling robot strong enough to carry human beings. The 220-pound 'bot, dubbed RI-MAN, could aid healthcare workers needing...
POSTED Wednesday, March 15, 2006
This is barely a prototype, but it's so wildly cool, it screams for attention. Glooo, a globe-shaped "world browser and communicator," brings you the Earth from a deity's perspective. The almost-spherical screen (looks like it doesn't cover the poles)...
POSTED Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Soon the expression "fill 'er up, Mac" will take on a whole new meaning. Taiwanese manufacturer Antig has demonstrated a production-ready version of its laptop fuel cell, which it claims will be hitting store shelves in early 2007. The high-tech...
POSTED Monday, March 13, 2006
Digital photographers have reason to celebrate. Coming this summer: Secure Digital flash-memory cards with 4 gigabytes of capacity, courtesy Panasonic. Although 4-GB SD cards were first announced last year, Panasonic's will be the first card to meet the SD 2.0...
POSTED Friday, March 10, 2006
A deck of cards and a candle should be enough to enjoy a blackout, but what if the season finale of Dancing with the Stars is on? For apartment dwellers like myself, a personal power generator and its toxic fumes...
POSTED Thursday, March 9, 2006
Saving a life by mixing man and machine has had varied results: Darth Vader tormented a galaxy, RoboCop saved a city. Still, I'm in no way hesitant about the Brain Computer Interface. The system, developed by researches in Berlin, allows...
POSTED Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Andrew M. sent us this link to a video showing off a wicked "multi-touch" screen. Instead of responding to just one poke at a time like today's touchscreens, a multi-touch display could process several touches at once. The ability would...
POSTED Monday, March 6, 2006
These days kids are typing on laptops pretty much before the umbilical's cut, and the handwritten word may be the victim. Swedish Company Anoto is hoping to reverse the pen's fortune by ushering it into the modern age. Anoto's pen...
POSTED Monday, February 27, 2006
Today's stealth planes may not show up on radar, but on a clear day you can still pretty much just look up in the sky and see them. Oops. Lockheed solves that problem with the Cormorant, a concept plane...
POSTED Friday, February 24, 2006
While Tool-Lok probably won't eliminate all electronics theft, it may make a miscreant contemplate risk versus reward. Tool-Lok — embedded RF circuitry in your portable — automatically locks up a device after a preprogrammed number of hours, and without an...
POSTED Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Put this one in the common-sense file — Philips recently patented an idea to make touchscreens responsive to pressure and not just movement. Exactly how a pressure-sensitive screen might work is still in the planning stage (and don't be...
POSTED Wednesday, February 15, 2006
We're not all aichmophobic, but an approaching needle's rarely cause for elation. Luminetx's VeinViewer Imaging System will at least dispel any fears about that hypo missing your vein. Using infrared light and a digital video camera, VeinViewer can help doctors...
POSTED Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Reason would testify: a 2.5-inch screen isn't a 42-inch plasma. Digislide has taken this logic to heart and is hoping their projection technology might begin to bridge the gap. The Australian company displayed its portable projection technology, Digismart, at a...
POSTED Friday, February 10, 2006
Universal Display Corp. has shown off a full-color OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screen that's extremely thin and, more importantly, flexible. The prototype's screen measures just 4 inches diagonal, but it's a miniscule 0.004 inches thick. Resolution is said to be...
POSTED Tuesday, February 7, 2006
Root canal, cavity, abscessed tooth — none of the buzzwords associated with tooth pain insinuate a good time. Well, Israeli company Fluorinex Active is hoping to rid your vernacular of these terrible terms. By combining a fluoride-based gel and a...
POSTED Friday, February 3, 2006
Samsung says they've invented a fuel cell that could more than double battery life in your cell phone or iPod. Announced Tuesday, the methyl alcohol-operated fuel cells will allow for eight hours of mobile-phone use and between two and four...
POSTED Tuesday, January 31, 2006
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) may be a rapidly receding memory, but it usually pays to go back and take a second look after all the dust clears. After all, given the sheer enormity of the show, there's no...
POSTED Wednesday, January 25, 2006
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