Top Stories
Navy launches U.S.S. Independence, first of new class of weapons-bristling speedster trimarans
World’s tallest LEGO tower built in England
Redesigned NES is maybe 15 years too late
Sections
Archive
Future Tech
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