By Andrew Liszewski

As the story goes, Paul Wessel noticed that his diabetic son Luke was always misplacing his blood glucose meter, though he never had any trouble finding his Game Boy. So Paul worked with pharmaceutical giant Bayer to develop the Didget which is a blood glucose meter that connects to the Nintendo DS and DS Lite systems. (It requires the slot 2 port so unfortunately it’s not DSi-friendly.)

It works like a standard blood glucose meter, you prick your finger and then insert the blood-soaked paper strip into the reader, but the test results are converted into reward points that kids can use to unlock new levels and items inside the Didget NDS game. The basic idea is to reward kids who regularly check their blood sugar levels which hopefully helps them develop good testing habits in the future.

According to the Didget website, the device will sell for about $50, though since it’s actually a UK-based site, there’s no word on if or when this will be available in North America.

[ Bayer Didget ] VIA [ Boing Boing ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Designed by Il-Gu Cha, the ‘Trace of Time’ clock is made from stainless steel with a glass face that allows you to jot down meetings and other important events when they’re supposed to happen. But the single hour/minute hand actually features an integrated eraser which cleans the clock’s face as it sweeps around over a 24 hour period. So while the clock’s useful for planning out your day, you can forget about jotting down things you’ll need to remember later in the week, since they’ll be gone by tomorrow.

[ Trace of Time ] VIA [ MAKE: Blog ]

By Andrew Liszewski

At some point along the way the development of GPS devices split into two distinct paths. On one side you’ve got complicated touchscreen devices with maps of every road on the continent that can plan out the easiest route from point A to point B, and on the other side they’ve actually been simplified to what are essentially glorified compasses, like the GD-101 from GlobalSat.

It forgoes the colorful touchscreen for a simple monochrome LCD display that features a digital arrow capable of pointing in one of 16 different directions. The idea is to set a destination you’d like to remember, like where you parked your car, and the GD-101 will easily guide you back, complete with detailed info on how far away you are. And it’s not that I think these types of devices are a bad idea or anything, I just think they could benefit from a price tag of around $30-40, instead of the roughly $80 they’re currently selling for online.

[ GlobalSat GD-101 ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]

By Chris Scott Barr

I can’t honestly count the number of times I’ve dealt with a dead car battery. Most occasions were when I was younger, since my first car didn’t make a noise if you left the light on. However, it’s something that happens to everyone at some time or another. It’s not a hard problem to fix, you can just get a jump from another car, or from one of those cool portable batteries. Either way, you’re going to have to lift the hood and hook up a pair of jumper cables.

There are some people out there who are deathly afraid of doing anything under the hood of a car. For those people, there is the Easy Quick Jumper. This works off of the same idea as a set of jumper cables, only you plug each end into the cigarette adapter of the two cars. Turn on the car with a good battery, wait 5-10 minutes and you should be set. Honestly, this would be a lot easier to store than bulky jumper cables, and quicker to get into place. If you’ve ever had a car battery die in the dead of winter, you’ll appreciate it. Just $26 gets you this handy gadget. (An extra $20 gets you a better version that eliminates the need for another car.)

[ VAT19 ] VIA [ RedFerret ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Electric cars aren’t exactly the most popular form of transportation out there. Thus the number of public charging stations are few and far between. One unlikely company is jumping on the bandwagon and installing charging stations at  6 of their locations.

Starting in Cary North Carolina, McDonald’s will offer ChargePoint Networked Charging Stations. In some ways this seems like an odd company to step forward. I don’t generally stay at a McDonald’s for more than 15-20 minutes, so most people wouldn’t get very much of a charge. Still, I suppose every station helps.

VIA [ NovaCharge ]

By Chris Scott Barr

My name is Chris, and I used to be a WoW addict. I lost countless hours to that game, but have been clean for over six months now. There are still millions of people hooked on the game, and now it looks as though they’ll have one less reason to log out.

Twitter is crazy-popular these days, so it really isn’t surprising to see it invade World of Warcraft. TweetCraft is a cool AddOn that will let you send and receive tweets in-game. You can also tweet screenshots and set up auto-tweets for events like logging in, entering instances and earning achievements. Of course the coolest part is being able to follow us from Azeroth.

[ TweetCraft ] VIA [ GearFuse ]

By Andrew Liszewski

So not only are video games destroying our minds, our physiques and the fabric of moral society, but now it turns out they’re not so great for our wrists either. Well at least the standard game controllers aren’t. That’s why a company called Smartfish, known for their ergonomic peripherals, have developed the PRO:Motion Game Controller.

Since everyone’s hands and wrists aren’t the same, the PRO:Motion gamepad can actually bend and rotate in the middle to create a more comfortable and ergonomically friendly controller for every user. But here’s the really cool part. Using the company’s DPC or ‘Dynamic Positioning Controller’ system, the PRO:Motion will actually study your “usage pattern” and make periodic but nearly imperceptible adjustments to the controller via a set of tiny onboard motors. So in other words, you don’t have to futz around with it to find the perfect angles, it will do it for you automatically.

Unfortunately pricing info doesn’t seem to be readily available at this time, and from what I can tell the PRO:Motion is only designed to work with PC games, and not with any of the major consoles on the market.

[ Smartfish PRO:Motion Game Controller ] VIA [ Everything USB ]

By Evan Ackerman

Last week on BotJunkie, we started out on a bit of a sour note listening to some robots figuring out how to sing, watched some industrial robots pick things up and put things down very very fast, read about a concept robot that prints on your walls, were incredibly impressed by a simple robot that climbs stairs, pondered what we’d stash away in a customized robot pouch, watched a humanoid robot transform into a car, fled in terror from an i-SOBOT riding on a steam tank, admired some awesome Japanese retro robots from the 1960s, checked out some new iBotz beginner robotics kits, felt a little better now that there’s a whiskery robot rescue rat on patrol, felt a little worse now that DARPA has a UAV that looks like a hummingbird, decided that $7000 is probably too much to ask for a little robot car, decided that $70 is not too much to ask for a little robot car, and finished out the week with a bizarre movie trailer for “RoboGeisha” and a nifty robot HTML t-shirt.

So far this week, we’ve posted about a robot that transforms into a motorcycle, an uncanny picture of a robot and a human, a robot that delivers customized ramen noodle soup, and the smallest wheeled robot with a gripper in the world.

Bot with stuff (post 4th of July edition), after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

By Andrew Liszewski

The scale and complexity of massive particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider allows them to make amazing scientific discoveries, but not every researcher has $2.2 billion lying around to build and fund one of their own. And that’s exactly what scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are hoping to overcome with their BELLA or Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator. In 2006 they showed that lasers could be used to accelerate electrons to very high energies in distances measured in centimeters instead of hundreds of meters using a technique described below:

Project leader Wim Leemans has spent much of his nearly 18 years at Berkeley Lab building lasers and working with laser accelerators. Collaborating with Simon Hooker of the University of Oxford, he and members of his group achieved a major breakthrough in 2006 when they broke the world record for laser-wakefield acceleration, a technique in which particles are accelerated by waves in plasma generated by intense pulses of laser light. In the wake of the laser pulse, electrons surf the waves of the ionized gas. Leemans and coworkers used this concept to accelerate electron beams to energies of more than 1 GeV in a distance of just 3.3 centimeters. Compare that to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC, which takes 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) to boost electrons to 50 GeV.

And while BELLA may never be as powerful as accelerators like the LHC or the SLAC, the scientists at Berkeley Lab are confident that the same techniques can be used to accelerate an electron to energies exceeding 10 GeV in a distance of just one meter. So in theory, one day you might actually be able to buy a rather capable particle accelerator that’s just a bit larger than your office’s photocopier. But since they produce massive amounts of radiation when running, you probably don’t want it sitting next to your desk. Maybe the new guy’s desk though… or the interns.

[ PR - BELLA: Accelerating Science by Accelerating Electrons ] VIA [ Popular Science ]