In their March newsletter, Aptera is making things sound pretty bright and cheery when it comes to the future of their (let’s face it) revolutionary car-thing. Yesterday they added this video, which doesn’t provide much in the way of new info, but does show some details of the car’s interior:
Also in the newsletter, Aptera promises that they’re “going to be updating you regularly from now until the rollout.” They’re hiring new people, making a new website, and moving into a bigger place, but the meat and potatoes is that they still have to conduct advanced crash testing and refine the manufacturing process before production. Their goal is still to begin production in “late 2008.”
I noticed a few more facts on their website, such as the minimum hybrid mileage of 130 mpg (at sustained highway speeds). Also, the Aptera is classified as a motorcycle (although it doesn’t require any special driver’s license endorsement) but it exceeds safety requirements for a passenger car. Check out the Aptera website for plenty more info.
If you hand someone a gift wrapped in newspaper and twine, they’re going to figure out you picked it up at the gas station 10 minutes before you got to their house. But if you hand someone the same gift that looks like it was wrapped by Martha Stewart, they’ll cherish that deodorizing air freshener until the day they die. But since very few of us have Martha’s skills (or dedicated army of gift wrappers) Hallmark has made things a bit easier by introducing adhesive gift wrap.
The underside of the wrapping paper is covered with a low-tack adhesive which is probably similar to what Post-It Notes use. So if you can leave a note telling your co-worker to stop stealing your lunch, you can wrap a gift like a professional. The sticky side also makes it a lot easier to wrap non-box shaped items like bowling balls, golf clubs or even puppies. And while I think it’s a clever idea, it’s still not as fast as my own wrapping system which involves a can of spray paint and a well ventilated room.
The adhesive gift wrap will be available exclusively from Hallmark for about $5 a roll.
If you spend an inordinate of time obliviously chatting away on your cellphone in public (you know who you are), everyone else in the world would love it if you could teach yourself how to use Audeo, a combination of software and hardware that picks up nerve signals on the way to your vocal cords. Audeo translates the nerve signals into the words you’re thinking about saying, and then a computer voice says the words for you. For the system to be effective, all you have to do is learn how to instruct your body to say things without your body actually saying anything, which is tricky, but possible.
Of course, Audeo is not actually designed for annoying cellphone users. Rather, it’s being developed for people who have lost the ability to speak due to neurological diseases like ALS (interestingly, the same disease that this robot is designed to assist with). The system isn’t able to recognize words at this point. From what I understand, it matches a pattern of nerve signals to one of 150 different words or phrases. The developers are working on a more universal version, which will be able to interpret the nerve signals of individual phonemes, which are the individual sounds that make up words. It won’t be especially fast or easy, but users will be able to construct whatever words they want, effectively replacing physical speech.
Researchers at the University of Leeds have developed a new system to assist those with weak hearts. Current solutions use implanted devices that suck blood out of the heart and pump it into downstream vessels. While they do work, they require the patient to undergo life-long drug therapy to suppress the immune system and prevent blood clotting. They also tend to damage the blood cells they’re pumping because of the high speed turbines they use. However this new system, which was originally devised by Dr. Peter Walker, actually wraps the heart in a specially woven biocompatible web material that never comes into contact with the blood stream. As a result, there’s no chance of the patient’s body rejecting it.
It works by using sensors to detect when the heart wants to beat which triggers a series of motors that cause the webbing to contract. This then increases the pressure inside the heart helping it to pump blood around the body. The device is still in the prototype stage at this point and has only been used on a testing rig that simulates a real human heart. But the team is optimistic that once they’ve perfected the sensors and mechanics it will be extremely beneficial to heart patients and those waiting for transplants.
I was very impressed by Novint’s haptic controller when I tried it out last month. I seriously think haptics (force feedback) is one of the next big things when it comes to input devices. One of the other next big things is going to be more degrees of freedom, i.e. being able to do more than just mouse around in the x - y plane. This maglev joystick, from Butterfly Haptics, combines these two big things into an even bigger thing, since the joystick floats in midair through carefully controlled magnetic fields. The user grips a “flotor” that hovers in an electromagnetic bowl. Optical sensors track the position of the flotor as you move it through six degrees of freedom, including up/down, left/right, forward/backward, and pitch, yaw, and roll. The system can track 2 micron movements (that’s 1/5 of the diameter of a hair) and dish out up 40 newtons (something like 4 pounds) of resistance, which is easily enough to simulate the feel of a solid virtual surface. It’s also able to emulate extremely fine textures and friction coefficients.
While it’s technically not magic, Aerogel is still pretty cool. It’s a glass-like substance that’s composed of 99.8% air and uninterestingly enough was the very first thing I every wrote about for OhGizmo! All that air not only makes Aerogel amazingly light, but it also works as a fantastic insulator which is why Laken is now using it in their ISO 70 aluminum bottles.
The Aerogel-enhanced bottles will actually keep a beverage warm for twice as long as a standard aluminum-polyurethane bottle and will prevent your beverage from freezing when the temperature drops below zero. If that wasn’t enough, at 24 ounces it’s even half the weight of a traditional vacuum insulated bottle.
At one time Aerogel was incredibly expensive but I guess the price has come down since the Laken ISO 70 bottles only cost about $59.
Ray Kurzweil, an inventor (of such things as the flatbed scanner and optical character recognition) and futurist gave the keynote at GDC on Thursday. Although the title of the talk was entitled The Next 20 Years of Gaming, Kurzweil spent the majority of the keynote explaining how information technology is advancing exponentially at a steady and predictable rate, which allows us to see where our future lies as a species. The idea that was really hammered home to me is that technologies and advances which may sound like science fiction are actually predictable, and thanks to the magic of exponential progression, much closer than we think.
Here’s a little taste of what I mean… Currently, thanks to medical and biotech advances, we are adding approximately 3 months to human life expectancy every year. With the advent of applied information technology (such as the ability to turn genes on and off, something we’ve recently figured out how to do), Kurzweil predicts that that rate is going to increase significantly:
“15 years from now, we’ll be adding more than a year every year, not just to infant life expectancy, but to your remaining life expectancy, so as you go forward a year, your remaining life expectancy will move away from you… The sands of time will be running in, not out.”
Let me restate what he’s saying: if you can make it to 2023, you won’t ever die of old age. This isn’t just speculation: it’s based on a mathematical model which has been, if anything, conservative. I’m sure there’s an asterisk in there somewhere, but even so, there’s no denying that it’s exciting to think about. More stuff like this, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
A wind-up radio is great for emergencies, or when you don’t have access to power, but there’s the downside of being limited to only listening to what’s on the radio. Thankfully Trevor Baylis, who apparently gained some level of notoriety for developing the wind-up radio in the first place, has now created a wind-up multimedia player. While prototypes were shown in August of last year, the final version is now complete and Reg Hardware actually had a chance to test it out.
As a result of the on-board generator the EP-MX71 can’t compare to the iPod in terms of size, but after an initial charge of 10 hours via USB the player can be completely independent of any external power source, not including your arms. One minute of winding should give you an extra 20 minutes of MP3 playback, or 10 minutes of video. The current version only has 2GB of memory on-board (they hope to expand that to 4GB and 8GB eventually) but it also includes an SD card slot making it infinitely expandable right out of the box.
Video files have to be converted to an AMV format before they can be enjoyed on the 1.8 inch LCD display, but the player natively supports the MP3, WMA, WAV and Ogg music formats. In fact it can even record audio from an analog source directly to MP3 files if you still have a few old mix tapes lying around. Overall Reg Hardware gave the player an 85%, and when it goes on sale it will have a suggested retail price of about $270.
In a typical office building thousands of people pass through revolving doors on a daily basis. Multiply that by the number of buildings in a typical city, and you can see why harnessing all that human power is actually not a bad idea. So the Revolution Door from Fluxxlab in New York is basically a turbine that’s powered by people as they enter or exit a building, just like how water powers a turbine as it rushes through a hydroelectric dam.
The Revolution Door uses a redesigned central core to efficiently convert the motion of the spinning door into electricity, and in theory could provide a source of free energy to the building where it’s installed. I had a similar idea for the office where I used to work, but it involved harnessing the power from my office chair while I killed time just spinning in circles. Of course that would probably have been canceled out since I spent the other half of the day playing FreeCell, but I still felt like I was doing my part to help the planet.
Here’s another clever solution to the problem of plugging large AC adapters into a power strip. To prevent the adapters from blocking other sockets like on a standard strip, the Socket Sense actually expands allowing it to accommodate a large adapter on every one. Brilliant! All the sockets are also angled at 45 degrees so that the Socket Sense doesn’t necessarily have to be expanded all the way, particularly for smaller adapters. And when you only have standard plugs to connect, you can collapse the strip down completely so that it takes up far less room. So far this is definitely the best solution I’ve seen for dealing with those annoying bricks.
You can get the Socket Sense from the IDEATIVE website for $39.99.
Related Tags: automotive, Eco-friendly, Innovation
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By Andrew Liszewski
By Andrew Liszewski
By Andrew Liszewski
