Digital Beverages MyFountain is an automated bartender. Which means that it’s really a glorified touchscreen with spigots that serves drinks with a minimal amount of human contact. It sits upon its pedestal-refrigerator, which conveniently holds 12 types of booze, a waterline and a carbon-dioxide cartridge (and the possibility to include name brand soda, in the future) and serves your vice-sauce up at the push of a button. As it mocks us lowly people. But at least it won’t steal my tips, right?
It also is linked up to a computer, so you can create personalized drinks and drink lists. It’s the future of drinking and sinning. But the future doesn’t come cheap, you know. The future starts from $2,575 and is available online, though it will be also be in certain stores in spring 2008.
Running around in virtual reality has always been a problem, since it’s pretty hard to physically move anywhere while you’re standing in a room and hooked up to a computer. VirtueSphere took a stab at the problem with a giant ball on rollers, but the Omni-Directional Treadmill (ODT) is a much more elegant (and, let’s face it, way cooler) solution. As you can see from the video above, the ODT allows you to move continuously in any direction (even sideways or backwards), and the current version will handle jogging speeds. It uses a bunch of little treadmills moving in one direction, all mounted on one large treadmill that moves orthogonally. It may not surprise you to hear that the US Army has dibs on all of the current versions, but the designers envision all sorts of applications, of which gaming is at the top (yes, top) of their list.
It’s only been, what, about six years since 3.5″ floppy disks were the epitome of non-volatile rewritable memory? Flash memory changed everything for the oh so much better, but if Samsung (and Intel) have their way, we’re going to be seeing a new type of memory as soon as next year. It’s called phase-change memory, or PRAM. Made from the same materials as rewritable CDs and DVDs, PRAM stores bits (the equivalent of 1s and 0s) by changing a glass alloy between crystalline and amorphous states with the application of heat.
Compared to flash, PRAM writes about 500 times faster while using half the power, is 1000 times more durable, and can be packed into a much denser area. PRAM also has significantly higher radiation resistance for those of you who work in nuclear power plants or outer space. So what’s the downside? Well, although it’s actually simpler to manufacture (in general) than flash, PRAM can’t be soldered after being programmed since it’s sensitive to high temperatures. This means that manufacturers are going to have to add a method of programming the PRAM after it’s been soldered to a circuit board. PRAM also requires a higher writing voltage than flash does.
My guess is that, due to the obvious advantages, PRAM is going to start replacing flash in the same way that flash is now replacing magnetic storage. It’s not gonna be quick, but it’s probably inevitable. There’s no information on pricing or availability of the first production units, but it’s rumored that we could start seeing some of this technology become available by 2008.
Developed for Homeland Security, this brand new flashlight uses a series of oscillating LEDs to induce nausea and eventual vomiting. It is designed by Intelligent Optical Systems as part of a push for nonlethal weaponry. The flashlight works by first flashing extremely brightly and then flickering a series of bright LEDs, filtering through several colors and brightnesses to create “psychophysical effects.” The desired results is to first blind you, then induce feelings of nausea and vertigo, eventually ending in compulsive vomiting. Fun stuff indeed. Of course, one drawback to this is that the flashlight is easily countered by closing your eyes, looking away and/or wearing tinted sunglasses. Also noteworthy is the adverse effect it could have on those with epilepsy or similar conditions; the oscillating light could trigger dangerous and violent seizures in some.
It is currently not on the market, although Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc. intends to start testing this product on volunteers at PENN state. The ultimate intent of all this is to have urban police, border-security agents, and the National Guard be armed with the new flashlight by 2010.
Aerogel is some damn cool stuff. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s the least dense solid material ever, made up of 99.98% air. The remaining 0.02% is made from silica, but there’s so little physical material in there that aerogel is practically invisible. It’s also hard to produce and mildly expensive, with all the large pieces going straight to NASA… In other words, it’s a poor geek’s diamond. It makes sense, then, that aerogel is being turned into premium jewelry. Here is the part that does NOT make sense:
“FusionX aerogel pendants consist of a 3mm pure Aerogel core that is fused inside a hand wound helix silver casing. The Aerogel-filled helix casing is sealed inside the precision cut, strong borosilicate clear glass casing, then the complete Aerogel assembly is hermetically sealed inside silver-over-titanium end caps for added strength and long lasting, waterproof durability.”
Yep, your totally cool sample of aerogel is fused inside the pendant. And then sealed. And then hermetically sealed. You can’t take it out and play with it, and you’ll be hard pressed to impress anyone with something that they can neither touch nor see. $38, available in 8 different colors.
If you want some aerogel of your own to actually play with, it’s available in a few places for a reasonable price. Small vials of fingernail sized aerogel chunks cost $25 from United Nuclear, and it’s absolutely worth buying yourself a sample.
Not for a long time have people’s panties gotten up in bunches of this magnitude over an upcoming gadget release. But word is that come June 29th (the day the iPhone hits the market), massive hordes of bespectacled geeks lusting after the coveted phone will swarm AT&T stores nationwide in such a frenzied scale that it prompted the company to hire an extra 2,000 employees just to handle the rush. To put a little more perspective, here are a couple more fun fact about the launch:
-1,800 AT&T retail stores exist and will all be selling the iPhone.
- AT&T sales staff have received a total of 100,000 hours of training to sell the device, with each employee receiving about six hours of individual training.
- AT&T stores will close locally at 4:30 p.m. on that Friday to prepare for the launch, then reopen at 6 p.m. until 10 p.m. that night.
A few months ago we mentioned that, if you were in the mood, you could pick up a customized Airbus A380 or Boeing 787 Dreamliner for only a few hundred million dollars. Boeing has just released a few more concept interiors from it’s Dreamliner VIP series, as well as the new 747-8, which is basically all the cool new features of the Dreamliner grafted onto a new stretched version of the trusty old 747-400. There’s a crazy amount (over 5,000 square feet) of interior space, as is demonstrated by pictures like these:
Yep, that’s inside an airplane. It’s a bit of a shock for those of us who are used to flying coach and are thankful for the occasional extra legroom afforded by an exit row. Four of these monsters have been ordered already, due for commercial delivery by 2010. Click through to Boeing’s website for more interior pictures.
As powerful as today’s laptop computers are they still tend to lag behind desktop systems. One area in particular is with graphics cards. Since they’re limited in size they just can’t compete with some of the huge desktop models from ATI or Nvidia. A company called Magma though is now selling an easy to use device that will allow most ‘desktop-only’ PCI Express cards to be used with a laptop.
The ExpressBox1 is like an external drive enclosure except that it’s designed to hold a PCI-E graphics card. There’s a smaller version that supports cards up to 6.6 inches in length and a pro version for cards up to 12.28 inches in length. They connect to a laptop via the ExpressCard/34 module and a PCI-E cable and Magma claims there is no latency in the connection since there’s a theoretical maximum throughput of 2000Mbps (or 250 MegaBytes per second) in each direction. At the moment the ExpressBox1 is only designed for single-width video cards needing a maximum of 55 watts of power. However double-width cards that require auxillary power will be supported later this year.
Of course performance has never come cheap in the PC world. The standard version ExpressBox1 is available on the Magma website for $729 (that’s without a graphics card) while the Pro version is available for $749.
I’ll be honest, I’m posting this primarily for the video. I’ll prattle on a bit about the engine and it’s potential applications afterwards, but regardless, watching rocket engines fire never gets old, especially if you have your bass turned way up:
Hotness. Designed by XCOR Aerospace, the 5M15 engine develops 7,500 pounds of thrust by combusting liquid oxygen with methane. By contrast one of the engines on the space shuttle has nearly 400,000 pounds of thrust (the solid rocket boosters approach 3,000,000 a piece), but hey, it’s only a test engine. The big deal is that it runs on methane as opposed to hydrogen or something more exotic. There are a bunch of advantages to methane, including simpler and safer storage and lack of toxicity. But the huge reason why methane is the deep space fuel of choice is that you can find it just about everywhere in the solar system; it’s a natural gas here on Earth, it’s found in the atmospheres of all the gas giants, it’s frozen on Pluto, and there are lakes of it Titan. And even on Mars, you can easily create methane by combining carbon dioxide with hydrogen (extracted from water ice). It’s like having free gas stations everywhere you go, which is nice since AAA charges extra for roadside assistance beyond Earth orbit.
Virgin Galactic, the company that successfully launched SpaceShipOne (with Scaled Composites) and is working on SpaceShipTwo (for which you can now book a 2009 flight at $200,000 a person, round trip of course), has entered into a joint venture of sorts with NASA to develop hypersonic commercial transport technology. Hypersonic generally refers to speeds of Mach 5+, or 3,500 - 4,000ish mph depending on altitude. That’s potentially London to New York in under an hour.
Virgin readily admits that hypersonic research isn’t something they’re cut out for. NASA, however, has already successfully tested their hypersonic scramjet powered X-43A up to Mach 10, and are working on expanding the program with hypersonic vehicles like the X-43B (concept shown above) and the X-51A. So in a nutshell (from the COO of Virgin Galactic): “We are interested in possibly paying for it. NASA is interested in researching it.”
As a past (and let’s hope, future) beneficiary of NASA grant money, I can say from experience that while NASA has the will, when it comes to the way, they’re notoriously stingy with research funding. Here’s hoping for my own corporate sponsor… Any British billionaires out there interested in Martian impact cratering?
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Compared to flash, PRAM writes about 500 times faster while using half the power, is 1000 times more durable, and can be packed into a much denser area. PRAM also has significantly higher radiation resistance for those of you who work in nuclear power plants or outer space. So what’s the downside? Well, although it’s actually simpler to manufacture (in general) than flash, PRAM can’t be soldered after being programmed since it’s sensitive to high temperatures. This means that manufacturers are going to have to add a method of programming the PRAM after it’s been soldered to a circuit board. PRAM also requires a higher writing voltage than flash does.
By David Ponce
By Andrew Liszewski
