Last week's Back to The Future hoax (in which evil internet fibbers said that we'd actually reached the date in the "future" that Marty McFly heads to) got me thinking. To be precise, it got me thinking "WHERE THE HELL IS MY MOTHER F***ING HOVERBOARD?"

You see, sci-fi cinema has a tendency to promise us the world, but none of the crazy ideas ever seem to come to fruition. Perfect example being flying cars; we've had them in comics and films for decades now, and you're telling me we can send people to the moon, but cant get a car to fly? Pshshhhh!

So here's my rundown on the best sci-fi gadgets that really do need to exist in the real world.

Admittedly, nearly all of the concepts and ideas in the films lead to some sort of disaster or other. But if the technology were in the hands of someone with the right intentions, someone who lacked hubris, who would use the gizmos for good and not personal gain, someone like... me...

Then...then...THEN I COULD TAKE OVER THE WORLD! MWHAHAHAH!

Hit the gallery below to see Tech Digest's Top 10 movie gadgets and gizmos that someone really should be making

Now THIS is cool. Sony have released a video showcasing brand new OLED tech. We're used to seeing super-slim OLED screens by now, but how about a screen you can roll-up and store away when not in use?

Sony describes it as "the world's first OLED panel which is capable of reproducing moving images while being repeatedly rolled-up". The display is built with organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) that have an original organic semiconductor material that gives it eight times the current modulation of the OTFTs presently around.

Taking advantage of all the previous advancements in OLED technology, the 4.1 inch, 121 ppi display uses a 20 μm thin flexible substrate to get the job done.

It's definitely some way off from being commercial tech, but it sure does look exciting. Sony will be showing off more of the display at the Society for Information Display conference in Seattle tomorrow. We'll let you know if anything as crazy-cool as this turns up then.

Take a look at the video above and start believing that we're living in yesterday's future today. Or something.

We've had HD TV and HD audio, and next on the list of old tech to get the high-definition makeover is voice calling.

XConnect are offering a high-definition voice trial through their IP-peering federation to several US operators. The aim is to highlight how simply and securely operators can deliver HD voice services across networks.

So what does HD voice calling actually sound like? According to the press release:

"Fixed, mobile and Web 2.0 service providers increasingly are adopting HD voice because it enables superior-quality voice communications compared with those supported by the legacy PSTN. HD voice reproduces human speech with substantially greater clarity, depth and nuance, using codecs that capture more than double the frequency range of traditional circuit-switched calls while generally requiring less bandwidth. The rich, natural-sounding quality of HD voice calls often is likened to that of face-to-face conversations."

"We are pleased to offer HD voice operators a simple and secure way to take advantage of the great potential this advanced service offers," said XConnect CEO Eli Katz.

"The XConnect federation-based, all-IP Interconnect 2.0 platform is ideally suited for providing a scalable method for interconnection of HD and multimedia services on a cross-network basis. This will drive mass-market adoption and deliver increased usage, revenue and margin whilst reducing churn."

OK, so it's all a bit bogged down in tech-jargon, but what it really means is we're one small step closer to crystal clear voice calls. Which can obviously only be a good thing.

For more info, click here.

We've all been there; on the phone, on the verge of breaking the meaning of life during the daily commute when your train hits a tunnel and your signal cuts out. We can send a man to the moon, but we still cant send an SMS from on the Tube.

But all that may be about to change thanks to wunder-kid Alexander Kendrick. While most 16 year olds are out learning the hard way the shortcomings of binge drinking, the teenage inventor has spent his spare time creating a revolutionary low-frequency radio that can send text messages from deep underground.

It's been tested as deep as the depths of a 946 foot cave, and looks set to become an essential tool for rescuers searching for caving enthusiasts who may have been a little too adventurous for their own good.

My wasted youth just flashed before my eyes.

Via:NPR

It gets pretty windy in Norway apparently. Well, windy enough for On Office's idea for a city built within wind turbines not to sound completely ludicrous anyway.

The concept here is that with turbines growing in size to accommodate our considerable energy needs, then their interiors could likely accommodate us too. A home away from home perhaps for offshore workers, or those who just cant tread lightly enough with their carbon footprints.

Imagine living in a home that was constantly powering itself? Put a few Ferris-wheel like cars on the end of those blades and you've practically got a self-powered theme park too! Result!

For more info, check Design Boom's in depth architectural analysis of the project.

Click the image below to get the gallery started

Here's a neat demo-video courtesy of Engadget showing off Zyxio's new breathing-based PC controller.

A novel mouse-alternative, the Sensawaft features a sensor which converts the direction, length and strength of your breathing into commands for the PC cursor. It takes some getting used to according to Engadget's Paul Miller, but he was getting to grips with the device within a few minutes.

Lots of potential uses here for the disabled or those with accessibility difficulties, not to mention perhaps medical uses where a third hand would be...handy. Keeping in mind the low suggested price range of $70, this is also far more affordable than other accessibility-designed PC control units.

Via: Engadget

Click here for more CES 2010 coverage from Tech Digest

Tech Digest at CES is sponsored by Best Buy. For more CES stories and videos go here

Cheap, clean power for 50,000 UK homes could be just 5 years away as "anacondas" take to British shores.

A company, called Checkmate, is testing 200m long rubber devices which would be tethered to the sea bed and are designed to swim against the current to produce up to 1MW of power each. The waves cause a bulge to ripple down the length of the anacondas and power turbines at the tails.

Fifty-strong shoals of the tubes could sit together just below the surface and scare all sorts of children in the sea. Checkmate hopes the devices, as designed by Professor Rod Rainey, would be in commercial production by 2014.

An enterprising techy in the Computer Science department at Rochester University, NY, has undertaken an investigation to find out exactly how much you have to mangle audio tracks before YouTube's content identification system can't recognise them any more. The findings are quite interesting.

For starters, he learnt that despite YouTube still easily recognising when a song's volume is massively increased or decreased, it can't cope with any pitch scaling beyond 5% or so. Also, interestingly, it only seems to recognise the first 30 seconds or so of a track.

The full analysis is right here, and there's some fantastic comments on the white noise test video, here. Also interesting is that despite infringing copyright on the website 35 times and, at once point, 15 times in an hour, the account hasn't been banned or removed.

Parallax

Research from US and Israeli scientists indicates that playing violent video games might be good for your eyes. The researchers asked two groups of non-gamers to play Call of Duty and The Sims, and then tested their vision.

Turns out that contrast sensitivity increased 43% in the group playing Call of Duty, whereas it only increased 11% in the people playing The Sims. The researchers think this may be because Call of Duty is a little more fast-moving than Maxis' hit game.

As an avid gamer who had his first eye test over the weekend, I'm not convinced. As a gamer who gets occasionally nagged to play less 'shooty-loud' games, I've now got an excuse. Guess science is good for something.

(via Metro)

OLED technology may be about to take a massive leap forwards, which is good news for anyone looking to the screens becoming more widely used. The blue OLED has always been the weak link in the screens, offering significantly shorter lifespans than its red and green brethren. Well, a team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is one step closer to cracking the problem by improving blue efficiency by an impressive 25%.

The breakthrough was made via new host materials for a blue phosphorescent OLED. Other than the alleged 25% improvement in efficiency, there's not a lot more to tell at this point however, and we'll have to play the waiting game. The PNNL scientists are rumoured to be discussing their findings ahead of meeting the American Chemical society later this spring, so hopefully we'll have more to tell then.

To the casual observer this may be a fish caught somewhere off the uncanny valley, but most fishes' limited eyesight will mean that it slips by completely unnoticed as it goes about its business. And its business is detecting hazardous pollutants in the water off the coast of Spain.

They've been designed by a group of UK scientists with the intention of collecting data while not scaring the local aquatic life. They look like carp and move around realistically with a top speed of around 2.25mph. They cost £20,000 a-piece, but fortunately the designers from the University of Essex have found the European Commission happy to foot the bill.

Mathematician Andrew Hicks is clever. So clever, in fact, that he's managed to work out how to get a mirror to display text that displays the correct way around, as in the picture above. Mightily impressive, no?

He's also done some other faintly magical stuff with mirrors, including a wing mirror that can display a 45 degree field-of-view, undistorted, and a mirror that reflects 360 degrees around you, again with no distortion.

Check out the full gallery of mirror fun at New Scientist.

A team of scientists at Purdue University have mapped carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels across the USA. The mega-high-res map will show you CO2 emissions in metric tons per state, county or capita.

The project, which took three years to complete, also breaks down emissions by their source - offering the option of viewing only emissions from electricity production, travel, or residential homes, for example.

To check out the map you'll need the Google Earth browser plugin, and a bit of patience because it takes a while to load.

Meanwhile, an erstwhile group of Google Earth explorers that thought that they'd found Atlantis have been disappointed. Metro is claiming that the vast city that observers had spotted on the floor of the Atlantic to the west of the Canary Islands is actually just an artifact of the sonar scanning process on the ocean floor. Pity.

(via AFP and Metro)

That's right, ladies and gentlemen - Forrest Gump will be pressing the big red button when the Large Hadron Collider comes back on in June, potentially dooming us all into getting sucked into a vast black hole. If I do end up ending my life in that way, I'll be a little happier knowing that it was all Tom Hanks' fault.

In a scene right out of Blackpool's Christmas Lights, a Hollywood actor will be taking precedence over the world's biggest and brightest minds to switch back on the massive, costly, science experiment that was switched off shortly after it was turned on, following a massive plasma leak.

Seriously, though - why Tom Hanks? It's not like they need the publicity that a Hollywood star will bring to the proceedings. In fact, his presence only detracts from the event, and makes whoever booked him look very foolish indeed. I don't have anything against Hanks, in fact I enjoy his work, but seriously - in big gold, shining letters - WHY?

(via Crunchgear)

Oh dear. Today is a sad day. We have been amused and entertained by a marketing campaign :(

The marketing campaign in question is that of ComputerTan, a supposed online tanning system that uses the deadly rays output by your PC monitor to bring a healthy orange glow to your face while you work.

It is, of course, a joke - perpetrated by UK skin cancer charity Skcin and designed to raise awareness of how bad it is to pursue the bronze-god look. The Times says some 30,000 people visited ComputerTan in its first 24 hours online, although whether it was 30,000 innocent, orange-faced receptionists hoping for a free top-up or 30,000 cynical tech-bloggers looking for a story about the gullibility of the common man, isn't made clear.

Don't delve into the site too deeply. It's not all as glossy and amusing as the intro video. It soon gets serious about things.

(Via The Times)

Related posts: Replacement skin | More replacement skin

The Oxford Junior Dictionary has been slowly removing loads of boring old nature and science words from its recent editions, replacing the likes of "guinea pig" and "monastery" with modern things kids need to know about like "MP3 player" and "broadband".

This deeply shameful activity by the newly edgy and urban word-explainer has mainly seen numerous nature terms and animal names dumped, but plenty of Christian and other religious words have been removed too - to make way for the likes of "database" and "chatroom". Ideal if you're currently hot-housing your kid for a future career in IT.

A full list of all the binned and replaced words can be found here, if you're thinking of starting an angry petition on behalf of the UK's under-represented budgerigar population.

(Via Technabob)

Related posts: Facebook will always have existed for them | Child enthused by video game!

The quest for cheaper, more environmentally-friendly lighting has taken another leap forward with scientists' new-found ability to produce much cheaper LEDs.

The New Scientist article goes into quite significant detail about how the process was achieved in order to avoid the LEDs cracking during the manufacturing process (due to the high heat required to grow them) so I won't attempt to look clever here by regurgitating it.

Suffice it to say, the "new" LEDs can be produced for around a tenner per 150,000 units.

A group of scientists at Cambridge University has conducted a study that shows that associations in videogames transfer directly to the real world. A group of volunteers played a (rather basic, from the look of it) cycling game, where they would be given a slurp of fruit juice if a cyclist from their team passed them, but a slurp of salty tea if a rival cyclist passed them.

A few days later, the participants were invited back and given the choice of two chairs in the waiting room, one with the logo of their team, and one with the logo of the rival team. Three quarters of participants picked the chair with their team's logo, despite most people claiming not to notice the design.

This is more "science" than "gadgets" to be honest, but we can't turn down the chance to report on the discovery of an immortal jellyfish.

The jellyfish, known as Turritopsis Nutricula among jellyfish enthusiasts and on jellyfish forums, manages to cleverly revert back to a juvenile state after mating - effectively becoming a baby again and living forever. Most STUPID jellyfish die after having sex, making the Turritopsis Nutricula the BEST JELLYFISH.

Scientists say the 5mm long jellyfish can do this indefinitely, which goes some way to explaining the massive rise in population of this undying creature.

Soon, the sea will be a white mass of pure jellyfish, although when jellyfish-infused beauty products start hitting the shelves from 2012 the poor little Turritopsis Nutricula will get hunted to extinction. That'll teach it to be so clever.

(Via The Telegraph)

Related posts: Science "sex chip" | Frozen mouse cloned

The Royal Society of Chemistry is a wonderful thing. I'm not sure how they decided it was within their remit to run a competition to solve the cliffhanger at the end of the Italian Job but I like to think it's the sort of thing they ponder during their lunch breaks only.

Around 2,000 people put forward their solutions but it was a gentleman by the name of John Godwin, of Godalming, Surrey, who was named the winner and right after I've told his idea, I'll explain why it just won't work.