Tag: Robots
Platial gets even cooler with MapKit
We were positively delighted by Platial first time it came up: the idea of an atlas anybody could annotate seemed to have, pardon me, a world of possibilities. Maps of hydrogen refuelling stations, maps of vegetarian restaurants, maps of…
ZAP Xebra PK Electric Vehicle
Reminding one of the little blue car frequently tipped over by Mr Bean, one of the exciting things about the ZAP Xebra PK Electric Vehicle is the price: $10,000 USD instead of the $120,000 variety we've seen before. It's…
Turnover eBook has pages, sort of
As someone who studied literature and has dozens of boxes of books, I understand the complaint that ebook readers don't have pages. So I find the concept of the Turnover, designed by Timothy Yeoh, oddly appealing. Simply, it's a…
Flying Alarm Clock wakes you in incredibly annoying way, cheap enough to destroy
To heck with broken flying clocks, the Flying Alarm Clock is the real thing. It goes off at the appointed moment, and then takes off into the air, continuing to siren, until you catch it and turn the little…
PageAddict monitors how specific your online obsessions are
As a blogger-for-hire, I can feel virtuous about the amount of time I spend trawling the internet to discover precious globs of vital information, and in this spirit I pass on the pageaddict plugin for Firefox, which monitors your…
No-Contact Jacket keeps hands off
It looks like an ordinary and somewhat ugly gray nylon anorak. But deep within the plastic recesses of the No-Contact Jacket is a 9 volt battery powering 80,000 volts of electricity that, at the flick of a switch in…
Brain-Machine Interface controls model trains
Five years from now we'll all be controlling our model train sets with our brain waves. If that sounds a little Philip K. Dick, Hitachi has spent big bucks making it so, and now has an optical topography based…
iLoupe lets you self-portrait your own cells
Designed to fit a Canon SD600 digital camera, the iLoupe is a 60x to 150x microscope module that lets you get extreme close-ups and then photograph them for future perusal. Intended for forensic use with crime scenes, detecting defects…
VR simulated limbs trick brain into fixing real phantom limb
It's not clear exactly how this works – survey says "the brain is being tricked" – but amputees who suffer phantom limb pain can find relief through virtual bodies. A woman with amputated fingers who felt them digging painfully…
Light my Swedish FireSteel
Instead of carrying around pseudo-waterproof matches, smelly butane, or a pyromania-provoking Zippo, clip some Swedish FireSteel on as a key fob and you’ll be set for 3,000 (Scout edition, £8) or 12,000 (Army model, £12, £13 with oak handle)…