According to Marc Abrahams, the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize and the Annals of Improbable Research, some Korean businessmen own special suits that emit a pleasant aroma when rubbed. These suits allow the owners to remain fresh after very long days at work and play. Here’s Abrahams demonstrating the effectiveness of his peppermint-scented suit to a test subject.
Continue reading… “Scratch & Sniff business suit”
Would you believe this could be the new look of solar power?
7th grader Aidan Dwyer was walking in the woods during the winter, and looking up, he noticed something about the bare branches above him. They didn’t appear to be growing randomly. So he took some measurements of the angles of the branches, crunched some numbers, and wouldn’t you know it, he found that the ubiquitous Fibonacci Sequence was behind it all. He suspected there was a reason behind this. That trees were using this pattern to gather more light.
So he did an experiment. Using the same number of solar cells, he built two working models. One was a traditional, flat array will all of the panels on a single plane. The other used the Fibonacci Sequence to create the same spiraled pattern he observed in the trees. The results? The little man himself reports…
Continue reading… “Genius 13-Year-Old has a solar power breakthrough”
USPTO issues 8,000,000th patent on August 17, 2011.
The first patent granted by the USPTO was in 1836 and 175 years later, the government body now has a database that is eight million strong.
Continue reading… “USPTO’s major milestones from one to eight million patents”
Are you tired of crappy earbuds?
If you use earbud headphones, you’ve probably owned more than one pair. They break easily and often, pushing users to spend less money on a product they know won’t last. That in turn pushes manufacturers to make them more cheaply, and crappily. But a new product has stepped in to end the vicious cycle: Ironbuds…
Continue reading… “Repairable, modular ‘Ironbuds’ could end the reign of poorly made earphones”
The Data Clip
As flash memory chips continue to get smaller the main advantage is more storage in the same space. For example, the 64GB USB stick of today, will hold double or triple that in the same chip space within just a few years.
However, there is another advantage to decreasing the size of the storage chips: you can attach a decent amount of storage to tiny objects you’d usually associate with another function entirely…
Continue reading… “4GB of storage on a paper clip”
Engineer Fumiyuki Sato displays his spherical observation drone in Tokyo.
Advanced Defense Technology Centre Engineer Fumiyuki Sato, a Japanese defense researcher, has invented a spherical observation drone that can fly down narrow alleys, hover on the spot, take off vertically and bounce along the ground.
Continue reading… “Japanese inventor develops world’s first flying sphere drone”
How many lives could this save?
Samuel K. Sia, a biomedical engineer at Columbia University, has developed a cheap test for HIV infection that can return accurate results almost instantly…
Continue reading… “New test for HIV takes 15 minutes, costs $1”
Powerful but oh so small!
Your watch battery isn’t small. This battery is small. At six times thinner than a bacterium, Rice University’s new battery is 60,000 times smaller than a AAA battery…
Continue reading… “The world’s smallest battery is six times thinner than a bacterium”
Professor Manos Tentzeris displays an inkjet-printed rectifying antenna used to convert microwave energy to DC power.
Researchers have found a way to capture and harness energy transmitted by such sources as radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems. By getting this ambient energy from the air around us, the technique could provide a new way to power networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.
Are you ready for the Green Flight Challenge?
Air travel may be time efficient, but based on planes’ carbon emissions, it’s not good for the environment. And while purchasing carbon offsets is a good move, it’s just a drop in the bucket. That’s why Google has teamed up with aircraft technology research group the CAFE Foundation to sponsor the NASA Centennial Challenge competition, called the Green Flight Challenge.
The more than $1 million first place prize will go to the team that designs the aircraft that best shows that the emission-free flight is not only possible, it’s practical…
Continue reading… “Google and NASA team up for a Green Flight Challenge with $1.65M prize”
Materials engineered to give off precisely tuned wavelengths of light when heated are key to new high-efficiency generating system.
MIT has developed a new photovoltaic energy-conversion system that can be powered solely by heat, generating electricity with no sunlight at all.
Continue reading… “MIT develops sun-free photovoltaics”
“Any industry that mislays 25-30% of its product in the process
of delivering it might reasonably be thought to have a problem.”
Between the water treatment plant and the tap in your kitchen, a lot can happen to water. Old pipes sometimes have slow leaks that are hard to detect, and sometimes there are bigger leaks that can waste a lot of potable water in a short time. According to a World Bank report published a few years ago, these leaks cost at least $14 billion a year.
Continue reading… “Slashing water waste with smart software could save billions of dollars”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.