Bike theft is a major problem.
If you walk around a major city, you may feel like you’re walking through a bicycle ghost town. Wheels and frames are left to rot tethered to street signs and and bike stands.
The resale value of your average bike is too great for a thief to pass up.
Israeli entrepreneur Izhar Gafni has looked to address this issue by creating a bicycle that’s simply too cheap to steal.
Many great pranks have been pulled over time using adhesives; duck taping a friend to a bed, gluing coins to a floor, and sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on someone’s back. Unfortunately, pranksters worldwide have been limited by scotch and duct tapes’ elementary adhesive abilities or superglues’ longer than comfortable effects. Fortunately, scientists have been hard at work developing a sticky alternative that will change the way we prank and the way we live our lives. They’re calling it GeckSkin.
As we work towards a greener and more sustainable future, we’re going to need natural materials that want to work with us. One of the most overlooked smart materials in the world is bamboo. Many people are familiar with it’s versatility, but few know the true extent of the life enhancing benefits that it provides.
Bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world, with reports of some species growing 1-4 feet per day (though most grow 1-4 inches, but still)! A common misconception of bamboo is that it’s a wood; it’s actually a grass. It’s nearly pest resistant and able to grow in a wide variety of climates, both hot and cold. Bamboo is easy to maintain as it requires little water. Bamboo can shelter us, feed us, and purify our air: it’s designed to help us in more ways than we know.
Those of us who use our phones for more than just the occasional call know that infinite battery life (or even a full days worth) is too good to be true; but is it really?
If you haven’t heard of the incredible opportunities that haptics offers us, then prepare to have your mind blown. Haptics essentially enables us to transmit touch via the internet, much the same way we currently transmit sound and sight. Some of the top companies in the world such as Apple are working to bring haptics to their product lines as soon as possible.
Everyone loves to eat. If you love to eat, often times you’ll find you have to cook. Cooking isn’t generally associated with being much fun. With these futuristic gadgets, though, you’ll want to strap on the apron and hit the kitchen.
Doctor Michael Ioffe and Professor Fernando Patolsky at Tel-Aviv University are fine-tuning a straw that will signal to victims when and if they are the targets of a date rape drug attack.
The smart straw is casually dipped in a drink, and if it detects GHB or ketamine, the drink will almost instantaneously emit a clear alert. Initial tests of the smart straw have proven to be 100% accurate with zero false positives.
In the 80s, you weren’t cool if you weren’t rocking a boombox; now in the 201st decade, you might not be cool unless you have a boombot.
A company called TovBot, a compilation of robot researchers and entrepreneurs hailing from Georgia Tech, IDC in Israel, and MIT Media Lab, was over the plain old method for taking in music. They wanted an interactive and intelligent user experience. A new robofriend named Shimi (fittingly pronounced shimmy) has been born to do just that. Shimi has some pretty amazing features for an mp3 dock, and should be in your living room in 2013.
Cost of lighting a bulb could take drastic turn from money to blood
In 1635, an English author named Frances Quarles coined the phrase “burning the midnight oil,” commenting on humanity’s obsession with working too hard; in particular into the wee hours of the night and early morning. Quarles’ fascination stemmed from the fact that people would literally have to use lamps fueled by oil to be able to work at these hours, despite the fact that oil lamps were unable to produce substantial light.
Need a cell phone you can count on? This one last 15 years.
It’s hard to determine whether or not the SpareOne phone is a breakthrough in cell phone technology.
On one hand, the phones makers have created a high tech device that runs on a single AA battery, which can last up to 15 years or through 10 hours of talk time.
When considering the duration of the phone’s battery life, one would believe it is revolutionary for the industry; however, upon second look, the SpareOne seems to symbolize the complete opposite – a revert back to the ways of old.