Posts by Category: future tech

It’s coming WHEN?

future tech January 2, 2010 posted by

Retinal Prosthesis – Photovoltaics give vision to the blind

A research team at Stanford University have created a unique photovoltaic chip – a Retinal Prosthesis – that will act as a solar cell array and provide partial vision for people who suffer from degradation in their photoreceptor cells. This chip not only generates power but it passes image data through to a processing retinal chip and on to the brain to be processed. Placed behind the retina, this amazing system includes a goggle mounted video camera that captures the…


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future tech December 24, 2009 posted by

Tooth Mounted Hearing Aid – smile wider and speak up…

WHAT? A Tooth Mounted Hearing Aid? Speak up I can’t hear ya.  Sonitus Medical of San Mateo in California has created a small device that wraps around the teeth. It picks up the sounds detected from a tiny microphone in the deaf ear and transforms them into vibrations. These then travel through the teeth and down the jawbone to the cochlea in the working ear, where they are transmitted to the brain providing stereo sound. The same process of “bone…


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cool tech December 16, 2009 posted by

Aura 6000 Sleep Therapy – giving a stiff tongue to sleep apnea problems

This Aura 6000 Sleep Therapy system aims to conquer sleep apnea – which is a serious and health threatening ailment – by stimulating the muscles of the tongue with an electrical charge during the night. Ghastly as it sounds, the developers believe that this is an effective way to stop the tongue falling back into the throat which is the cause of the loud snoring and the obstruction of the airways. They reckon there are nearly 40 million people with…


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cool tech December 15, 2009 posted by

50 Cheapo iPhone Clones – or why lock-down lovin’ Apple could be heading towards a music industry type meltdown

Two companies, two completely opposing attitudes. In the green corner, Apple, champion of the lock-down, closed off, proprietary platform. Our way or the highway. In the blue corner, Google, home of the ‘do no evil’, open systems, come-one come all platform. Apple vs Android. We’re not going to say much other than show you all this page full of 50 iPhone clones from the Far East. Sure they’re not the same as the real thing, but we all know it’s just a…


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future tech December 3, 2009 posted by

Pico Plumber – Fixes pipe leaks with E. coli

The boffins at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland have come up with a novel idea for detecting and repairing water pipe leaks. They did it by engineering a strain of the E. coli bacterium, they dubbed Pico Plumber, that could detect a special chemical that is released at a break in the pipe. The bacteria swim to the break and when there are sufficient bacteria at the site, they start producing a two part glue, one half of the…


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Eco Friendly December 2, 2009 posted by

CarGo – Saves car spaces for parking bikes

Copenhagen, site of the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference, has introduced something unique to handle their astonishing 15,000 bicycles in their fair city – the CarGo. Though a pilot project lasting the next 6 months, this fiberglass, car-shaped shell, by Danish design firm Goodmorning Technology has cabins to store 4 cargo bikes inside and takes the space of just one traditional car parking spot. The outer casing features solar powered lights -four headlights that light up after dark and another…


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cool tech November 24, 2009 posted by

SkySpark – electric plane breaks emission free flight speed record

The Italian SkySpark plane is totally electric, eerily quiet and has just broken the world record for emission free flight speed, humming through the air at 250 km/h using some Lithium Polymer batteries and a 75–kW engine. The team’s goal is to build a plane which will fly for over 500 kms at an average speed of 300 km/h, which would make it a very attractive alternative to conventional planes. As long as the price is right of course. The head of the…


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future tech November 16, 2009 posted by

Is a “road train” in our future?

The idea of letting your car drive itself has been around since the Jetsons. Now the European Union is testing out this concept in the form of a Road Train. With the idea of cutting down on fuel consumption, over the next three years the EU will test the Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE), where eight vehicles would be linked by wireless sensors to operate as one “train.” A professional driver would control the “train”, monitoring what’s around…


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cool tech November 11, 2009 posted by

Silicon-Silk Electronics – embed some LED tattoos where it counts

Science fiction moved a tad closer to our epidermis this month with the announcement that researchers are working on nano-scale electronics which can be embedded in the body using a silk screen carrier. The idea is for this Silicon-Silk patch to biodegrade over time, leaving behind the fully functioning electronics. Professor Brian Litt, of the University of Pennsylvania where some of the research is being done, believes that the new technology could give rise to a slew of new applications in…


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Eco Friendly November 10, 2009 posted by

Morrocan Solar Power – ramping up the alternative energy momentum

The Moroccans have announced a project to invest 9 billion dollars in a 2000 megawatt solar energy production system located where else but in a handy local desert or two. We’re talking 10,000 hectares of array, sucking the power out of 3000 hours of bright sunlight. Neat. There is one puzzle though (and it’s not just the weird headline which implies the country is forgoing solar energy). The article claims that Morocco spent $6 billion in 2008 on oil products for energy, and…


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cool tech November 9, 2009 posted by

A.W.E. – the Animated Workplace Environment that’s almost, but not quite, a cubicle…

As if cubicles weren’t enough, the boffins at Clemson University have come up with a computer controlled robotic wall called the Animated Workplace Environment – or A.W.E. – which is designed to adjust to different configurations depending on need. It features motion sensing tech and so will react to the movement of the users (for example it will retract automatically if you stand up to leave the room) and at the moment offers 6 or 7 different shape settings. Check out…


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Bizarre October 28, 2009 posted by

PetMan – the world’s first sweating robot…yeew!

The folk at Boston Dynamics – they of BigDog fame – are at it again, this time with a 2 legged robot prototype called PetMan. It’s still spooky tech, only now it’s a biped in action, strolling around like it’s a Sunday morning in Manhattan [scary video]. For some strange reason the boffins have built the thing to test chemical clothing (hence the sweating stuff) rather than accomplish some worthy task, but we’ll wait and see how the thing eventually turns out…


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Awesome October 21, 2009 posted by

Ordnance Survey 3D Maps – the future of digital maps looks beautifully bumpy

Ordnance Survey, the UK’s venerable mapping agency which was founded in 1746, has just released information on its new OS 3D mapping technology, which has been in trials for 3 years. The new technique uses a combination of StreetMapper 3D vehicles and aerial surveying with precision lasers to produce high resolution 3D maps of an area.   The first city to be mapped in this way is Bournemouth on the UK’s South coast, which has had every square metre of the town centre mapped using…


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future tech October 20, 2009 posted by

Audi R4 – The e-tron becomes real

It turns out that Audi haven’t just been sitting around waiting for the hydrogen economy, they’ve been working on electric sports cars. This is the Audio R4, based on the e-tron concept they showed off at the Frankfurt Motor Show earlier this year. The R4 range will sit between the TT and R8 models in the Audi sports car pecking order with the electric R4 the top-of-the line model in the R4 lineup. Petrol versions will feature further down the…


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Bookmark This! October 15, 2009 posted by

Google Wave Add-on For Firefox – free plugin brings Wave to your browser

I’ve been playing around with Google Wave for a few days now, and it’s definitely a fascinating piece of technology. The idea is to drag email and text communications into the 21st century by restructuring the way we chat with each other. As with all innovative tech, it’s going to take a while to see what benefit this initiative will bring to the table, but I’m tending to agree with Daniel Tenner in his view that at the very least…


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