Funky stuff, man!
Forty times more aerodynamic than a Bugatti Veyron and with a top speed of 90 mph, the Arion 1 is aiming to be the fastest human powered vehicle in history. The bicycle, or more accurately velocipede, is the brainchild of an engineering team at the University of Liverpool in the UK, and it will attempt the world record in September 2015 in Nevada, USA.
Bioengineer Manu Prakash of Stanford University has come up with an excellent design for an ultra cheap paper based folding microscope which could provide low cost health monitoring and diagnosis in areas where conventional scopes are too expensive.
Trust the Swedes to be first with something that could transform the world’s payment systems, but the clever folk at Lund University have successfully tested out a Pay With Your Hand terminal which lets you buy your lunch or coffee simply by scanning your palm.
The web’s great, but boy does it suck up time. How many times have you started your day with great intentions only to turn round and find that you’ve spent the whole morning watching videos of hula cats? Yeah we know how it goes. There are tools to help, but in general they’re too easy to switch off. Until now.
If you’ve ever had a leak event happen in your life, especially of something like diesel or other noxious liquids, you’ll know it’s not a funny business. Apart from the health hazard, it can be a real pain and expensive in terms of clean up and restoration. Now a neat invention by a former firefighter aims to make it easier to contain a leak emergency before it gets worse.
It’s amazing what you can do with a bit of creativity and the right attitude nowadays. Of course it also helps if you’ve got an artistic eye, and the folks at Concrete Revolution seem to have that in spades. Their specialty is taking standard concrete and turning it into something else entirely.
When it comes to portable power, you can never ever have too much. The powers that be know this, which is why they keep coming up with more and more solutions, but we think this one is probably the most ambitious we’ve seen yet.
The world’s first wearable technology show opened its doors to attendees this week, and we took a trip down there to video what was going on. For those just back from Mars, wearables are the latest ‘thing’ to hit the technology world. The idea is it covers any kind of technology that we wear, as opposed to carry around, so smart glasses, smart watches, smart jackets, shoes. But not phones or tablets etc. You get the picture.
![The Wearable Technology Show 2014 – a sneak preview of the current state of the art in wearable gadgets [Show Report]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/wearablesshowlondon2014b.jpg)
Chess is such a noble endeavor, don’t you think? What with all that thinking, and calculating and laughter. Lots of laughter. But there’s not a chess master in the world whose game wouldn’t improve with a decent set of playing thingies, which is where this DIY Nixie Tube Chess Set comes into play.
Ever since the dawn of time, or even earlier, man has been trying to simulate the experience of being in a car at high speed without actually…er…being in a car at high speed. This desire has been increasingly shaped by the power of modern driving games on PC and consoles of course, and now it’s reaching new levels of cool.
Do you run a small business? Wish you could make life easier by accepting credit cards, but don’t want all the hassle of the machines and procedures? Well there’s a new product which actually could make it all so simple.
Twenty five years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at CERN in Europe came up with a new way of storing and retrieving information using the then fledgling Internet network of computers. His idea of a ‘worldwideweb‘ [sic] took off slowly, but by the end of 1990 the first web site was up and running. Today there are estimated to be around 2.5 billion users of the system, with 1 billion of those based in Asia alone. One…
On the 13th September this year the streets of Beijing will reverberate to the sound of 11 teams racing around in almost total silence at speeds of up to 225 km/hour (limited). This will be the inaugural event in the Formula E calendar, the world’s first all electric single seater formula car racing season.
Speed reading is all the rage nowadays, and although we’re not really sure just how effective it is to consume the printed word at ridiculously rapid speeds, we can see the attraction for people who have too much to do and too little time. Now there’s a rather remarkable free product which can help you consume text on a web page at high speed, and it actually seems to work well.
![OpenSpritz – free speed reading bookmarklet turns your browser into a 950 wpm speed demon [Freeware]](https://www.redferret.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/openspritz.gif)
If there’s one thing that’s constantly amazing about web tech, it’s how stuff actually does what it’s supposed to do when you least expect it. That’s why this Songtapper service, which looks like a bit of a joke at first glance, is such a shock. It actually seems to work.
