We’ve seen some bizarre projects turn up on Indiegogo and other crowdsourced funding sites over the years. However, the Tongue Cover may well be the most bizarre ever.
The product is designed to cover the taste buds on the tongue so you don’t taste the disgusting liquid medicines you have to swallow when you’re sick. On the surface, it sounds like a pretty good idea.
As a parent, I’ve literally had to sit on my kids before to get them to take antibiotics. That said, I think the odds of getting a kid to slide what amounts to a condom over their tongue are just about as slim as getting them to willingly swallow their medications – if not worse.
I’m not trying to be humorous either, the pre-production prototype absolutely looks like a condom. The product is only recommended for single use due to hygienic and legal reasons according to the creator of the Tongue Cover.
You might think making tongue condoms would be an inexpensive proposition. Apparently, it’s not, the project is seeking $70,000(USD) by March 30, 2013, and as of this writing has raised a whopping $46. If you can’t live without this tongue cover, 25 bucks will get you 30 of them with an estimated delivery in May.
Technology that allows a direct link between the brains of two rats, allowing the behaviors of one animal to shape those of the other – even if they were thousands of miles apart – could pave the way to cognitive crowd-sourcing, researchers suggest. The experiment, in which microelectrodes a 1/100th the thickness of a human hair were inserted into the parts of the rats’ brains which handle motor information, saw one rat rewarded for hitting a specific lever in its cage, and then remotely tutoring its counterpart to select the correct lever in its independent cage by direct stimulation of its motor cortex.
The system basically learnt from the electrical activity in the part of the “encoder” rat’s brain, as it figured out which of the levers in its cage to press, and then stimulated the “decoder” rat’s brain with the same impulses. Although the second rat did eventually figure out which was the right lever on each test, however, demonstrating a roughly 70-percent success ratio, it wasn’t an instantaneous process.
Instead, it took scientists around 45 days – with the rats practicing for an hour each day – before the decoder animal became proficient. That appeared to be a sudden switch in understanding, however, rather than a gradual familiarity: “there is a moment in time when … it clicks” Professor Miguel Nicolelis of the Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, where the research took place, said of the process.
“Suddenly, the [decoder] animal realizes ‘Oops! The solution is in my head. It’s coming to me’ and he gets it right” the scientist says. To help that process along, the encoder rat was denied a treat whenever the decoder rat picked the wrong lever, a feedback system that encouraged sharper thoughts from the tutoring animal.
Although the current system uses a pair of rats – at times linking Duke University with a counterpart lab in Brazil – the scientists are already working on a version which will combine the thoughts of multiple animals. “You could actually have millions of brains tackling the same problem and sharing a solution” Nicolelis suggests, opening the door to a crowd-sourced problem solving engine of sorts.
“It is important to stress that the topology of BTBI [Brain-to-Brain Interface] does not need to be restricted to one encoder and one decoder subjects. Instead, we have already proposed that, in theory, channel accuracy can be increased if instead of a dyad a whole grid of multiple reciprocally interconnected brains are employed. Such a computing structure could define the first example of an organic computer capable of solving heuristic problems that would be deemed non-computable by a general Turing-machine” Professor Miguel Nicolelis, Duke University Medical Center, North Carolina
Nicolelis and his team also predict that one day – albeit a day several decades off – humans will be able to communicate and learn in this fashion, though it will take some clever cabling to actually make it practical. Currently, the microelectrodes require direct contact with points within the brain; while non-invasive brain monitoring equipment exists, it’s insufficiently precise for these purposes.
According to Nicolelis, the next stage of the research is to work on the crowd-crunching potential of the system, and measure its potential for computation in comparison to more traditional systems.
This ain’t your daddy’s Tesla. In fact, the Renault Twizy is arguably the antithesis of the Model S: eye-catching where the Tesla is discrete; cheap where the electric sedan is expensive. Intended for city driving and the sort of short trips where nippy and straightforward are the key factors, the Twizy also manages to be a whole lot of fun, albeit with a couple of caveats (and preferably a pair of gloves). We raised our eco-cred with a Twizy blast around the urban jungle.
The Twizy may be small, but it’s certainly not discrete: expect to be looked at when you’re behind the wheel. The moon-buggy styling, prominent safety-shell cabin design, narrow footprint and comical dimensions add up to a car that gets noticed. Years ago, I used to drive a Smart car, back when they were still an unusual sight on the roads; the Twizy definitely gets the same sort of attention, with other drivers pausing at junctions to gawp, pedestrians stopping still and turning on the spot to watch you zip past, and kids pointing phone cameras at you.
European sales of the Twizy began almost a year ago, though the car is still relatively uncommon. That’s arguably down to the compromises owners have to make: in its base form, the Twizy lacks any sort of doors, for instance. Renault charges £545 ($832) on top of the base £6,795 ($10,370) for the scissor doors, though that still only gets you the side bars and translucent lower sections. In fact, it was only in October last year that Renault relented and offered plastic upper windows as a £295 ($450) add-on.
Even with the “doors” in place, the Twizy’s cabin can be an uncomfortable place to be. There’s no attempt to make it water-tight – there are gaps all around the edges, including huge holes where the scissor bar clicks into the rear locking mechanism that you could easily fit your hand through – and the waterproof seats are sturdy foam rather than something more cosseting. It’s also not a car you’d want to leave your phone or sat-nav in: security is limited to a lockable cubby behind the vestigial rear seat, and since you have to unzip the window from the outside merely to reach through to grab the door-opening switch, anything left in plain view is likely to be snatched.
Renault Twizy first-drive:
If the Tesla Model S’ vast, touchscreen dashboard is one example of EV usability, the Twizy’s console sits at the other extreme. There are the usual indicator, light, and wiper control stalks behind the steering wheel, and a pod binnacle showing speed, range, battery status, and drive status above. A hazard blinkers button is on the left, next to two buttons to select either drive or reverse (pressing them both puts the Twizy into neutral), while under the left hand side of the dash is a parking brake.
No rear view mirror – there’s no rear window, though a clear plastic roof is a £195 ($298) option – and the wing mirrors are manually adjustable. More worrying is the complete lack of heating options: in an effort to save battery power, you don’t get fans or heated seats, and even with the windows zipped up there was plenty of cold air circulating through the cabin. At least the windscreen gets a heating option for quick demisting. Your right foot is kept occupied with two pedals – accelerator and brake – and there are no gears to consider.
Starting off in the Twizy is an unusual sensation, even if you’re used to driving electric cars. The Renault is pretty much silent initially, and the feeling of openness from the minimal doors makes you feel quite exposed. As the electric motor ramps up (and you suppress the feeling that you really ought to change gear) it starts to work its way up to a heady whine, combining with the whistle of wind noise to make a cabin that you’d struggle to hear the radio in at comfortable levels, if that is Renault actually fitted one.
Then again, perhaps comfort should be left to drivers of $100k Teslas: the Twizy has its own brand of appeal. After the initial disconcert has worn off, you quickly realize that the tiny Renault is in effect a go-kart for grown-ups. The non-power-assisted steering is direct and immediate, and the tiny wheels and minimal seat padding contribute to a ride that tells you everything there is to know about the condition of the road and how much grip you have. Renault quotes a top speed of 50mph (we managed to squeeze out 52mph with the help of a mild slope) but even at sub-30mph rates the Twizy is incredibly fun, demanding you punt it round corners.
Acceleration lacks the instant verve of other EVs we’ve tried, but is perfectly fine for urban use. Less reassuring is the brake, which feels wooden and overly-stiff. Like other electric cars, the Twizy uses regenerative braking to top up its 52V drive battery – stored under the driver’s seat – with graphics on the LCD showing when you’re using power and when you’re creating it. Maximum range is 62 miles, Renault says, but that’s very dependent on driving style and, more pressingly in the 2-degree centigrade conditions we tried the car, temperature. In fact, we never saw more than 38 miles in estimated range on the display, though with the benefit of regenerative braking that didn’t quite drop in parallel with the actual distance we traveled.
A full charge from a 240V European domestic socket takes 3.5hrs, with the Twizy sprouting a curly extension cord from a hatch in its snout. In fact, the sticker price doesn’t actually include the drive battery at all: Renault is instead leasing them to owners, with finance packages depending on estimated usage (from 4,500 to 9,000 miles per year, ample considering this is not a car for the freeway) and length of agreement. For a year’s rental at the minimum mileage, you’re looking at under £0.15 ($0.22) per mile, not including actually charging the Twizy up.
The Twizy is undeniably a silly car. It’s impractical if your travel isn’t limited to urban use, potentially uncomfortable in inclement weather, suffers from limited range (like most small EVs), and is fairly expensive for a supermini once you add in “essentials” like doors and windows. The version we drove came to around £8,500 ($13,000) when you added in the wheels, doors, windows, clear roof, and a Parrot hands-free kit, which is a lot for a city toy.
And yet… there’s something addictive about it. Maybe it’s the purity of the driving experience, or that the bemused and entertained expressions of the people you whiz past can easily distract you from the fact that you’ve had to dig out gloves and a hoodie in order to keep warm. Maybe it’s the fact that you quickly start to believe you’re at the wheel of a lunar rover, or a car from a Gerry Anderson show. Stopping to recharge doesn’t seem like such a chore when you can combine it with warming up again over a coffee, watching pedestrians pause to ogle the Twizy parked outside.
Renault’s ambitions for the Twizy in the UK are conservative: whereas warmer countries on the European continent might be able to ignore the open-air cabin, it’s far less fun in rain and wind. Still, while we can appreciate the efforts of Tesla and the big car companies attempting to make EVs more mainstream, there’s no denying that the ridiculous (and ridiculously good fun) driving experience of the Twizy makes us glad Renault hasn’t gone entirely sensible as it looks beyond gas engines.
Last summer we talked about a boy in the UK who found a yellowish rock on a beach near his home. What the boy thought was a rock was actually a chunk of whale vomit known as ambergris. The chunk of whale vomit the boy found in August of 2012 was estimated to be worth as much as £40,000.
A man named Ken Wilman was recently walking his dog on the beach in the UK when he discovered a strange yellow stone. While it looked like a chunk of dirty yellow rock, Wilman’s find could be worth as much as £100,000. The man says that his dog first spotted the rock and that it “smelled horrible.”
He actually originally left the rock on the beach and came back to retrieve it later after an Internet search told him how much the substance could be worth. Wilman has already been offered €50,000 for the 3 kg specimen if it turns out to be sperm whale ambergris. The material is an important component in perfumes.
The man is currently sending a sample to be tested to determine if it is in fact ambergris. If the substance is confirmed to be sperm whale vomit, some estimate the material could be worth as much as $180,000. Ambergris has been used in high-end perfumes such as Chanel No. 5. If you’re wondering, sperm whales eject ambergris into the water when they have stomach or throat problems where the material can float for years as it hardens.
When smartphone cameras are increasingly the go-to snapper of choice, you have to do something unusual to stand out, and Bonzart’s oddly retro Ampel certainly does that. Styled – and in fact named – after German traffic signals, the odd twin-lensed camera looks like it should be a toy, but does something for its $199 price tag that most cameras would demand specialist lenses for: native tilt-shift photos and video.
We caught up with the Bonzart (GDC) team at the CP+ camera show in Japan this week to have a look at the Ampel, which is available in the US, Japan, and UK. Styled and operated like a twin-lens dual reflex camera, the Ampel has a flip-up panel on top revealing a color display, as well as dedicated mode dials on the side for each of the lenses.
One of those lenses shoots normal images – albeit with the choice of either 4:3 or 1:1 (i.e. square) aspect ratio – while the other shoots tilt-shift images, making everything look like a miniatures scene. Up to 5-megapixels images can be captured, or up to 720p HD video, and there’s a 4x digital zoom though no optical zoom.
What you can do is snap on a magnetic wide-angle lens, which fits to either the regular or tilt-shift lenses. If the unusual aspect ratio isn’t enough for you, you can also apply some integrated effects: there’s standard, vivid, B&W, sepia, and “refreshing” to choose between. Storage is courtesy of a SD card up to 32GB.
It might not be the first camera you reach for to take wedding photos, but for a party the Ampel is certainly unique enough to stand out. Plus, with dedicated tilt-shift lenses running at around $300, the $200 Bonzart camera is practically a bargain.
You’re nobody in the consumer tech world if you don’t have a celebrity “Creative Director” and, with will.i.am and Lady Gaga already occupied, BlackBerry has snatched warbler Alicia Keys. The freshly-announced “Global Creative Director” for the Canadian company, Keys joined CEO Thorsten Heins on-stage at the launch of BlackBerry 10 and promised to “work closely” with developers, retailers, and others to promote the platform.
“I want to further enhance this concept of having your work life and your personal life in one device” Keys said, referring to BlackBerry 10′s combination of both business and consumer functionality. Keys will also be trying to push BlackBerry in the music industry, so expect the OS to feature in RnB and rap music soon.
Of course, being a creative director also means you get to plug your own projects, and Keys is no different. Her side-project of choice is Keep Moving, though the scheme will at least get some BlackBerry 10 devices to use. Neil Gaiman, Roger Rodriguez, and others will be using the OS to produce various creative projects.
For Keys, it’ll be producing music videos in multiple cities as part of her own tour, using the Z10 to make special films to “capture sights, sounds, and fans of every city that I visit.” Whether having her onboard will raise the profile among consumers is questionable, however.
Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime may have straddled a full-sized Mario Kart replica for publicity, but Waterloo Labs‘ DIY version goes several steps better with actual gameplay dragged out from the console to the race track. Taking four regular go-karts, and then strapping on RFID readers, pneumatic launchers, and various servo-controls of the steering and throttle, the real-life drivers can boost their performance by grabbing RFID-tagged boosters hanging over the course, and sabotage rivals by shooting at them.
Just as in the classic SNES racing game, different items around the track have different effects on the go-cart. Get a mushroom, for instance, and the speed of the Mario Kart is boosted for five seconds, having been artificially limited to 75-percent of full throttle.
However, the RFID-tagged plastic bananas cause the pneumatics to automatically lock up one side of the steering for three seconds, causing the go-cart to swerve uncontrollably. Since all of the carts are hooked up wirelessly, some items can apply a penalty to all the other drivers when collected, for instance automatically slamming on their brakes.
A 120psi cannon on the side of each of the carts can be used to blast other drivers, again causing their brakes to lock or their steering to go wonky. Unfortunately, the Mario Kart race track Waterloo Labs set up was only temporary, but the team has released the source code in case you have the space and inclination to build your own.
Before anything else, yes, her name is Beautiful Existence, and yes, she might not have a very beautiful existence if she goes through with her challenge of chowing down on nothing but Starbucks food for a year.
I’m not saying Starbucks doesn’t serve stellar sandwiches, donuts, or coffee, because they do. Heck, I love their hot chocolate to pieces and it’s a drink I turn to when I’m feeling particularly down or homesick (when I’m away for work.)
However, living only on Starbucks food for a year doesn’t sound appealing, even to a fan like me. Beautiful isn’t being sponsored by Starbucks or any other company, and if you do the math, she’ll be spending close to $7,000 the whole year due to this ‘resolution.’
Beautiful explains her motivation behind the challenge: “The company pays good benefits for part-time workers. That’s where my money is going… We’re really lucky and I would say actually spoiled as Americans because we have all these different eating options…You go to all these other countries and they don’t have these luxuries. Really? Is it really going to be that hard for one year of my life to limit my menu? We’ll find out.”
Sounds like a plan but I wonder what this is going to do to her health? We all saw what happened to that guy who ate nothing but McDonald’s for one month (remember Morgan Spurlock and his Super Size Me documentary?)
Remember John McAfee? He’s the man who, just weeks ago, went on the run from Belize after his neighbor was found murdered, claiming that the police wanted to kill him and frame him for the murder. He fled to Guatamala, where he spent a week or so in detention before his release was ordered. He arrived in the US shortly after, and now he’s pecking out his tell-all tale via his blog, where he describes himself as the head of his own private spy operation.
According to the post he wrote on his blog, McAfee purchased 75 laptops, loaded them with “invisible keystroke logging software,” packaged them back up so none would be the wiser, and gave them away to those in positions of power: law enforcement, government employees, etc. The software then sent McAfee text files of what was typed, and he soon had access to a variety of social media and email accounts.
Soon after, he amassed 23 women and six men whom he calls his operatives; eight of the women, he said, were so accomplished at their missions that they ended up living with him. Of course, his mission was a success. He not only discovered countless affairs and love triangles via his snooping, but also an international Hezbollah trafficking network that, he claims, was sending nearly a dozen terrorists into the US per month. He states the terrorists are making ricin, a poison, from harvests grown in Nicaraguan training camps.
Of course, it’s important to remember some things: McAfee is known to be involved in drugs, even having had his place in Belize raided at one point on suspicion of meth manufacturing. He was not a suspect in the murder of his neighbor, only wanted for questioning, something that prompted him to flee with claims of impending murder and corruption. He’s also known for lying on is blog, including one instance of pulling an “elaborate prank” about manufacturing a drug called MDPV.
Likewise, shortly after the debacle started, McAfee sold his life story, and is no doubt looking to make as much money as he can from his strange (and suspicious) activities. What better wait to fuel such ambitions than to make up elaborate stories about spy-scapades? Of course, we don’t know for sure whether what he says is true. According to McAfee: “I just did it because I could.”
A Fox has reportedly stolen a phone and subsequently send SMS messages from it. Here’s how it happened: kids spotted a fox near their homes and tried to attract it with an iPhone app that simulates the sound of a dying rabbit (there’s really an app for everything!). Left on the ground, the phone indeed attracted the Fox (probably by saying “diner time” in “fox/rabbit language”) which grabbed the phone and ran away with it. (more…)
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A Fox has reportedly stolen a phone and subsequently send SMS messages from it. Here’s how it happened: kids spotted a fox near their homes and tried to attract it with an iPhone app that simulates the sound of a dying rabbit (there’s really an app for everything!). Left on the ground, the phone indeed attracted the Fox (probably by saying “diner time” in “fox/rabbit language”) which grabbed the phone and ran away with it. 