A few months ago, I covered the Foc.us headset – a nifty little peripheral which uses electricity to jolt awake the user’s brain. This in turn confers benefits similar to what you’d get from a cup of coffee, albeit without caffeine jitters (or the inevitable caffeine crash). Sounds pretty cool, right?
It’s just passed through the FCC.
While not much about it is known,
Hewlett-Packard’s use of an Intel processor in its upcoming
ultra-cheap tablet computer might make the device very interesting to
hackers.
As electronic devices get increasingly tiny, heat management becomes a bigger and bigger problem. In gadgets that can’t practically house a fan, heat sinks
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The California-based company’s calling it the ‘World’s
Fastest Hard Drive’. Their hype machine is on full bore, but at least
it has some reason for it. Pairing a large flash memory cache with a
very high rotational speed, the Enterprise Turbo SSHD’s performance
is sure to be interesting.
Chromecast promises to provide a very low cost option to bring your online media to your TV, regardless of the device you use, from a PC, Mac, tablet or phone. Available for $35, it makes a strong competitor to current offerings.
Fujitsu’s high-tech walking stick looks
to offer easy monitoring and direction for loved ones. A few
additions to its already decent feature set, however, could make it
even better.
Bright Light Ventures has developed an extremely classy solution to the age old problem of unruly desktop cords and cables with the Pinza device.
A team from Canada managed to create the first human-powered helicopter, winning a $250,000 prize for a competition that had remained open for over 20 years, a first and great innovation in aeronautics. The winning flight was done in a stadium last month.
You know when there’s a business idea that is just so simple, and
fantastic, and obvious you wonder how we’ve existed on this planet
without someone creating it before? Well, one of those ideas has
surfaced, it has to do with key-cutting, and it is so simple it is
genius.
We’ve seen a 3D printer make objects out of soft materials, and one that uses titanium powder. This 3D printer made by researchers at North Carolina State University is somewhere in between: it uses a liquid metal alloy that is stable at room temperature.
According to the university’s press release, Dr. Michael Dickey, Colin Ladd, Ju-Hee Soand John Muth were able to make freestanding structures out of an alloy of gallium and indium. At room temperature, the alloy reacts with oxygen in the air, forming “a ‘skin’ that allows the liquid metal structures to retain their shapes.” Watch the video below, but I must warn you: it will make you want to play Sims.
According to the researchers, the printer can not only stack metallic beads together as shown in the video; it can also inject the alloy into a polymer template to assume a specific shape. The template can be dissolved to free the printed metal structure. The alloy is also conductive, meaning it can be used to connect electronics. I wonder if the alloy can be used with carbomorph to print complex gadgets.
[via NC State U via Popular Science]
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
