Hasta La Gadget!

Whether it’s that extra push when you are climbing a hill, or you just want to cruise along with minimal effort, electric bikes have come a long way from their humble beginnings. Now, BMW has released the details of their upcoming e-bike, which looks pretty interesting.

The electric Cruise bicycle weighs 44lbs and has a pedal assist that’s capable of driving the bike 15.5 mph for a maximum range of 53 miles. The battery is mounted on the bike’s down tube, while its 250W Bosch motor is under the bottom bracket, which should give it a very low center of gravity, improving overall stability and maneuverability.

The bike offers with disc brakes and four modes of power assistance. Torque sensors will tell when the rider is delivering more power on hill climbs and contribute more power to assist the ascent to maintain speed. It’s also got a detachable computer showing speed, battery life and other information.

BMW plans on releasing only 1,000 bikes in Germany to test the market. There’s no release date yet and no price, but hopefully, if it’s successful, a more widely available BMW e-bike will be made.

[via BikeRadar]

It pays to play it safe, especially when you’re on the road. Thousands of motorists die every year in accidents; while there’s no surefire way or system to eliminate these unfortunate occurrences entirely, there are some things that you can wear on your head to cushion the blow or install on your bike.

On a related note, 6D has come up with a redesigned motorcycle helmet that’s supposed to help reduce concussions. I think its a given that anyone who owns or rides a bike should have a helmet; they’re probably the most important bike accessories around in the first place. 6D’s helmet is described as having elastomeric dampers that absorb the force of low-speed impacts, which is where most traditional styro-and-shell helmets often fail.

If I lost you after that last line, then no worries because this video will explain what words can’t make you understand.

The gel dampers in 6D’s helmets will cushion the fall in low speed situations (below 9mph). Note that styro-and-shell helmets work best during impact situations at above 9mph.

The animation and renderings were brought to life by boutique visual firm Related Grey using 6D’s CAD data of the helmets.

[via Gizmodo]

Many people rely on headphones and earphones for music and audio playback these days. It’s just a convenient way to listen to your tunes, without bothering the people around you. Now, scientists have come up with some cool new earphone tech. Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have created the first graphene-based earphones ever.

Without any optimization, a single sheet of graphene can provide a frequency response comparable to or better than a pair of commercial Sennheiser earphones.

The researchers used a graphene diaphragm that’s 7mm across and 30 nm thick, which was sandwiched between two silicon dioxide electrodes which cause the diaphragm to vibrate when power is applied. The material is extremely light and very strong – roughly 100 times stronger than steel – thanks to the unique properties of Graphene’s pure carbon structure.

While this prototype pair is unoptimized for playback, with some tweaks they could be. I’m just curious to see how expensive a production version would be.

[via Technology Review via Extreme Tech]

Sometimes, songs can speak to you in ways that no mere words ever could. Whether you’re happy, sad, melancholic, in love, or broken-hearted, chances are you’ll find a someone who’s already singing a song about it.

Of course, you’d have to create different playlists and fill them with songs that will satisfy each of your moods. Or you can just put the Mico headphones over your head and let it do your work for you.

Mico is a pair of “mind-reading” (aka biofeedback) headphones that is controlled by your brain waves. It was shown off at South By Southwest, where people got a chance to put it over their heads and have it play songs based on their mood – without them having to choose the song themselves. The headphones work with a custom music app that searches through its library of 100 tracks to play a song that’ll match your current state of mind.

According to its creator, Neurowear:

Mico frees the user from having to select songs and artists and allows users to encounter new music just by wearing the device. The device detects brainwaves through the sensor on your forehead. Our app then automatically plays music that fits your mood.

No release dates have been specified yet, although Neurowear says that Mico is coming “in the neat future.”

[via Dvice]

Adobe Photoshop CS 5 and CS 6 have a set of features called Content Aware. They automatically fill in gaps or selected areas in images as if those gaps or parts were never there. It’s not perfect, but it can be a time saver for many operations. This prototype software is like Content Aware for videos – it can edit moving subjects out of a video while the background remains more or less untouched.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and University College London’s Computer Science department developed the wonder software. From what I can understand, the program works by marking the subject(s) to be removed and the one(s) to be retained. Then, for each affected frame, the program will look at a source frame elsewhere in the video where the background is not blocked by the object to be edited out, and use this source material to “inpaint” the section back into the image.

I think the software works best when the moving object to be edited out is over a static background, i.e. it won’t be as effective when there are like a hundred people moving and you want to remove someone from the foreground.Watch the video for a demo (and a way better explanation):

How awesome is that? I don’t know how much of the process is automated though. Head to MPII’s website for more information on the program.

[via MPII via Ubergizmo]