Nothing is too good for your first born child. From a $3,000 Aston Martin-branded stroller, to this hand cut and sewn leather car seat from Maxi-Cosi that will set you back $875. A princely sum that would otherwise sound ridiculous were it not for the adorable tiny integrated cup holder. More »
Samsung issued an apology yesterday for the tragic accident that occurred at its semiconductor plant in Hwaseong on January 28th. A hydrofluoric acid leak killed one worker while injuring four others. It is said that around 3 gallons of the acid leaked. The colorless poison damages the lungs and bones and eventually harms the entire nervous system. While the incident occurred around 11:00PM that night, Samsung failed to report it until 3:00PM the next day.
The five workers were dispatched to clean up the spill, which had leaked outside of the plant. The worker who died was not wearing a full hazmat suit or a gas mask. The other four were wearing hazmat suits, and gas masks, but still sustained damage from the exposure. They were hospitalized and have made a full recovery. Because of Samsung’s delay to report the leak, the company was fined $900 by the local law enforcement.
Kwon Oh-hyun, Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman, stated that the company will revoke its application for its Hwaseong plants to be certified as “green” operations, at least for another 5 years. Kwon also stated that they will make sure incidents like this are prevented in the future. He stated, “We plan to overhaul the system in a bid to better make environmentally-friendly workplaces.”
There were a total of seven people arrested for the incident. Three of the individuals were officials of Samsung Electronics. They were charged with negligence due to the fatal accident. Yonhap also reports that the semiconductor plant in Hwaseong was designated “green” by the government in 1998, dismissing them from any future government check-ups. The government is currently reviewing the application Samsung submitted back in August that would re-certify its “green” status.
[via Yonhap News]
Samsung apologizes for acid leak that killed 1 and injured 4 is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Continental already sells tires packed with monitors that keep tabs on air pressure, automatically letting you know when it gets too low. But the company is planning to expand that technology with improved tire sensors that will actually be able to calculate and report the current load weight of your vehicle so you don’t exceed its suggested capacity. More »
Let’s be real here, most of the time smartphones get used for a lot of nothing. But in India women are using their smartphones to protect themselves by tracking local incidents of harassment and violence. More »
You would never buy a car without cup holders like you’d never buy a car without seat belts. A secure place to store your scalding coffee so you can concentrate on driving and put both hands on the wheel isn’t a convenience—it’s a safety feature. And it wasn’t even standard on cars until the 1980’s. More »
How many times have you lifted that little cardboard cup to your mouth, only to recoil in pain once the hot coffee touches your lips and scalds your tongue? If it’s a number higher than one, then I’d say that’s one time too many.
Designers Yang Dongyun, Wu Yichen, Sang Xinxin, Gu Zhiyu, and Lin Xia must agree, since they designed the Nohot interactive cup to put an end to coffee burns once and for all.
It looks just like a regular coffee-to-go cup, except that it’s got a lid that’s made from heat-sensitive materials. When the drink is still too hot to drink, a circular lump in the middle of the lip expands, so that the person can’t drink the coffee without bumping his or her nose that lump on the lid.
As the coffee reaches a safe drinking temperature, the lump on the cover slowly flattens, so that it’ll look like the regular lids that you see so often on your own daily cup of coffee.
Pretty nifty, isn’t it?
The Nohot cup is a red dot award: design concept winner.
[via Yanko Design]
When someone starts talking about cloaking devices and technology, I immediately reference the Romulan tech of Star Trek. However, when it comes to earthquakes, scientists are working on a way to cloak entire structures from tremors.
The so-called “seismic cloak” would help protect buildings, power stations and dams from earthquakes, by using metamaterials to divert the seismic waves around an area. Seismic waves have a longer wavelength than light, making them a lot easier to push around. Recently, researchers in France performed the first large-scale test of seismic cloaking.
They came up with an array of empty holes that were able to redirect seismic waves so well that acoustic sensors beyond the second row were hardly able to detect the waves. Now, scientists have to address how to deal with real quakes that come in a number of different wavelengths, and figure out what to do with the redirected seismic energy, otherwise adjacent structures could end up bearing more than their fair share of the quake’s energy.
[via MIT Technology Review]
You never want to experience it, but whenever a pedestrian is involved in a collision with a car, his or her head can often suffer grave injuries due to a collision with hard elements underneath the hood, such as the engine block. To reduce the number of such impacts, some auto-makers (like Nissan and Toyota) have introduced the Pop-up Hood concept, which raises the hood to create more space away from the engine block (after taking into account the deformation of the hood due to the collision with the pedestrian’s head). This of course, requires that the collision is properly detected to start with.
That’s where Denso comes in with this new pressure sensor that is to be installed where the front bumper is. It is equipped with sensors that can detect where in the front of the vehicle the collision is happening. Previous designs used acceleration sensors that were not as effective. This is probably the last line of defense that could prevent serious, if not fatal, injuries to a pedestrian. So far, those new sensors have been spotted in the Toyota Crown Hybrid, which is available in Japan.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Self-Driving Car Could See Competition From Oxford University, Moveo Electric Scooter Is Foldable, No Parking Spot Required,
Right now your GPS sucks in cities but, soon, that will change. Scientists have developed a new system that increases its accuracy by up to 90%—it can tell where your vehicle is within an amazingly low margin of error of just three to six feet. Right now, the error margin in urban driving can be more than 160 feet. More »
Strapping your feet to a board and then sliding down a snow-covered hill requires skills that most humans aren’t born with. So to make it just a little easier for novices to learn how to snowboard, Australia’s Streetboardz has created a board with a built-in handbrake that lets riders easily stop before things get out of control. More »
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