GADGETS
The mean streets of Manhattan were a little less busy today, as many stepped outside and looked toward the sky. Early this afternoon a little piece of history headed New York’s way from D.C. on the back of a 747 plane. The Space Shuttle Enterprise, chauffeured by a NASA jet, was sighted all around the city as it took the scenic route to its final destination. The shuttle will have a home aboard the USS Intrepid ship, in the Sea, Air and Space Museum.
Last call was twenty minutes ago, but you’ve still got a full can of Miller Light in front of you. Just shotgun it. That’s what it was designed for. Dubbed the ‘Punch Top Can,” this new design increases air flow which reduces that pesky glug. It's science! Is this the most important invention since public sanitation? You decide.
This new product isn’t all inclusive, as you see in video below, you’ll still need some sort of tool to puncture the second tab. This is sure to cull an entirely new breed of party tricks.
Apple has its own specific kind of of fans. We’ve all seen them, known, or been one of these fans. They’re part of a phenomenon that made technology trendy. They love their iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. They dig the sterile smell of a posh Apple store and they wear their white earbuds with pride. Apple products have become as much a fashion statement as they are a piece of technology. Slap an Apple logo onto just about anything and it might become an instant success. The people at Air Aroma are taking things a step further. They’ve bottled the essense of Apple products.
At the Tribeca Film Festival, audience members are finding that once the film is over, there’s so much to come together about. Whether it’s film discussion, looking for venue information or even what restaurants to hit up next, there is now a tool specifically created to enhance the Tribeca Film Fest (TFF) experience.
For those of you interested in maximizing your festie experience, Bombay Sapphire and the widely popular geo-social application Foursquare have teamed up for the first ever interactive map of New York City geared toward TFF attendees. Make the most out of the festival, which is going on now through April 29th. Easy to navigate, these series of tools and rewards will help make this year's festival experience unlike any before.
Scratch and Sniff stickers and scented erasers are still among the coolest things to stick with a kid’s school supplies. For some people, however, that just wasn’t enough. Forget scratching and sniffing, it’s all about tasting for McVitie’s, a baked goods company in the U.K. Their Willy Wonka inspired wallpaper lines an office elevator and encourages passengers to take a taste of its insides.
What looks like flat scratch and sniff style paper is actually food. Jaffa cakes, which are little sponge cakes filled with orange jelly and coated in chocolate, are what line the elevator walls. All instinct and everything our mothers warned us not to do should keep most sensible people from wanting to lick any kind of wall, but McVitie’s friendly invitation might change some minds. About 1,325 lickable cookies line the walls of the elevator and McVitie’s actually did have a bit of forethought on the sanitation front. Once licked, each cookie is removed and replaced with another. Epidemic averted, maybe.
In Singapore this week, hugging a Coca-Cola vending machine will get you a free soda. No, it’s not a sudden outreach from the robots we’ve created. It’s part of a campaign started by Coca-Cola called, appropriately, the ‘Open Happiness’ campaign. It’s not the weirdest campaign Coca-Cola’s taken on and it certainly doesn’t trump Pepsi’s social networking vending machines. Still, it’s raising eyebrows and bringing a little joy all over Singapore.
It’s easy to get jealous of sci-fi worlds where the future has become way more advanced than it ever will. The Jetsons are going to get their flying cars and sky houses in about 40 years. Most every other fantastic future movies and video games told us about already started happening once we hit the 2000s. Yes, a lot of those are some pretty grim future scenarios, but what we’re really jealous of are the gadgets. Instant transportation and touch screens everywhere are what we’ve been thinking up for the future for years. Little did we know that some of that future tech was already here, making its premier in Hong Kong.
The guys at Google X Lab have done it again. The same masterminds behind the "driver-less car," have unveiled their newest futuristic idea: Project Glass! Project Glass takes all the functionality of a smart phone and places it into a wearable device that resembles eyeglasses. The concept features see-through lenses that can display everything from text messages to maps and reminders. They may even be capable of showing video chats, providing directions, taking photos, and recording notes!
If that’s not awesome enough, these glasses will do all this through simple voice commands, according to a concept video produced by the company and released on YouTube. The glasses are not yet for sale, but Google will be testing them in public. So if you happen to be walking around and notice someone with a pair of futuristic looking glasses that remind you of Wall-E, don’t worry! It’s probably just a Google employee.
It’s Spring! The sun is finally out for more than a few hours at a time, trees, however few in the city, are bursting back to life, and the streets are full of spring dresses and pasty shoulders, finally seeing some action after months of hibernation. Just when we finally thought we could stop huddling around our radiators hoping for some warmth, the most awesome heating device in the world was created. We know your eyes are still adjusting to the light, but feast your eyes on the coolest radiator ever the be invented: The Super Hot T-Rex.
On a list of things we thought we would need a robot version of, jellyfish were somewhere around the absolute bottom. Science, however, works in some mysterious ways. Our latest advancement in technology is a robot that continuously propels itself, without really ever having to come back into human contact for a recharge. It just so happens that the creature whose shape best suited the experiment happened to be one of our prettiest and most gelatinous sea critters.
The “Robojelly”, which thankfully comes without any stinging power, is bell-shaped and relies on a combination of oxygen and hydrogen gases to contract and release its appropriately jelly-looking “muscle”. This “muscle”, according to an abstract featured in the April issue of Smart Materials and Structures consists of “nano-platinum catalyst-coated multi-wall carbon nanotube sheets, wrapped on the surface of nickel—titanium shape memory alloy.” While that’s practically Schi-Fi jargon for many to take in, the important part is that this combination makes the device capable of moving around in water. It makes its structure very close to that of a living jellyfish.
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