What better way to become green that to get the most popular and least polluting mode of personal transport and having it made out of what else, cardboard. Yep, cardboard, that stuff that is used for all types of packaging for mostly all the stuff we buy. From cellphones, TV’s and other consumer electronics, they all come in cardboard boxes. It is not only cheap and extremely recyclable, it is also light and quite strong (well if you don’t drive it in the rain that is, kidding it is waterproof and will not break-up in the rain). It also addresses the most plaguing problem with respect to bikes which is theft. In the UK alone, thousands of bikes are stolen each and every year and the statistics keep rising.
Some bicycles are indeed expensive with all the aftermarket upgrades and rare alloys that they now come in. From carbon fiber to tungsten and titanium parts, they are all vandalized or stolen even when chained to a lamppost. The cardboard bike is also cheap at $30.00 and when they reach the end of their life (which is still miserably short at 3 months) they can be disposed of easily without worry of pollution or contamination of the environment. The cardboard parts are simply re-made into other cardboard products then re-injected into the cycle once again. The cardboard used by the inventor was used to make pallets or crates and was rated to carry 2,500lbs(but he does agree that a stronger version for heavier people might be needed). The cardboard bike is still in the prototype stage and any commercial product would still have to undergo further testing and testing for it to go into full-scale production.
No Comments Yet | Posted by Nick at 5:03 pm under General, Home & Garden
Ever since the Olympics became an event that was all about glory bot only for the athlete but the countries they represent, people have been obsessed with ways of augmenting the already rich and strong talent people are exhibiting in the games. New shoes and clothes for track and field, new equipment and training technologies and now we have new swimsuits that are so high-tech they aim to break existing records set previously by their ill-equipped counterparts. Shaved heads or head-gear that cover’s non-aerodynamic hair, shaved body hair an d so on and so forth just to shave off that critical split second that could result in a gold medal in the games.
The shark-suit is made of material that mimics the sharkskin that is proving to be better in reducing drag as opposed to traditional swimwear. Shark’s skin is smooth and silky from front to back yet rough from tail to snout and this is made possible by thousands upon thousands of small hooks or scales if you’d like to call them that making it an ideal design for swimsuits that are faster and better in water.
The discovery was made by biologists who closely examined the skin of sharks and pondered how such large predators could swim effortlessly even with their bulk and shape. As it turns out, their skin is made up of thousands upon thousands of scales shaped like hooks that reduces drag considerably once under water. The hooks break up resistance and makes it easier for the swimmer or the shark to slice through the water faster and better allowing them to go faster. The suit has been recently approved by the 2008 Olympic Committee allowing it’s use in the pools of the games where it was previously banned in fairness to those who could not afford such high-tech suits. The up-coming gamers would allow the real-life testing of the technology between the several manufacturers who now make the suit allowing them to settle once and for all who makes the best and fastest swimwear on the planet.
No Comments Yet | Posted by Nick at 7:27 am under General
Yep, as much as this gadget is loved and much anticipated by many, there is a select group of people on this earth who are not pleased with the way the new Apple iPhonelong nails. The touch screen technology that is used with such touch interface gadgets like the iPhone relies on capacitance technology which allows the device to interpret the touch or gestures of the fingers that is tracked and interpreted as commands by the microprocessor. All this is possible with high-speed microprocessors that does the interpreting and action seemingly without delay that is made possible by today’s high-speed microprocessors and microelectronics.
The problem has drawn much discontent that women with long nails have peppered the Apple website on the problems suggesting the inclusion of a stylus with the design. Apple has relied that there are several aftermarket stylus out on the market that would work with the iPhone and that the market share of women with long nails that do need assistance is negligible in their design of the popular device. Apple is yet to release an official statement on the matter but initial signs are that they are not planning any major re-design of the product to accommodate “long-nailed” people in the near future.
The release of the 3G iPhone has been quite a delayed reaction on the part of Apple for the capability has been available for quite sometime on other carriers and cellphone manufacturers. Good luck iPhone into the realm of 3G, and for those who have long nails, do consider this before getting the latest gadgets and gizmos for manufacturers can’t accommodate all factors in their design which is usually bound by trade-offs of pro’s and con’s.
No Comments Yet | Posted by Nick at 7:21 am under Cameras, Cellphones, Gadgets, Home Entertainment, Laptops, PDA's, Toys
If you happened to watch Sigourney Weaver in the Alien film series, then you’d know about exoskeletons. In one installment of the series, she uses a robot suit used to load and offload cargo from spacecraft to beat the heck out of the alien predator she was trying to kill. That machine is now reality thanks to the efforts of a software engineer who has developed an exoskeleton that has the capacity to increase a normal person’s strength as much as 20 times. What does that mean for us normal people, well say in the construction industry, you could have one or two of these to handle heavy loads and helping the other guy’s position heavy members of the structures they are building. On the battlefield, suit up a soldier and surround him with enough protective armor that would allow him to go against a tank (with armament of course). He could also repair tanks and other heavy machinery on site without fear of exposing himself to enemy fire, allowing easy servicing of military hardware.
Developed for rescue work, imagine the combination of a human’s mind and the power of a bulldozer clamoring up to rescue survivors form disasters like the ones that the Chinese have experienced. The concepts and implications go on and on for augmentation systems is better than totally independent machines doing a man’s job (or a woman’s in Sigourney’s case). The development was spearheaded by the US Army in hopes of developing exoskeletons for their future soldiers. The current developers are still in the research phase for there is still no battery that can power up the machine for more than a couple of minutes. Other obstacles are costs which should go down as more materials are discovered to be as light as fabric yet stronger than steel in tensile strength. There may be more to this technology than what it has become so don’t be surprised to see one of these machines working at a construction site near you sometime soon.
No Comments Yet | Posted by Nick at 4:29 pm under General
During the annual “D:All Things Digital” media and technology conference that was hosted by Wall Street Journal in Carlsbad California, Sony unveiled it’s latest product, the thinner than credit card (actually thinner than a credit card at 0.3mm) OLED Display TV, that is the thinnest and most viable OLED product on the market to date. Sony is already selling ultra-thin LCD TV’s for almost $2,000 bucks for 11″ models but this one tops the charts by being the thinnest and most vivid display series of all the competing TV manufacturers in the world. Samsung, which is considered to be one of the best producers of LCD TV’s along side Sony has a huge chunk of the Digital HD TV market, coming up with the 41″ OLED that was showcased at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show. Sony on the other hand has been selling small OLED displays for quite sometime is soon to follow.
Sony has excelled in the OLED TV area for OLED’s are low power, thus friendlier on the environment. They also claim to attain an unprecedented 1 million to 1 contrast ratio which many people find hard to believe for that would be sharper than what the eye can interpret. They are currently very expensive but as time passes by and more and more people begin to make them in huge numbers the prices would surely start falling. The company has announced that they would be rolling them out by the end of this year in the US with other countries still in the works. OLED’s use organic materials that do not need backlighting by producing their own light when excited by electrical current. The technology also offers faster refresh rates than current display technologies in use today. Tomorrow would be brighter indeed with innovations such as these and bigger better OLED TV’s are in the works form Sony and the many other consumer electronics manufacturers out in the market.
No Comments Yet | Posted by Nick at 11:53 am under Gadgets, General, Home & Garden, Home Entertainment
If you are a true tech-junkie then you’d have heard about nano-technology and the benefits of these extremely small structures. First of all, products that are based on nano-technology have the advantage of building their traits on the molecular level hence making them more flexible in their applications. Bucky-balls are small spherical structures that have [...]
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