You say that carrying the groceries is more tiring that it used to be. Perhaps you need one of the new robot exoskeleton suits which are coming out of Japan

Tsukuba University engineering professor Yoshiyuki Sankai’s HAL robot suit is apparently pretty close to production ready, with up to 20 of the bad boys to be produced by next year and 400-500 in 2008. The suits, designed to help in any number of situations where your puny human muscles are too pathetically weak to get the job done, will cost an estimated $42,000 to $59,000. If you just want to take it for a test spin, they’ll be up for rent for about $592 a month.

You need to save the world (or at least the city) by dismantling the pieces of an atomic bomb which you found lying around the office. The problem? You can’t remember whether to remove the neutron trigger before or after you disconnect the wires leading from the battery or the trigger/timer to the detonator. What do you do. Does this sound familiar?

If so, you need to bookmark Wired Magazines how to guide to dismantle an atomic bomb.

P.S. Disconnect the wires first. duh

Is you job taking away your smile. Then maybe you need this helmet:

Artist Tim Simpson has a helmet that makes you smile, no serious, the helmet *makes* you smile – “A helmet for people in jobs which demand an unusual amount of smiling, such as air-stewards, receptionists and politicians. A sensor in the front of the helmet detects anybody within a 2 metre range, at which point the mouth is pulled into a broad grin by a small servo motor and some concealed fishing wire. The helmet addresses the facades of social interaction and explores our responses to affected expressions.”

Cnet gives 6 examples in this article of how life is starting to look a little like the world described in the original Star Trek.

The iGrill would qualify as a gadget that I least need to have. Why do I need a George Foreman grill that can run from a USB cable again?



Gizmodo recently had an article about a new suit for the stylish geek. Does this mean we are officially past the early adopters?

Here’s a dashing and urbane suit designed by Bagir and Eleksen that transforms the suit’s lapel into a control panel for controlling iPods. As seen in the above picture, just make the universal gesture that you’re reaching for a weapon inside the jacket pocket to control the iPod. The suit is machine-washable and wrinkle-resistant, so no matter what sort of fights occur at the office, the iPod suit will be ready to go for another day’s adventure in no time.

The iPod suit uses Eleksen’s ElekTex smart fabric touch pad technology to actually carry out the iPod manipulation. This isn’t the only product to feature ElekTex, however. It was just a few months ago that a backpack was released with the very same smart fabric technology. It seemed to work decently back the, so this iPod suit shouldn’t be complete garbage. We’ll see come November when it’s released for around $280.

Tired of the high price of gas? Duh. Can you imagine a car(?) that gets 330 miles per gallon. Someone can, has, and plans to sell them:

If I didn’t know any better, I would think that in the next few years our SUV-clogged highways will be full of three-wheeled, egg-shaped, and super-efficient vehicles that will save the world by robbing us of cargo room. Here’s another highfalutin concept car that’s all three, slated to hit the road in the near future: the Aptera. With the lofty goal of getting this 330-miles-per-gallon vehicle on the road in the next two years for under $20,000, the Aptera certainly has the potential to change the automotive landscape. Designed by Accelerated Composites, the Aptera seats two and weighs a scant 850 pounds, with guts that combine hybrid technology with a super-efficient diesel engine

North Korea should take note of this story:

One of the big selling points of the Navy’s new destroyer is that it can rain a whole lot of hell — 20 rocket-propelled artillery shells, in less than a minute — on targets up to 63 nautical miles away. Fully armed, two DDG1000s should have the firepower of an entire, 640-man artillery battalion, the Navy promises.

But really, that’s the start. The ship’s real power will come when it moves away from chemical powders to shoot its projectiles — and starts relying on electromagnetic fields to shoot projectiles almost six kilometers/second, instead. With an electromagnetic rail gun pushing the rounds out so quickly, the number of rounds fired per ship would jump from 232 to 5000, Navy planners believe. (Military.com has a great primer on how it works.) Because they travel so fast — nearly Mach 7 — the destructive force those rounds deliver would more than double, from 6.6 megajoules to 17. And they would fly almost five times farther — up to 300 nautical miles. That’s enough to put 100% of targets in North Korea “at Risk” from a single battleship, a Navy briefing notes (right, sorry for the crappy scan).

Originally a story in Chinese about how to make a homemade mosquito trap:

How to build a Mosquito trap.

Materials Needed:

2000ml (2 liter) bottle

50 gram (brown?) sugar

1 gram yeast

Thermometer

Measure cup

Knife

Black paper

Cnet pitted the Apple Newton Messagepad against the latest Samsung Q1 ultra-mobile PC (Origami project), and — despite being a decade old — the Newton won.

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