Looking for an easier way to get your booze in? How about in pill form?
Russian professor Evgeny Moskalev of Saint Petersburg Technological University has developed a technique that turns alcohol into powder which can then be packed into pills.
In case you’re wondering, this technique can be used on any type of alcohol.
Futuristic TV shows and movies show modern authentication systems as either retinal (eye) scans, voice scans, but rarely full facial scans. Well, the future is here today. Enter FaceID, a system that scans your face and matches it against one of up to 500 profiles in its internal database.
Not only that, but these are 3D images captured by using multiple cameras, and must be matched by an actual face. In other words, a photo will not suffice. It adjusts for variances in lighting, and claims a 0.0001% margin of error. Surprisingly, this sophisticated gadget carries a price tag under $500.
Buy now!
Price: $419.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
This is just a design right now, but it’s cool-looking for sure. Called the Switchital Clock, the numbers break apart and morph to the next set of numbers each minute. Designer Matthias Pugin has a number of other cool designs on his website.
Looking for a real alarm clock? We got lots of those!
Happy New Year to you, our readers, your friends and family. Here’s hoping that 2010 is a better year for us all.
In the meantime, while we wait another 12 months to see how things will shake out, we dare to give you our humble predictions for what’s in store gadget and technology-wise for 2010. We’re not going to go too much out on a limb with our 2010 prophecies, because we don’t want to be too disappointed if they don’t come to pass!
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This is probably not for everyone, not even close. This mobile desk pretty much only holds a laptop or a notebook or some papers. I can’t imagine sitting in for very long; after a while, I’d want to lean back.
Also not sure why a site called “Opulent Items” is selling it, although I suppose it is with its price tag.
Buy now!
Price: $500.00
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
I’m the ‘leave the spoon in the cup’ type of person, but only because I feel a need to make sure the contents of my coffee mug or tea cup are properly stirred! Well, no more; technology to the rescue. The self-stirring mug does it at the press of a button on the top of the handle. Love it.
Powered by batteries, the Lazy Mug also has a bit of insulation to keep your drink warmer for longer.
Price: £10
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
Industrial designer and inventor, James Dyson, is at it again. This time, he’s moved away from vacuum cleaners and onto fans. Fans, you ask? Yup, fans, but take a look at the photo. It doesn’t have any blades!
It just looks like a cylinder. What it does is pull in air and amplifies it 15 times. No wonder it’s called an ‘air multiplier’. It’s easy to clean, is safe with kids, has 90º oscillation and tilt.
Buy now!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: starts at $299.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
In much the same way that people complain about there being ‘nothing’ good on TV, a similar criticism is leveled at the Web/Internet. I think that in both cases, it’s an empty argument. Have you ever flipped through your cable guide and noticed how many educational channels there are?
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The Social Media Group of the MIT Media Lab put together what really amounts to an art exhibit that melds data mining of the Internet and natural language processing to produce an graphical snapshot of your online identity.
It’s neat the first time you watch as the dynamic animation crunches through the data that it finds associated with your name, but it has limited value to me, as it just spits out a colored bar divided up based on where you ‘spend’ your time online.
Obviously they didn’t make it to be shared or re-used very much. There could easily be a mechanism to save the generated image or point someone else to the page. Or perhaps tooltips for what each section means in more detail. Better still would be a listing of some of the websites where the system found your name up in lights.
As you know, we love featuring ‘green’ and/or environmentally related advances in technology, and here’s another. This time, a team in the Department of Materials Science at MIT have devised a roof tile that changes its surface reflectivity depending on the temperature.
In a nutshell, at low temps, it absorbs as much sunshine and heat as it can, while at high temps, it is more reflective. Fantastic. Nicknamed the Thermeleon, these roof tiles could save 20% on cooling costs.
