NASA says this is not a space diaper, but it is. They call it the Maximum Absorbency Garment. I call it the Space Pooper. But why do astronauts use them?
Quite simply, when astronauts are sitting in the Space Shuttle, strapped to their seats and ready to go, they may experience very long delays. Sometimes even hours. And when that happens, they just can't get off their seats to go to the toilet. They just have to do it, as Alan Shepard discovered while waiting inside his Mercury capsule on May 5, 1961, waiting for theFreedom 7 mission launch. He was the first American to reach Space and the first astronaut to pee inside his suit.
Once you juice it up wirelessly atop a myGrid inductive charging slab, Duracell's new $35 myGrid USB charger will power pretty much anything that has USB, including smartphones (~4 hours), MP3 players (~30 hours), and ebook readers (~100 hours).
The Lithium-ion rechargeable battery is tiny for travel-friendliness—it occupies the top left of the myGrid in the photo above—and can be charged via USB if you don't have your myGrid handy. It'll be available before the holiday for $35 to extend all your new gadgets' lives.
Google has a lesson for its employees: Don't tell the world how well we treat you, or you'll be fired. The company apparently told staff today it terminated the employee who leaked word of a 10 percent companywide pay raise.
A Business Insider got hold of an internal memo from CEO Eric Schmidt—for "Googlers only"—which said they'd be receiving 10 percent raises plus a cash bonus for the holidays. The source added that the bonus would be $1,000. "Within hours," CNNMoney reports, "Google notified its staff that it had terminated the leaker, several sources [said.]" Apparently there's nothing like holiday season firing to inspire the people Schmidt called the "best employees in the world."
Repairing damaged concrete often requires pouring more fresh stuff, or digging it all up and starting over again. But thanks to germ experts at the University of Newcastle, custom bacteria—"BackFilla"—might be the future of fixing.
The bacteria, once released into a damaged area, procreate and spread into the cracks—and then die. But don't be sad—in their wake, they leave behind calcium carbonate corpses as strong as the original concrete. And don't worry—the researchers were canny enough to design the bacteria to know when their work is done, so they don't run amuck and cover the world in concrete:
The bacteria also contains a self-destruct gene that keeps it from wildly proliferating away from its concrete target, because a runaway patch of bacterial concrete that continued to grow despite all efforts to stop it would be somewhat annoying
Yes, annoying is right—or like something out of a very dull horror movie.
As concerned as we are about memory, we haven't done much to preserve it. Most of ourhard drives don't last past 30 years. But soon, using diamond-like carbon nanotubes, even your Gizmodo comments could last practically forever.
The solution, discovered by researchers at the University of California, takes an entirely new approach to data storage. The proposed device would place a microscopic iron crystal inside a carbon nanotube. With the application of an electric signal of just a few volts, the iron nanoparticle moves back and forth along the tube, registering a binary "1" or "0" depending on its position, basically acting as data bits.
While it's a theoretical solution right now, the scientists who created it are confident that we'll someday see a practical application. And when we do, because of the project's nanoscale nature, we may be able to store 25 DVDs' worth of information on a postage stamp-sized storage device.
The prospect of billion-year storage is fascinating and a little terrifying. Do I want researchers ten thousand years from now combing through my drunken tweets? Actually: maybe. Because when our robot overlords comb through the records and find this post, they'll know that I've always been fully supportive of their cold, steely, logical reign.
The Belkin n52te SpeedPad set the bar for one-handed gaming peripherals that looked like they could control alien spacecraft. It's successor, the Razer Nostromo keypad, maintains the look, and it's been updated to support more instantly-switchable keymaps and gaming profiles.
The Razer Nostromo's got all the new chipsets and drivers that have cropped up since the Belkin Speedpad came out back in 2007, bringing it up to speed with today's cutting-edge competitive gaming (and maintaing its crazy-ass, highly intimidating look.) In addition to its 16 fully-programmable buttons and eight-way directional thumb pad, the Nostromo can now support eight full keymaps (up from three) and twenty gaming profiles (up from ten).
The Razer Nostromo is available now for $69.99 at Razer Zone.
No trend's got me more excited lately than ThinkGeek turning its April Fool's products intoreal products. And now, the pièce de résistance: canned unicorn meat. For sale. Right now.
First came the monolith action figure, then My First Bacon, and now? Now mythical creature meat served up Spam-style.
It's been discovered that you create the very same substance those Ruskis won the Nobel prize for out of household sugar. Borrow a cup from your neighbour, and get baking the world's hardest substance. No, not your Mom's scones. Graphene.
Rice University researchers are responsible for making the startling discovery, which could cut down greenhouse gas emissions and save money too. We already know that graphene (carbon atoms arranged in 2 dimensional linked hexagons) is the strongest (and thinnest) substance known to man, and importantly can conduct electricity. We can look forward to it replacing valuable copper and silicon—and if it's made from normal table sugar, then that's just doubly sweet.
Viewsonic announced their mini-sized 3D camcorder last month, but now they've finally brought it stateside. Not only does the 3DV5 pack two 5MP fixed focus cameras for 3D 720p video, it's also got a glassesless 3D display panel for playback.
Of course, the 3DV5 has the same problem that all 3D camcorders and cameras do: you're going to have to get yourself a 3DTV or 3D laptop to watch it on. The good news is that this particular mighty mite can also record in 2D, making it as present-ready as it is future-proof. And it might just be worth the $180 to have your bases covered.
You've had chances before to keyboardize your iPhone, but never with quite so much elegance. The BoxWave Keyboard Buddy is a smoothly built, adorably named iPhone 4 case that crams in a sliding Bluetooth keyboard.
It's a great solution for those who want their iOS but whose sticky fingertips make onscreen keyboards a chore. And it doesn't look to add too much bulk, as far as these things go. But that's coming from someone who gladly saddles his 3GS with battery case bulk most days.
The only wince-inducing part of the Keyboard Buddy might be the price; if I wanted a slider that bad, I'd probably put the $70 towards my ETF or a new device altogether.
Always Innovating's Smart Book breaks the traditional netbook into pieces. A touchscreen VoIP phone, a tablet, and a keyboard.
As if hardware transformation on the fly weren't clever enough, the Smart Book includes a switch they say will instantly swap OSes. That's right—click bewteen Android, Chrome, Ubuntu, or their own AIOS. And underneath all this design sophistication is some decent hardware muscle—an ARM Cortex-A8 processor (speed unspecified), 512 MB of RAM, and 256 MB of built-in flash storage, along with the usual 802.11 b/g/n WiFi.
The whole scheme is a bit extravagant, and probably not a dream device for someone seeking simplicity—and the whole "dude on a couch" aesthetic doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the train out of vaporwareville. But Always Innovating is taking pre-orders for the whole system at $549.
This low-cost sleeping-bag keeps infants warm for between four to six hours, and once it cools down it can be plugged in or submerged in water for 20 minutes to heat up again. Not while the baby's still inside, mind.
Designed for developing countries where homes are not centrally-heated and children can't afford the luxury of electric blankets, the wax-filled heating pouch has a nylon outer (which gives it that FedEx look which is so hot right now) and can be easily carried by parents. It's aimed at India for now, but if successful will be rolled out to Asia and Africa.
Can using Twitter make you smarter? A new semester-long study found that college students who used Twitter for educational purposes earned GPAs a half-point higher than a non-tweeting control group.
In a group of 125 students at an anonymous medium-sized public college in the Midwest, 70 students used Twitter to access information and complete class assignments; the remaining 55 students used a more typical Internet-based course-management system and billboard. Not only did the tweeting 70 earn higher GPAs, they also reported much higher levels of engagement. The findings were reported in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.
Some early-adopting professors have advocated experimenting with Twitter in the classroom — "essentially asking students to pass notes during class," as the Chronicle of Higher Education once put it. This study may vindicate such an approach. But one professor quoted by the Chronicle expressed skepticism that Twitter alone could have led to such a remarkable boost. "I think more could be done to understand the range of ways that the Twitter design can work better in class assignments and collaborative note-taking," said Dave Parry, a UT Dallas professor who himself has experimented with Twitter in his class.
Meanwhile, to the dismay of more traditional professors, students can point to a new justification for pulling out smartphones in class.
After falling in price to "just" $50,000 last year, Panasonic's five-year-old plasma has been updated with 3D technology. The TH-P103MT2 will sell for the equivalent of $101,900 in Japan—not including installation, naturally.
Asus calls the black cladding over its newSabertooth P67motherboard a "tactical vest", which despite the goofy name is there for good reason: the shielding ducts cool air over motherboard parts, while protecting from daughterboard heat. In theory.
What can we make of this credit card spending by smartphone platform data from Pageonce? That iPhone owners spend like crazy, and WinMo holdouts are probably saving up for a new phone, for starters.
The data was taken from a random sampling of 275,000 Pageonce users, and includes at least 5,000 users per platform. And it could mean a whole bunch of things! Either iPhone users spend more money on average, or they have more debt on average, or the simple averaging masks extreme expenditures at the high and low end. BlackBerry and iPhone are arguably the most commonly used enterprise phones, so that might have something to do with racking up higher monthly charges.
The study also took a look at monthly phone bill charges:
It vaguely reminds me of someone painting eyeballs onto their eyelids to feign wakefulness, but I kinda almost want a Vertical Bed. It's intended to help you catch a few extra zzZZZ's on your daily commute while looking dorky.
Basically the bed fully supports all of your body weight by attaching to subway ventilation grating. And to prove that it works, some poor guy got assigned to the task of taking 40 minute naps in the middle of New York. Since he didn't get mugged or fall over, this could be considered a successful trial.
The Vertical bed comes complete with noise-cancelling headphones, opaque sunglasses, a free standing umbrella, and fits into a suitcase. No idea when we'll be able to buy one, but I'll be wishing I already had it while waiting in line.
The Sony EVIL NEX 3 camera may look a bit odd, but it's got a 14 MP Sony Exmor HD sensor, a touchscreen—along with old-school knobs—and some nice specs:
Image Sensor: 14.2 million effective pixels.
Metering: Multi pattern, centre-weighted and spot.
Sensor Size: APS-C-sized CMOS (23.4×15.6mm).
Lens: Sony E Series mount.
Shutter Speed: 30 to 1/4000 second. Flash sync: 1/160 sec.
I guess as it's got two 14.1-inch touchscreens Kno feels it can get away with charging $899 for its tablet, but $599 for the 14-inch tablet with just one screen? Why, that's more expensive than the iPad!
Considering it's aimed at college students, that's a huge ask on their bank account. But Kno's CEO is reckoning on students seeing the Kno not just as a tablet (something to browse and watch movies on), but as a textbook replacement.
It runs on a Tegra 2 chip, and has 16GB of storage—with the OS said to be Linux. Students, would you live off baked beans for a year, just to be able to afford a Kno? Anyone?
