This Super-Tiny Windmill Could Someday Charge Your Phone

Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington have come up with a way to build a nickel alloy windmill so small, 10 of them could be mounted on a grain of rice. And if all goes as planned, hundreds of the little things could end up in a case that charges up your smartphone.

UT Arlington's Smitha Rao and J.-C. Chiao designed the windmill, which at its broadest is just 1.8mm wide. Built from nickel alloy for rigidity, the little fan is self-assembled using wafer-scale semiconductor electroplating principles and a technique the team likens to origami. Rao and Chiao have partnered with WinMEMS Technologies Co., a Taiwanese company researching ways to build micro electro-mechanical systems, to bring the baby windmill to reality. More here.

The Sun Is Your Zippo With This Solar-Powered Lighter

Perfect for smokers who live in windy cities, this compact parabolic reflector lets you harness the sun as your own personal lighter—one that's immune to even the strongest winds.

A spring mounted holder ensures your cigarette is always at the focal point of the sun's reflected rays, and the $8 mirror is made of plastic so it won't immediately shatter if dropped. It's also the perfect camping accessory if you've never had much luck rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. More here.

France Will Pay You $5 Million to Invent an Oil-Drilling Drone

France's equivalent of DARPA has a lofty task for you. The National Research Agency is challenging engineers to design and build an autonomous oil-drilling robot that can operate continuously for six weeks at a time. And they're willing to pay you handsomely.

Well, to be exact, the French oil company Total is offering a €3.5 million (nearly $5 million) budget and a €500,000 (about $680,000) prize for the winning team. The National Research Agency's website describes the so-called ARGOS challenge:

The goal of the ARGOS Challenge is to foster the development of advanced robotic capabilities in oil & gas environments. The programme is based on robot systems which can safely operate in complete or supervised autonomy over the entire onshore or offshore production site, potentially in hazardous explosive atmospheres. The overall objective is to enhance the safety of operators in isolated production sites.

It's actually a pretty brilliant idea. As we've seen time and time again, drilling for oil is a dangerous job—however necessary for keeping our gas guzzling machines running. But just as unmanned aerial vehicles make a fighter pilot's job safer—and just as autonomous trucks are already operating at some mines—these drilling drones will inevitably save some lives. Until they develop minds of their own and turn this beautiful planet into Swiss cheese, that is. More here.

This Is the World's Fastest Memory Card

Behold, the world's fastest memory card. Lexar's 3333x CFast 2.0 ratchets up the read speed of Compact Flash cards to a dizzying 500MB/s—and that is very, very fast.

Of course, you probably won't be able to take advantage of all that speed just yet, unless you have some insane pro-level kit, but that might change as the next wave of high-spec DSLRs dribble out into the market. When they do, these little guys should be able to cope with whatever ludicrous capture rates you can thrown at them.

When they go on sale, they'll be available in in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB sizes. It's worth noting that you could theoretically fill up the smallest one in around a minute if you were so inclined. A minute.

You can probably expect an ever faster card to come along soon—these records don't stand for long—but until then, you'll have to save up for the Lexar. More here.

Science Makes a Circuit So Thin, It Can Sit On a Contact Lens

Flexible, stretchable, bendable circuits will make futuristic wearable devices and implantable medical sensors possible. Today, a Swiss research team revealed a big new step in that field: a super-thin circuit that can function while wrapped around a human hair or laid on a contact lens.

The team, led by Giovanni Salvatore at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, created a circuit on a parylene film just a single micrometer thick. That's about one sixtieth the thickness of a human hair. The scientists achieved this by building the circuit on a vinyl polymer base that's then dissolved away, leaving the ultra-thin, ultra-flexible circuit intact.

The resulting circuit can be draped over human hair, plastered on human skin, or pasted on a plant leaf, without cracking or losing conductivity, as show in these images from theresearch paper published in Nature Communications:

Applications for such technology sound positively sci-fi: the Swiss research team envisions a transparent circuit on a contact lens to sense the increased pressure in the eye that causes glaucoma. Other applications could include implanted sensors that continually monitor blood pressure in heart patients.

The limiting factor right now: everything you'd want to plug in to that circuit. Batteries, for example. Still, the idea of a circuit you wear on your eyeball makes Google Glass seem positively quaint. More here.

Wireless Internet Is Coming To Your Next Car

GM is calling it OnStar 4G LTE. What does this mean for drivers or passengers? It means their next Corvette, Impala or Silverado will have a wireless hot spot for their smartphone, tablet, laptop, or Apple Newton. GM says this technology will be on nearly every Chevrolet car, and each vehicle can connect multiple devices.

Yes, plenty of car companies have been doing this a while, particularly on higher end models. But GM says Chevrolet will have the broadest implementation of 4G wireless of any car brand, and it will be across multiple price levels.

The Internet connection will allow for more than just fast Jalopnik browsing on the go. GM says the built-in 4G LTE connection will allow them to update their vehicles with the latest software and apps remotely, so they can continually tweak and improve their infotainment systems. The new technology coincides with the 10th generation of OnStar, which was first released in 1996.

Pricing hasn't been announced, but GM says if you're a current AT&T customer you can add this to your existing data plan.

What else is coming to your next car? Apps! Apps, of course. Apps like The Weather Channel, NPR, Cityseeker and various radio streaming programs. For better or worse, the car is becoming more and more like your smartphone every year.

As The Detroit News notes, in-car wireless Internet is one of the next really big automotive technologies. Both BMW and Audi have announced 4G for their cars. Besides the convenience of a mobile hot spot, it's expected to be a moneymaker for these companies:

Analysts say GM could see a revenue boost from the new 4G Wi-Fi service. IHS Automotive last year estimated 4G LTE could add $400 million in gross profit by mid-decade; it was cited in a Citi Research investment note.

While purists may scoff at the idea of in-car Internet for devices, you have to know that mainstream drivers not only want this, but are fully planning to make use of it. It's probably just a matter of time before this becomes de rigueur on all new cars. More here.

You'll Happily Swap Your Old Bulbs For This Interactive Party Ball

If you're outraged that the government would dare tell you what kind of lightbulbs you should be able to buy, ION Audio's new Party Ball should help quell your rage. It's designed to screw into a standard ceiling mounted light socket, but instead of just providing a warm glow to illuminate a room, it puts on a dazzling colored light show.

Who could possibly need incandescent bulbs anymore when this thing promises to turn every room in your home into a personal night club? The Party Ball's colored LEDs shine in a 360 degree arc so every corner of a room gets bathed in tinted light. And it's got a built-in microphone so the flashing and pulsing lights react and sync up to whatever music you happen to be playing. Pricing hasn't been announced just yet, but you can rest assure it won't include a cover or a two-drink minimum. More here.

This Connected Bluetooth Toothbrush Will Nag You More Than a Dentist

We all know we should be brushing more diligently several times a day, but without our dentists regularly shaming us into better oral hygiene, that rarely happens. So a Paris-based company called Kolibree has created what it claims to be the world's first app-connected toothbrush that will encourage better brushing habits between dentist visits.

The toothbrush may look like your run-of-the-mill electric model, but it's been enhanced with a wireless Bluetooth connection that lets it report your brushing times and habits to an accompanying app. Not only does this give a user insight into how long they actually brush versus how long they should be brushing, it also allows oral hygiene to be turned into a game to encourage kids to stay on top of tending to their teeth. And the company intends to make the collected data available through an API letting other developers create brushing-based games and other applications.

Depending on the model, Kolibree's connected toothbrush will sell for between $99 and $200 when it becomes available for pre-order this summer. But the accompanying app will be free, and the cavity-free dentist visits that follow (hopefully) will be painless. More here.

Light Up Spurs For Cowpokes Who Ride Bikes, Not Horses

If you have to ride your bike at night, there's no such thing as wearing too much reflective material—after all, you want to make yourself as visible as possible to those with whom you share the road. But a flashing light can ensure a driver spots you well before the headlights of their car do, and with a pair of these glowing LightSpurs clamped to the back of your shoes, you'll stand out like a sore—but safe—thumb.

Powered by a small CR2032 watch battery, the waterproof LightSpurs will run for about 100 hours in flashing mode before you need to swap in a new one. They can also be set to steadily glow, though that will reduce your battery life. They sell for about $20 each, but in theory, you only need to wear one on the side of your bike that's most visible to traffic. Unless you're going for the whole wild west effect—in that case, a pair of spurs is definitely the way to go. More here.

This Pickup Truck is Made of ice and you can Actually Drive it

Behold the first self-propelled ice sculpture ever—a truck made of ice that actually works! It's a real truck, using 11,000 pounds of ice over a regular truck chassis complete with engine and electrical system. Check out the videos to see how they built it—and how it melted.

The truck ran for 1.6 kilometers at about 20 km/h on December 12, 2013.

A Fold-Flat Watering Can Designed For Your Cramped Balcony Garden

If you live in an apartment or condo in a big city, and have managed to find a little room on your tiny balcony for a modest garden, you probably don't have much space left for the tools needed to toil over your cramped crops. So inventor Marc R. came up with this rather cleversoft-sided watering can called the Squish that's thin and easy to store when it's empty.

Marc is working with Quirky to make the Squish a reality, but in the meantime we can marvel at its design. Featuring a canvas bladder like ones many canteens are made from, the Squish expands from just one-inch thick when empty and stored to eight-inches across when full of water. It can hold up to a full gallon of water, and features a folding spout that helps minimize the Squish's footprint even further. And now that the design is nearly finalized, hopefully Quirky will get this into production and in stores in time for your Spring planting. More here.

Where Emotions Hit You, Visualized

Nerves make your stomach churn; embarrassment brings a glow to your cheeks. Emotions clearly have a direct physiological effect on our bodies, and now a team of Finnishresearchers has analyzed exactly how—and represented them in this visualization.

To construct the maps, the researchers showed 773 participants different words, stories, movies, and expressions, and had them highlight on a human silhouette the areas of the body in which they felt decreasing or increasing activity. More activity sees the color change from black to red to yellow, while decreasing activity is represented by an increasingly bright shade of blue.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, tally with many of the experiences you've probably had: depression is linked with a deadening in the limbs, while shame induces bright spots on the cheeks. Sadness even features activity in the eyes, presumably representing the tears experienced by participants.

While the authors willingly admit that the results could be influenced by cultural references and stereotypes about emotions, they rightly point out that the responses are clearly culturally universal; it's worth noting that participants were drafted in from both Finland and Taiwan. Indeed, the researchers claim that such universality is likely a result of a biological basis for our response to emotions, rather than a cultural one. Not that it'll help much next time you blush your way through a date. More here.

Beat-Matching Glowing Sunglasses Are Perfect For New Years Eve and Morn

It's New Year's Eve and unless you've got children to tend to you'll probably be partying well into 2014 this evening. And while normally sunglasses aren't required for the middle of the night, these Dropshades are, since they feature a glowing pulsing EQ that stays in sync with whatever music you're listening to. And, the next morning when you're hungover and dodging the sun, you'll be even happier you're wearing them. Powered by a USB-rechargeable battery, the $50 specs use six colored LEDs on each side to light up the pulsing bars, but thankfully the glow isn't visible and won't blind you while you're wearing them. 

A single charge will keep the party going for up to 14 hours, and the animated EQ automatically adjusts itself as the music gets louder and louder. So they're perfect for evening, even though they don't spell out 2014. More here.

Why do so many galaxies in space look like this?

Flat. Like a streak across space. Thin. Stretched out. How come whenever we see galaxies, they always look like this? NASA has the answer. And it has something to do with how a ball of dough becomes pizza.

This image of spiral galaxy ESO 373-8 was captured by NASA with the Hubble telescope. It shows a galaxy that's 25 million light years away but its shape already seems so familiar. Why is that? NASA explains:

Try spinning around in your chair with your legs and arms out. Slowly pull your legs and arms inwards, and tuck them in against your body. Notice anything? You should have started spinning faster. This effect is due to conservation of angular momentum, and it's true for galaxies, too.

This galaxy began life as a humungous ball of slowly rotating gas. Collapsing in upon itself, it spun faster and faster until, like pizza dough spinning and stretching in the air, a disc started to form. Anything that bobbed up and down through this disk was pulled back in line with this motion, creating a streamlined shape.

Angular momentum is always conserved — from a spinning galactic disk 25 million light-years away from us, to any astronomer, or astronomer-wannabe, spinning in an office chair.

Scraping Decades of Grime, Car Exhaust, and Mold Off Rome's Colosseum

The Colosseum in Rome is being cleansed of car exhaust that has built up over decades, ever since Mussolini's ill-advised decision to build a major road nearby.

The exhaust, however, is just part of an overall mixture known as "black rust," CBS Newsreports: "Exhaust, pollen, algae and fungus growths form a coating the restorers call 'black rust' which has to be washed with non-chemical solutions and rubbed off gently in order not to damage the stonework."

From the copy of David Gissen's excellent book Subnature, full of interesting examples of how the pollution accumulating on historical monuments around the world offers its own weird form of cultural and industrial history. The idea that buildings, statues, and other structures—even geological features—should be scraped clean of their everyday chemical environments is, of course, obvious from the point of view of wanting to preserve their vulnerable rocks and masonry. But it is also, Gissen suggests, somewhat over-enthusiastic or even misguided to think that we can return something to its "original" state. In fact, he argues that to see these structures in their natural—or, as he puts it, subnatural—context we should see them still dotted with weeds, pollution, dust, even bird crap and gum.

After all, the candle-blackened interiors of churches, or the dusty banisters of private homes, are as revealing of the lifestyles of the people who once lived in or used those buildings as are the carefully polished surfaces we might encounter on the old knick-knacks in a museum. Even centuries of wood smoke and other layers of urban pollution that accumulated on, say, Notre Dame in Paris before it was cleaned in the 1990s are not without their historical insights. Spotlessly white stone exteriors are not necessarily historically accurate, in other words, at least not in the sense that any city—except perhaps Singapore—can boast of a truly sterile condition for its major public and private structures.

Gissen points out that perhaps there is an unexpected interpretive value in the grime now coating parts of the urban world, and, even if that grim shouldn't be saved, there is value in taking a closer look at it before rushing to wash it away.

This is not to suggest that we shouldn't clean the Colosseum, as this toxic mixture of contaminants would eventually eat the building away, like a tooth disappearing in a glass of Pepsi. But it is to say that it might be worth saving a small section of the building—even just a disconnected stone that poses no risk of structural decay—to remind future visitors of what the urban context can really do to even its most monumental inhabitants.

Think of the small patch of smoke-stained ceiling in New York's Grand Central Station. Unbeknownst to most commuters, there is a tiny spot on the ceiling where restorers left a small, secret historical reminder:

Look up at the ceiling: In the northwest corner, you'll see a little square black patch. Now imagine extending that color across the entire constellation that's painted on the ceiling. That's what was there before Grand Central Terminal was dramatically restored in the 1990s. That little black patch was left as a reminder of the bad old days. And what exactly does that black patch consist of? Decades of dirt? Try again. It was the result of decades of smoking in the terminal. That's old nicotine and tobacco residue that was preserved, and it's a testament to how dramatic this restoration was.

Perhaps something similar could be left on the Colosseum, to remind us of the blackening presence of roads and the bad decisions of earlier urban planners. More here.

The Naked Metal Core of a Dead Planet Is Circling the Sun

You know about those plans to visit an asteroid in the next few years? Well, a select group of astronauts would like to sweeten the deal. Why visit a regular asteroid, when there's a planet's solid metal floating up there and it's likely magnetic?

Asteroid 16 Psyche is the intriguing candidate in question. Linda Elkins-Tanton of the Carnegie Institute recently proposed a mission to Psyche at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The composition of the asteroid is very much like Earth's core, but its soft outer layers have been stripped away by other incoming asteroids.

If, indeed, the metal core currently in orbit used to be molten, it's also probably highly magnetic; Elkins-Tanton even refers to the asteroid as "a little refrigerator magnet in space." This could likely have an effect on how we design the spacecraft or satellite that will visit it, and the bizarre landscapes that might be found on the asteroid also sound spectacular. Simulations of how the asteroid might have lost its outer layers suggest, for example, "that Psyche's craters could have dramatic rims that froze in splash-like patterns." The scientists studying it describe it as a "metal world."

"A mission there is the only way that humankind will ever visit the core of any body," Elkins-Tanton said, adding that Psyche could teach us a lot about how planets work. "We can learn about the building blocks of the planets in the first million years of the solar system in a way that we can't do any other way."

That is, if the metal spaceship doesn't get stuck to the magnetic asteroid in the process. More here.

Here Is a Video of Tiny Mice Decorating a Tiny Christmas Tree

Pop-up Ports Keep this Backup Battery Slim and Svelte

What's the point of carrying around a backup battery that's larger than the smartphone it's designed to boost? It defeats the purpose of carrying a pocketable device in the first place. When it comes to backup batteries, slim is the only way to go, and with a set of pop-ports that keep its USB ports free of dust and crap, Paick's Noble will easily slip into a bag or pocket.
The Noble's 6,000mAh battery is large enough to bring three iPhones back from the dead, or completely recharge an iPad or other larger tablet. At half an inch thick it's not the slimmest battery you can buy, but with two USB and a microUSB port, it could be one of the more useful tools in your bag. And, with an introductory price of just $50 it's a ridiculously affordable way to ensure you never find yourself with a dead phone. More here.

Mikhail Kalashnikov Has Died

Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, passed away this morning at the age of 94, according to the BBC.

Kalashnikov's contributions to small arms design cannot be overstated. His AK-47, developed in 1946, is the embodiment of the Soviet virtues of simplicity and reliability. Rugged and easily maintained, AKs are capable of operating in extreme conditions that would disable other weapons. They're the most widely produced assault rifle on the planet for good reason. As their creator told Reuters in 2009, "When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed' ... So this has been my lifetime motto – I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable."

Kalashnikov's military career began 1938, when he was conscripted into the Red Army as a tank mechanic. He quickly rose to a command position in the 24th Tank Regiment, 108th Tank Division stationed in Stryi. The injuries he sustained there during the Battle of Brody in 1941 would change the course of his life.

During his rehabilitation, Kalashnikov overheard other wounded soldiers complaining about the sub-par performance of their rifles, inspiring him to design a more effective weapon. His first outing, a sub-machine gun, was passed over, but it both served as the foundation for the later AK-47 and demonstrated his engineering talents, earning him a position at the Red Army's Central Scientific-developmental Firing Range for Rifle Firearms of the Chief Artillery Directorate.

While he's best known for his signature assault rifle, Kalashnikov has been credited with more than 150 small arm designs over the course of his illustrious career, including the AK-47, AK-74, AKM, and PKR light machine gun. These weapons have revolutionized warfare, and are now employed by more than 50 nations around the world. More here.

Finally, a Real-Life Memory-Erasing Technique for Humans

Get your Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind references ready, because scientists have just figured out a way to erase bad memories using—you guessed it—electroshock therapy. Get ready for on-demand forgetting. It's a real thing now.

A team of Dutch neuroscientists recently devised an electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to "target and disrupt patients' memory of a disturbing episode." Nature explains how patients were showed two traumatic narratives in a slideshow and then subjected to the new technique:

The team later prompted patients to recall only one of the stories by replaying part of that slide show. Immediately afterwards, when the reactivated memory is thought to be vulnerable, the patients received electroconvulsive therapy.

One day later, when given a multiple-choice memory test, patients were significantly worse at remembering details from the reactivated story, performing near chance. Patients' memory of the other story, however, remained largely unscathed.

The test was conducted on 42 patients with severe depression, so there's a chance it could work differently on normal patients. It's also worth pointing out that ECT is no fun. It induces seizures and, well, doctors are shocking patients' brains with electricity.

A breakthrough like this was due, though. For years, scientists have been saying we're on the cusp of developing a way to erase memories, and last year, they successfully erased the memories of sleeping mice. Then, just a few months ago, they managed to identify the gene that helps us forget. But a point-and-click method for erasing particular memories, that's proved elusive. Until now.

As is often the case with groundbreaking research, the next step is more research. But the scientists involved in the field of memory erasure hold out hope that advances like these will lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of conditions like severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. After all, sometimes, ignorance really is bliss. More here.