Yep, That's a Helicopter Bicycle

OK, so none of us probably have any use for a flying bike, but it's alright to want one. It's perfectly natural. So just let the wild envy wash over you as this Frankenstein machine takes flight.

Developed by three Czech companies working in unison, the bike was demoed for the first time in Prague today, where it underwent a remote-controlled five-minute flight. The 209-pound rig with its four battery-powered propeller pods isn't quite capable of carrying around a real human being yet, so instead a dummy got the inaugural ride. Hope he enjoyed it.

Clever Trunk Dividers Stop Your Groceries From Taking a Wild Ride

It's all but guaranteed that the most hair-raising drives you'll have will be immediately after you fill the trunk with groceries, plants, and anything else you don't want to topple. But with these $13 Stayhold trunk dividers, you can hand your keys to a Hollywood stuntman and not have to worry about the bread being crushed by a jug of milk.

The solid plastic shields grips your trunks carpeting to keep whatever it's butt-up against securely in place. It can handle cargo as heavy as a toolbox or a suitcase, and unless you're putting air between the tires and the road, everything will be exactly as you organized it when you get to your destination. Now if only they made a version for kids. More here.

There Was Drinkable Water On Mars According To Opportunity

Opportunity, aka The Little Rover That Could, is still making important discoveries 10 years into its Martian jaunt. After the devastating loss of twin rover Spirit in 2011, Opportunity rallied and kept trekking, only to recently discover a fascinating rock near Endurance Crater.

One of the oldest rocks ever analyzed, the specimen shows that drinkable water once existed on Mars. Opportunity identified a type of clay mineral on the rock that is only formed in neutral water, like the water found on Earth. Steve Squyres, the principle Opportunity researcher, noted that Opportunity has found other liquids that could chemically be described as water in the past, but these samples were all closer to sulphuric acid. Curiosity recently found similar evidence of neutral water at Gale Crater. Squyres said:

It is really striking to me, how similar the stories are for the rocks at Gale and Endeavour crater.

Though the desert conditions on Mars have made other Martian water acidic, the findings contribute to theories that Mars may once have been habitable. Nice hustle, Opportunity. Way to be. More here.

All the New iOS Features Your Old iPhone Won't Get

As expected and widely reported ahead of today's keynote, Apple introduced a completely revamped iOS at WWDC. Not only did they ditch the skeuomorphic design scheme in favor of something a little more colorful and fun, the company added a handful of neat new features—some old, some new. But as with any major update to the mobile OS, there are a handful of features that won't be coming to older generation iOS devices. (Hint: It's because Apple wants you to upgrade.) 

Now, according to Apple "features are subject to change" and "not all features are available on all devices." Here's what you're getting and not getting based on each device. (And in some instances some services will be limited to 10 devices.)

AirDrop (which requires an iCloud account): iPhone 5, iPad(4th generation), iPad mini, iPod touch (5th generation)

Siri: iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad (Retina and newer), iPad mini, iPod touch (5th generation)

Panorama: iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (fifth generation)

Square and video formats and swipe to capture: iPhone 4 and newer, iPad 3rd generation and newer, iPad mini, iPod touch (fifth generation)

Filters in Camera: iPhone 5, iPod touch (fifth generation)

Filters in Photos: iPhone 4 and up, iPad (3rd generation and newer)

This Papercraft BBQ Will Make You Hungry Enough to Eat a Notebook

Summertime is upon us, and that means it's grilling season. You could go down to the store to pick up everything you need for a tasty BBQ, or you could just make do with what you can find on your desk. That second option is remarkably nice-lookin' but probably not the most delicious.

This drool-worthy yet stylized piece of art was put together by the French creative team zim & zou, and inspired by some illustrations that lept off the page but not quite into anyone's mouths. They wouldn't do too well on the grill either. Now if you'll excuse me I REALLY have to go get dinner. More here.

What Happens When You Use a Giant Construction Drill on a Car?

It's quite simple really, the car gets completely destroyed, screwed and mangled in every which way possible. The TR-150 construction drill completely eats the car alive to the point where it can no longer drill it anymore, it has to smash and pulverize it. Using construction tools for destruction is a beautiful thing.

Leaked Windows Phone Screenshots Finally Show a Notification Center

Windows Phone 8 is pretty, and there's a lot of things to like about it. But for every one of those there's also a glaring absence. Hopefully one of those is soon to disappear, leaked screenshots of an internal build of the OS shows that there's finally a notification center, presumably coming soon.

The screenshots were shared by a Redditor who bought a 920 off Ebay and found that it was running a peculiar OS: an internal beta. In addition to the notification center, there seem to be some improvements to multitasking as well, including the ability to close applications in that view.

As with any leak, there's always the possibility it's just a big fake, but there's nothing about this set of screenshots to make it wildly suspicious. On top of that, we know Microsoft's pushing out a Windows 8.1 update soon, and when an update comes to Windows Phone 8, you'd hope it would include something so basic as a notification center. Here's to hoping. More here.

Amazon Has a 3D Printer Section Now

3D printers just got a little more mainstream. Amazon has now opened its own 3D Printer page for the sale of printers and filaments so you can get all that jazz shipped right to your door with the greatest of ease.

Amazon is peddling the MakerBot Replicator 2, Afinia 3D Printer H-Series, 3D Systems' Cubify (not available), fabbster 3D Printer, Airwolf3D, and a couple of Chinese models as well as well as filament—both ABS and PLA varieties. You can also pick up books, CAD software, and other assorted parts there too.

It's just one small step to bigger 3d printer adoption; this doesn't make them any cheaper. But it's never been easier to pick one up if you're in the market. More here.

A Lego Segway Is as Ridiculously Wonderful as You'd Expect

Lego whisperer Simon Burfield has a knack for taking the plastic building toy well past the limits of what it was intended for. His specialty is building rideable creations including a full-sized wheelchair, and now a rather brilliant Segway clone.


It can easily support his weight, and even turns with a pivoting handle. The current version doesn't self-balance—yet—but that's totally within his grasp since the 'Legway' already has four Mindstorm NXT control modules on board. And Burfield claims he's already started construction on a larger version that promises to be even more amazing. Can you imagine the size of the box these sets would come in? The building instructions would be as thick as a phone book.

A Simple Design Tweak Makes Sleeping Bags Less Like Straitjackets

A tapering mummy-style sleeping bag is easier to travel with since they can be compressed extremely compact. But if you suffer from even a smidgen of claustrophobia, spending a night in one can be like sleeping in a straitjacket. To make them more comfortable and compatible with those of us who toss and turn, Nemo has created a spoon-shaped sleeping bag which provides extra space where it's needed, without sacrificing portability.

The $230 Rhythm 40 bulges at the knees and elbows to allow the occupant to easily roll over during the night, or strike a more comfortable sleeping pose that doesn't have them just lying on their back. The sleeping bag's also waterproof, for unanticipated leaks and floods in the night, and has a pocket in the hood for stashing a pillow. Suddenly, camping seems a bit less like roughing it. More here.

Intel's Prototype Thunderbolt Flash Drive Is the World's Fastest

You can officially stop bragging about how fast your fancy new USB 3.0 flash drive is. At the Computex show in Taipei Intel was showing off this hacked together prototype of adedicated Thunderbolt 128GB flash drive boasting data transfer speeds of 10 Gbit/s, or about twice as fast as USB 3.0's max. And now that Thunderbolt 2 has been introduced, waiting around for large files to copy to your flash drive could be a thing of the past.

Of course Intel had no word on when consumers could get their hands on the Thunderbolt flash drive, if ever. But there was plenty of interest in it, and as the protocol becomes more popular, it's safe to assume at some point these will move past the prototype stage—hopefully with that adorably compact form factor still intact. More here.

Sonar Could Let Your Body Talk to Machines Better

Sonar. Subs use it. Dolphins use it. And someday your own body might use it to detect and treat what ails you. Echolocation unlocking the quantified self.

Given that the human body is mostly water—about 60 percent—researchers at the University of Buffalo are currently developing miniaturized sensors that use ultrasounds to communicate with other embedded devices, like pacemakers, in the body to figure out what's going on under all that flesh.

What's different about this type of "body area network" is that it isn't relying on a series of sensors that use electromagnetic radio frequency waves but instead uses ultrasound, which Tommaso Melodia, PhD, UB associate professor of electrical engineering, says is far more efficient given the body's mostly liquid composition. Radio waves, you see, have a hard time penetrating through the human body, much less water. A cluster of devices sending radio waves back and forth to each other also generates a significant amount of heat, which isn't really something you want happening inside your body. Melodia's theory has garnered a five year, $449,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to further investigate this idea.

So, for example, if you're a diabetic and have embedded insulin pumps that are connected to a blood glucose monitor, the two could communicate via ultrasound to regulate insulin levels in real time.

We're obviously still years away from Melodia's ultrasound network becoming a reality but it's this type of wearable technology that will one day make the quantified self a reality. the NSF grant will allow Melodia and his team to begin modeling and experiment with an array of ultrasonic, wireless body sensors. More here.

Can We Invent Technology to Record Our Dreams?

Do you remember the dream you had last night? Last week? Last month? Probably not. Our sleepy imagination just vanishes without a trace. But... what if we could record our dreams? Like invent some sort of dream DVR. Then we would never forget.

AsapSCIENCE delves into the mysterious world of dreaming to answer the question of whether or not we can invent technology and software to translate our dreaming brain into actual recordings. It's sort of mind blowing how close we already are.

Watch Every Single Version of Windows Ever in One Exhaustive Video

A very patient soul spent hours and hours of his life installing each version of Windows from 1.0 to 8.0 Pro, then sped up the footage. The result? The entire history of the operating system condensed into just over an hour. Bonus points: Daft Punk's Random Access Memories as the soundtrack.

It's fun to see how antiquated Windows 1.0 looks against Windows 8's clean, Metro design, and the hour-long ride gives you a nice, big picture look at how far Windows has come (with a quick break for Doom and Reversi). More here.

The World's Thinnest 1TB Hard Drive Is Just 7mm Thick

If you're in the market for slimline storage, Western Digital has just the hard drive for you: it's latest offering, WD Blue, crams 1TB into a case that's just 7mm thick.

Small enough, in fact, to make it the world's thinnest 1TB hard drive right now. The small frame doesn't mean it skimps on features, though: it has motor shafts at each end to reduce vibration and improve tracking, secure parking to keep the heads away from the plates during shocks, and both electromagnetic and piezo actuators for more precise movement.

For $140 with a two year warranty, it seems like a pretty sweet deal—and should help all those exciting new Haswell ultrabooks stay as slim and slinky as possible. It's available as of today, for both OEMs and consumer alike. More here.

Vine for Android Is Finally Here

Vine, the very popular way to splice together six-second video vignettes, is now available for Android. Here's the Google Play link, which is live for your video-sharing enjoyment right now—after some initial delays, it looks like the download link is finally operational.

Twitter purchased Vine when it was still just a nothing startup late last year, and launched . Despite some early controversy, and questions about how fun/useful Vine actually is, the service has really blossomed over the last half-year into something both fun and useful, dragging millions upon millions of regular users into it's whirlpool of erratic filmstrips. (Vine claims it's got some 13 million users in tow.)

A Lamp Made of 200 Traffic Cones Is the World's Craziest Hazard Light

The minds behind "Planet: Under Construction" (PUC), on the other hand, put some 200 cones to a use that's awesome.

Made from a big, spherical metal frame work with a high-powered lamp in the middle and the 200 cones bungie corded on around the outside, PUC was created by the international architecture firm Woods Bagot for Vivid Sydney. It'll mark the entrance point to the festival at large until June 10th, suspended in the air by cables like some construction-working sun. Beats a shirtless dude waving an orange flag any day. More here.

Electrified Wolverine Claws Are Fabulously Ill-Advised

I think it's safe to say that we all want Wolverine claws. Sure, working out some of the logistics would be tough at first, but come on. You would feel invincible! And you could open plastic packaging really easily. To this end, Master James made a set of great looking claws at a machine shop. But they weren't awesome enough. So he electrified them.

Inspired by "Thor's Hammer," a Hack A Day project, James hooked his claws to the transformer from a salvaged oil furnace and let the sparks fly. He notes that he has no sense of how high the voltage is, which just makes the whole thing stupid amazing. Safety and the internet have never really mixed and this makes it all worth it. More here.

Unique Photo Shows the Ridiculous Size of America's First Spaceships

One of the things that always shocks me when I go to the Kennedy Space Center is the tiny size of the Mercury (left) and Gemini (right) capsules—the missions that jumpstarted the American space exploration program. This unique photo clearly shows how ridiculous these tin cans are.

It also shows how big the astronauts' gonads were. Look at them! These guys were actually strapping themselves to oversized photo booths attached to metal cylinders full of a few tons of explosive fuel. Even Gemini—designed to carry two humans and rendezvous in orbit—looks stupidly small. More here.

How Big Would an iPhone Be If You Combined All the iPhones Ever Sold

Very, very big. Like way bigger than the new World Trade Center big. Like almost double the world's tallest tower big. If you combined all the iPhones ever sold into a single gigantic monolith of a phone, it'd be 5,059 feet tall and 2,846 feet across. Ridiculous!

In Animal's very silly series Stupid Calculations, Josh Orter figured out the size of a ginormous iPhone by doing simple math with a lot of numbers. It's delicious arithmetic, to be honest. Here's a tasty sampling:

305,160,600 older models x 5.65 square inches=1,724,157,390² inches
51,131,400 iPhone 5’s x 6.83 square inches= 349,227,462² inches
TOTAL 2,073,384,852 square inches (14,398,506 sq ft or 330.54 acres or 0.516 square miles)

That was the calculations to figure out the area of the beastphone but to calculate the dimensions, he needed to jump through more hoops. Comparatively speaking, the giant iPhone would be wider than Central Park (2,846 feet vs 2,640 feet) and its surface area would dwarf the new World Trade Center (330.54 acres vs 23 acres).

Hell, if you wanted to pave a standard highway with all the iPhones ever sold, you could do so for 227 straight miles. Read the rest of the fascinatingly (but admittedly useless) report  here.