HAL Suits Could Help Support Nuclear Cleaners

A Tungsten vest provides its wearer fantastic protection from radiation's damaging effects. Problem is—said vest also weighs about 132 pounds. So how does the Haz-Mat crew of tomorrow gird their loins in this radiation-resistant element? Exo-suits, obviously.

Cyberdyne (the real Japanese company, not the fictional LA firm responsible for Skynet) has adapted their Hybrid Assistive Limb, or HAL (oh, come on), to support these heavy tungsten tunics. HAL suits monitor the body's electrical impulses and attempt to support the user by anticipating his movements. "This new type of HAL robot suit enables their wearers to work on the site without feeling the burden," the company said in a statement. "It is hoped that this will reduce risks of working under harsh environments and contribute to early restoration operations by humans in the wake of disasters."

And, when used in conjunction with the conventional Tyvek suit, which is designed more for keeping radioactive materials from melting into your skin than protecting you from actual radiation, workers will be effectively protected. The company has not said whether these devices will be used at the Fukushima plant where roughly 2,000 workers daily struggle to sanitize the site.

 

 

EZmouse Packs a Backup So It Never Runs Out of Batteries

They lost their annoying USB cables, but in the process wireless mice also gained an appetite for batteries. Recently they've been put on a power diet, but Digitz's EZmouse goes double deuce on the rechargeable batteries so you never need to hunt down a fresh AAA ever again.

The mouse's main rechargeable battery is good for about four to five weeks of use before it needs to be removed and connected to a USB port on your computer for charging. And to ensure you can keep on wirelessly mousing while the main battery's powering up for two hours, a smaller, non-removable backup provides up to three days of additional use. When the main battery is topped off and re-inserted into the $50 mouse, the backup then automatically recharges itself so it's ready for the next time it's called upon. A feature I wouldn't mind seeing added to digital cameras and other devices with removable rechargeable batteries.

 

 

LG's thin and Mighty P330 Laptop Surfaces at Korean Retailer

The Core i7 processor has been replaced by an i5-2435M running at 2.4GHz, but that's hardly a deal breaker -- and it's possible a higher specced variant will eventually see daylight too. The other key credentials are all intact: an NVIDIA GeForce GT555M taking care of the visuals, a 40GB / 640GB SSD and HDD combo for snappier performance, and an IPS display built into an all-metal 1.7kg (3.6-pound) chassis. The price is listed as ₩1,364,000, which converts to a hefty $1,220

iOS 5 Battery Help Is Almost Here

A few days ago, Apple admitted that there's an unknown issue with the iPhone 4S's battery performance, and two days ago it seeded a beta for iOS 5.0.1 to developers to try to address the problem. Now Beta 2's already been pushed out, which shows that Apple's taking this battery business seriously.

 

 

Dell Latitude S Tablet Available for Pre-order, Might just Arrive Before Christmas

Serving as further evidence that the stylus really is back, Dell's coy enterprise slate, the Latitude S is now available for pre-order with an estimated delivery date of November 29th and an $859 price tag. If your too impatient to wait for Windows 8, this one's sporting Microsoft's seventh generation, weighs a hefty 816g -- nearly twice as much as the BlackBerry PlayBook -- and contains a 1.5GHz Intel Atom Z670processor.

 

 

A Leopard-Print Garden Hose Cover for Your Summer Home at the Jersey Shore

I'd imagine this is the sort of hose Snooki would own—were I to also imagine Snooki capable of fathoming the whole "watering plants" concept. The "Hose Clothes" cover slips onto hoses up to 5/8-inches in diameter and costs $24 for 25 feet or $34 for 50 feet at Dirt Couture.

Korean Bendy Memory Could Make Plenty of Trendy Tech

Flexible displays aren't much good unless there's flexible memory alongside. It's been attempted before, but bending memory pushes the individual transistors so close that they begin to interfere with one another -- causing degradation and shortening the device lifespan to just a single day. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has solved the problem by pairing transistors with memristors, which are immune to such annoyances. By fixing both inside a flexible substrate, you can push them as near as you like without any electo-radiation spanners jamming up the works. This also means that the flexible RRAM behaves just like flash memory; maybe in the future it won't just beantennas sewn into our clothes.

 

 

Magically Transform Brown Eyes to Blue with Lasers

There is something about blue eyes that can pierce another person's soul while also acting as a revealing window into your own. Brown eyes? Not so much. What if you wanted blue eyes, though? Color contacts? Meh. Try this new laser surgery that'll permanently transform your brown eyes to blue.

Brown to blue, permanently. That's what Dr. Gregg Homer from Stroma Medical in California says he can do. His Lumineyes procedure uses a laser tuned to a specific frequency to blast the brown out of eyes into blue. The process only takes 20 seconds too and it literally removes the melanin—the brown—from a person's eyes, which in turn reveals a blue color in two to three weeks (of course the blue isn't real, natural blue eyes have lower melanin in the front of the iris—the blue color in blue eyes come from the same effect as to why the sky is blue).

Dr. Homer says he still needs about $800,000 to complete clinical trials and if all goes to plan, the procedure will be available in 18 months outside the US and 3 years inside the US. The process is expected to cost around $4,800.

Microsoft-Approved Windows Phone 7 Unlocker Goes live

Let the great Windows Phone 7 unlocking begin! ChevronWP7, the Microsoft-sanctioned Windows Phone unlocker, went live today. The project is aimed at "hobbyist developers," giving owners of WP7 handsets the ability to run and test unsigned apps on their phones. Interested parties need a Windows Live ID and $9 to sign up -- that price'll give you unlimited unlocks on a single phone. You can grab more info and an unlock here.

 

 

How to Securely Wipe Your Data from Any Phone on Any Platform

It's phone upgrading season, and if you're industrious, you might be looking to sell your phone on eBay or craigslist or pass it on to your snot-mouthed little brother. Whatever, it's going; it's gone; fare thee well, you old piece of junk!

But please oh please oh please don't forget to wipe your data before your phone changes hands. Here's a quick guide for anyone who might need it, so you're not fumbling through options and settings for half the day.

iPhone

• First, you should probably back up your phone using iTunes
• Go to Settings
• From there, go to General
• Now go to Reset
• Select Erase All Content and Settings
• You'll be prompted to enter your passcode at this point
• It will take a few minutes, unless you've got a fairly ancient iOS device

• ---

  Android

• Backing up for Android is relatively straightforward; just connect your phone to your computer via USB and drag all of your files into a new folder.
• Pull down your Menu and go to Settings
• Scroll to Privacy
• Click Factory data reset

• ---

  Windows Phone 7 and 7.5

• Back up with Zune software if you're on Windows, but there's currently no way to totally back up your SMS texts for Windows Phone, so keep that in mind if you like to keep hang onto your messages.
• Go to Settings
• Tap About
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and tap "reset your phone"
• Press "yes" when the warning prompt appears
• Warning: You won't be asked to confirm your password

• ---

  BlackBerry OS 6

• Use BlackBerry Desktop Manager to back up your phone
• Go to Options
• Scroll to Security
• Now scroll to Security Wipe
• Select all options (Email & Contacts, Applications, Media card)
• Type the word "blackberry" into the box and hit confirm

 

 

Cheaper Android Phones Are Crap Compared to iPhone and BlackBerry

Fandroids say that iPhones, Blackberries and Windows Phones are way too expensive. Anyone can buy a cheaper Android! Now a study covering 600,000 support calls has found that these cheap Androids are exactly that: Cheap. And cheap phones break.

According to this study by wireless service company WDS, hardware failures are more common in Android handsets than in the more expensive competition. Makes sense: The culprit is not Android itself, but Google's OS licensing. Since it's so easy to license Google's OS, inexpensive phones are common. And inexpensive phones do not put as much of an emphasis on construction as expensive ones.

But the thing is, these are not cheapo phones from the developing world. The study's 600,000 support calls come from Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia—primo mobile markets.

It makes sense: while top of the line, more expensive Android phones from Samsung or HTC are solid, the inexpensive phones that are helping Google take so much market share are also its Achilles Heel. According to WDS' Tim Deluca-Smith: "At the moment, Android is a bit of the Wild West." Giddyup.

 

 

OpenBSD 5.0 Offers More Hardware Compatibility, Less Bugs

Fans of the Unix-based OpenBSD can crack open a bottle of their favorite open-sourced champers because the operating system has launched version five-point-oh. More evolutionary than revolutionary, this version has been given plenty of nudges in the right direction, with broader hardware support, OpenSSH 5.8 and improved network capabilities. The full change log also includes a plethora of stability improvements and bug fixes too. The volunteer-run OS can now be grabbed from OpenBSD's FTP servers or as a paid-for CD set if you're feeling a little noughties.

 

 

Internet Explorer Does Less than 50 Percent of World's web Surfing

It's been a long and winding road for Internet Explorer, Microsoft's venerable web browser, and for over a decade it's been the browser of choice for most netizens. According to Net Marketshare's latest numbers, however, IE now enables just under half of the world's total -- meaning mobile and desktop combined -- web traffic after owning 95 percent of the browsing market seven years ago. The decline is at least partially due to a rise in mobile web browsing and an increasing Chrome user base. Of course, Microsoft's finest still has a healthy 52.63 percent desktop market share, which gives it a sizable lead over the competition from Firefox (23 percent), Chrome (18 percent), and Safari (five percent). There's plenty more graphs and charts to show you exactly how the browser war is going, so hit the links below for the full pie-chart treatment.

 

 

Apple Admits Battery Problems: It’s iOS 5’s Fault

All those problems with evaporating iPhone batteries? Looks like it's not the hardware's fault—Apple's 'fessing up to a buggy iOS 5 release that's sucking more juice than it should, The Loop reports.

Apple confirmed the problem in a message to The Loop, stating "A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks."

Looks to us like it's more than "a small number of customers," but either way, we hope the battery-fixing update arrives ASAP. I've got so many stupid Siri video ideas I need to execute!

 

 

The Cleanest Way to Get Pomegranate Seeds into Your Mouth

Every pomegranate is composed of exactly 840 seeds. To extract every last sweet morsel, you could either spend a half hour picking at the husk with crimson-stained fingers or just knock them clean out of their skin with the ART.

The Arils Removal Tool (ART) from the Shoham company comprises a collection cup, grate, and cover. After splitting and de-crowning a pomegranate, you set the half on a grate that sits over the collection bowl, cover it, and rap the top soundly with a heavy spoon. This knocks the arils (the seed itself and the red, fleshy sac it sits in) free of the pith, allowing them to pass through the grate to the collection cup. The ART retails for $16 on EBay. 

 

 

A Majestic Bench That Records Your Ass Heat

You! You're full of body heat. Your blood is boiling. Maybe just figuratively. But you're not just a pile of molecules, you're throbbing with vitality. This bench by Australiandesigner Jay Watson shows it to the world. Thermochromatic assprint.

It's a handsome modern bench set, sure, but the thermochromatic coating is why we care. Any body part that touches the surface will change its color, leaving a mark behind. From the photos, this looks cool and frankly kind of gross.

 

 

Nokia Lumia 800 to hit the UK on November 16th

The Lumia 800 will be making its way to the UK in November, the confirmation that Nokia's "first real Windows Phone" will indeed be available within the UK on November 16th, just a day before Samsung unleashes its Galaxy Nexus handset to British users. Last month, the company confirmed that the device would be priced at €420, though there's no word yet on what that price tag may look like in sterling.

 

 

Varley's evR450 All-Electric Supercar set to hit Australian Roads Next Year

As Autoblog Green points out, Australia's Varley Electric Vehicles is known more for bulky industrial vehicles than high-end sports cars, but the company's now looking to change that perception with its new all-electric evR450 supercar. While it'll no doubt turn a few heads simply standing still, it also looks to measure up reasonably well under the hood, boasting a top speed of 200 kilometers per hour (or 124 MPH) and a zero to 100 km/h time of 3.8 seconds. 

The company's also promising a range of 150 kilometers (or 93 miles) that can be doubled with an optional range-extension pack, although its not letting anyone actually drive the car just yet (or even look under the hood, for that matter). As for a price, Varley's saying that the base package will come in "below" $200,000 Australian dollars (or about $213,000 US), and it says it could roll out "as early as January 2012."

 

 

Ubuntu Coming to Tablets, Phones, Cars and Smart TVs by 2014

We've already seen Ubuntu running on tablets and smartphones, but not in any official capacity. Rumors had it that Canonical would be making a serious push into the tablet space in early 2011, but that effortnever materialized, or at least was never acknowledged. Still, Unity has some finger-friendly streaks and Oneiric added ARM support -- so it's not much of a stretch to see the popular Linux distro on your mobile devices. 

Well, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth made that move official by issuing a challenge to the Ubuntu community to start pushing beyond the traditional PC form factor. There were no products to announce, but Shuttleworth was confident the OS would be ready and in shipping consumer electronics by the time version 14.04 arrived in April of 2014.

 

 

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