Category: Visionaries

People are starting to look to the oceans to produce clean energy, and a couple of Korean researchers have come up with a unique way to harvest power from the high seas. According to Wired, Park Chul and Kim Jongchul recently wrote a proposal that envisions using a giant kite to tow a large ship with a hydroelectric turbine attached to its hull. Essentially, the system would create a floating ...

Share Leave it to Oprah to bring a tear to our eye. On her show yesterday, film critic Roger Ebert, who recently lost his voice to thyroid and jaw cancer, sampled his brand new and remarkably realistic voice synthesizer. With his wife by his side, Ebert speaks for the first time with his new voice module, and admits, "It still needs improvement, but at least it sounds like me." As you can see in ...

Do androids dream of lunar landings? NASA seems to think so. Its Project M would send robotic avatars to the moon in place of flesh-and-blood astronauts. These robots would be controlled by scientists on Earth wearing motion capture suits, thereby allowing researchers to study the lunar surface nearly in real time. (A three-second communications delay exists between Earth and the moon.) The ...

In developing nations, many treatable diseases kill thousands because there's no cheap and accessible way for diagnosis. But a Harvard professor may have discovered an affordable way for people to diagnose a disease from their homes. According to CNN, Harvard chemistry professor George Whitesides created a "paper chip" prototype, barely bigger than your fingerprint, that would cost pennies to ...

Share Everybody wants efficient, inexpensive, clean energy. But, problem is, nobody seems to know just how to produce it. Now, one man is certain that his new technology will turn this dream into reality. According to Engadget, K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, unveiled his "Bloom Box" on Sunday's episode of '60 Minutes' (video from the show after the break). With two small blocks, each ...

We've seen what happens when laptops and other small gadgets have faulty lithium-ion batteries: they burst into flames. So imagine what would happen if the batteries in the upcoming barrage of hybrid and electric cars failed in the same catastrophic fashion. Since they're several magnitudes larger, it's only logical to assume a meltdown would be that much more severe. That's why Peter Roth's ...

The coolest thing we ever made from Popsicle sticks was a tiny house. Come to think of it, that probably wouldn't be considered "cool," even to our fellow first graders at the time. These days a new trend called kinetic art is utilizing Popsicle sticks in ways we never imagined. The king of the kinetic art world is a man named Tim Fort. According to Boing Boing, Fort recently set the world ...

Imagine if you had to walk to work on a prosthetic foot. It's a sobering reality, but many Americans do it every day. Dragging around such a limb takes a lot of effort, but a new prototype could make it easier by recycling the energy a wearer would typically expend between steps. According to Inhabitat, when walking, we spend most of our energy transitioning from one foot to the other; ...

With reasonably priced 3-D printers hitting the market, and DIY versions becoming more prevalent, we're now entering a very exciting time in which designers are experimenting with the materials they send through their extruders. We wrote back in November about Belgian design outfit Unfold and the Utanalog teapot it displayed at the Bits 'n Pieces Exhibition. Now, Unfold has successfully used its ...

Technology can definitely be a spectator sport, and one of the most entertaining aspects of being a scientific bystander is watching creative minds apply modern and futuristic concepts to classic contraptions. The bicycle has been one of the favorite targets of those ingenious (and mad) scientists, and the creations have ranged from sad and depressing to awesome and inspiring. Several students ...

It's no secret that malaria is a huge problem in developing nations. Bill Gates has even brought the problem to the attention of the American public. But here's the question: how do we battle this deadly disease? According to Intellectual Ventures Lab, lasers could be the key to saving thousands of lives. Think of this system as a bug zapper on steroids. Now, this idea isn't a new ...

Throughout the years, we've seen our fair share of creepy robots, from kits that let you build a girlfriend to bizarre looking, big-eyed dancing robots. But after watching a recent video from Virginia Tech's RoMeLa Lab, we're still cringing. Why? Well, one of their latest robots, dubbed ChIMERA (Chemically Induced Motion Everting Robotic Amoeba), looks like a slug and uses a mechanism charmingly ...

Share The now former CEO of Sun Microsystems shared his resignation with the world late last night. Via Twitter. In haiku form. "Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more." With those words Jonathan Schwartz stepped down from the position he's held since 2006, a move which is partially in response to the company being acquired by Oracle. According to the New York Times, ...

During World War II, British operatives constructed a massive computer designed to intercept and decipher incredibly complex, coded German messages. The machine, known as the Colossus, successfully interpreted strategic encryptions and was instrumental in the success of Allied forces. After the war, the heroic machine was destroyed so that enemies could not duplicate the amazing technological ...

As many city-dwellers know, it's hard to scrap together even a few seconds of cell phone service in underground metros or subways. But a student barely old enough to drive has just invented a new device that can send text messages from well below the surface. Los Alamos, New Mexico's 16-year old Alexander Kendrick won the 2009 International Science Fair for developing a cave radio device that ...