Tag: INVENTION

A U.K. inventor has developed a 4-foot-tall plastic robot child for he and his wife that, believe it or not, is creepier than Haley Joel Osment in 'Artificial Intelligence: AI' (way to be redundant, Spielberg). According to The Daily Mail, Tony Ellis and his wife, Judie, don't have any kids or pets, but they do operate a toy robotics company called Conceptioneering (which is almost as bad of a ...

Traditionalists (or real musicians) might turn up their noses, but a group of Dutch Belgian (thanks, murasaki378) college students recently developed a pair of gloves that work as a drum kit. According to Designboom, four students at Artesis University College of Antwerp created the 'Beat on the Block' drum gloves (video after the break), which work by tapping the fingers on a flat surface. The ...

Putting together a list of the best or worst of anything is always an arduous task. Some will agree, most won't, and many will be downright enraged with your selection. But that's also kind of the point. With this in mind, then, Time recently took it upon itself to put together an unranked list of the 50 worst inventions of all time, ranging "from the zany, to the dangerous, to the just plain ...

We all take it for granted now, but there once was a time, not too long ago, when withdrawing cash from your bank account meant waiting in lengthy lines at your local bank. Everything radically changed, of course, with the birth of the ATM. On Saturday, John Shepherd-Barron, the man widely acknowledged as responsible for creating the cash dispenser, passed away in Scotland at the age of 84. ...

Rather than sit back and do nothing while his son struggled to communicate, one British father created a program to help his autistic child communicate. Autism is a difficult disease for both parents and children to manage. According to BBC News, Stephen Lodge's Speaks4Me program allows its user to form sentences by dragging and dropping onscreen images in a particular order. Stephen's ...

Motorcycle enthusiast Colin Furze, who recently became known for attaching a flamethrower onto the back of his scooter, was arrested in England last week. According to the Telegraph, Lincolnshire police noticed the publicity surrounding Furze's creation -- reminiscent of something from a James Bond film -- and arrested him for suspicion of possessing an object converted into a firearm. It's an ...

As you grow older, style becomes less of a concern. Just ask Grandpa; it's all about function. The same holds true for a new exercise device called the Skaters Coach. This amalgamation of a tricycle and a walker was created by Tom Demme, who's a baby-boomer with two knee replacements. It might not look cool, but it'll certainly help to keep senior citizens healthy. According to CNET News, the ...

By sea, by air or by land, no terrain is out of the question for a New Zealand inventor's do-all vehicle. According to a Reuters video (watch below), Rudy Heedman has built a homemade hovercraft that uses a set of detachable wings to take flight when it reaches 44 mph. It's a child's (or adrenaline junkie's) dream come true. Once he leaves the water for the sky, Heedman is protected from death or ...

While some would probably prefer to bring the very wrath of God down upon unsuspecting rodents (see Victor's Multi-Kill Electronic Mouse Trap), others might prefer a more purist method to offing them -- with a high-powered twist. Jack Easton, managing editor of Telovation.com, tinkered with the concept of the classic mousetrap, which is how his pneumatic version came to be. "Many people have been ...

Don't tell Japanese professor Yojiro Ishino that less is more. On November 24, Ishino and his students at the Nagoya Institute of Technology were rewarded for their excessive creation -- a camera with 158 lenses. According to Crunch Gear, the invention was recently certified by Guinness World Records as having more lenses than any other camera in the world. The lenses are lined up in four rows ...

These days, everybody's looking for "greener" ways to get around town. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise us to discover that our mom had ditched her SUV for a bicycle. This wasn't the case until fairly recently in the U.S., but the Japanese, ever the technology mavericks, were green when green wasn't cool. Need evidence? Just check out these bike models from Shukuno Rintendo that Today and ...

Some devices and creations are so perfect that efforts to upgrade or modernize them seem pointless. To our minds, Velcro has always occupied that realm of perfectly simple, yet effective tools that may be beyond technical evolution. But a team of scientists at the Technical University of Munich is officially bringing Velcro into the 21st century. Directed by Josef Mair, the team ditched the ...

NASA frequently receives headlines for awesome, and ridiculous, tech developments, but some of its scientific contributions integrate seamlessly into the consumer landscape with very little, or no, fanfare. Radar Online recently compiled a list of 13 NASA developments that were originally intended for space travel, but also became mainstream products. One of the selections is well-known, like ...

With those rotating, germ-infested metal bars, plain old turnstiles are so yesterday. When it comes to keeping wanderers out of subway stations, amusement park rides, and office buildings, water jets are apparently the way of the future. Thanks to a new invention that uses a jet stream to create a barrier at a turnstile, the Wicked Witch of the West will never again enter your space without ...

Gamers, extreme sports enthusiasts and rednecks swear by Mountain Dew, that cool, unnaturally green shot of pure caffeine in a bottle. Thanks to a New Mexico man's invention, environmentalists might, too. According to KRQE.com, inventor Paul Patone has developed a fuel delivery system that can connect to and power everything from a car engine to a lawnmower. The GEET (Global Environmental Energy ...