Tag: WEIRDSCIENCE

Leave it to our clever, if bizarre, Japanese friends to come up with the NoPoPo battery. According to Unplggd, the battery gets power when one of several fluids mixes together with its magnesium and carbon components. Among those fluids are beer, saliva and -- that's right -- urine. Apparently, those unlikely charging agents help the batteries to live for as long as ten years. And the bizarre ...

A research team at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has successfully engineered an experiment in which test subjects perceive themselves as occupying bodies other than their own, USA Today tells us. The study was designed to research technology potentially useful for robotics and the treatment of sensory disorders. Head researcher Henrik Ehrsson told USA Today, "The participants has [sic] a ...

In yet another sign that things are super weird and only getting weirder by the moment, a Canadian woman named Karla-Rae Morris is getting an $8,000 "breast enhancement surgery" for free. All thanks to some supportive (male) friends she made on a very, very strange Web site. For those unfamiliar with the world of underground breast surgery, here's how it works: MyFreeImplants.com is a ...

Could this mean the end of laundry day? Textile scientists in Australia and Hong Kong have developed a special coating for fabrics made of titanium dioxide nanoparticles that actually cause the fabric to self-clean when exposed to sunlight. Besides the obvious benefit of less time spent doing laundry, the new fabric could also mean less water used to wash clothes and less detergent being washed ...

Meant, presumably, for rich high-school nerds with a hankering for more wedgies, the iShoes make the Segway look cool as ice. Essentially motorized shoes, the iShoes came from the mind of Ilya Kaganovich who, "on a trip to New York, thought of a new way to get around town: motorized shoes," according to the iShoes site." Luckily, Kaganovich's brother, Boris, is an aerospace engineering student, ...

Might want to sit down and cross the legs for this one, fellas. A new vasectomy procedure has been developed by a team of researchers from Australia's University of Adelaide. Essentially, it consists of a silicone polymer valve that fits snugly inside the vas deferens, thereby blocking the passage of sperm. The valve is inserted through a hypodermic needle, so there's no need for surgery. The ...

Allergies suck -- so the always-resourceful Japanese have decided to sick robots on the problem. Tokyo-based weather forecasting company Weathernews, Inc. is apparently getting ready to install roughly 200 spherical robots across the country to monitor the pollen in the air. The shells of these bots are made of styrofoam, and a monitor inside does the dirty work. The eyes indicate the ...

Check this out: A new prototype dress may one day help dense men or women clue in on their partner's emotional condition. The Daily Mail reports that the Bubelle Dress, designed by scientists at the Dutch electronics company Philips, changes colors depending on the wearer's mood. The dress's development was prompted by a research venture dubbed the SKIN Probe Project, which imagines daily ...

Despite all the stories that claim video games are corrupting our children, plenty of good news regarding video games is also surfacing lately, much of due to Nintendo's charge to expand its market to non gamers. This was spurred on by the success of games like 'Brain Age' among senior citizens, and now the Wii is finding even more success in strange places, like physical therapy offices. Some ...

With his mind apparently grasping onto distant memories of cruising down the autobahn in his black Audi A4, a German man was stopped yesterday by police, after they caught him doing 40 mph down a high street in Geseke, Germany -- in his electric wheelchair. The 54 year-old Guenther Eichmann was apparently a former engineer, and had modded his wheelchair's engine to burn rubber. Doing 40 in a 20 ...

Curious George prefers eating bananas, but playing with robots will do to pass the time. A team of scientists at Duke University took the world by surprise in 2003 when it successfully used monkeys to control robotic arms with only their brains. Don't be surprised, but the Duke team just one-upped itself. Implanting electrodes into the monkeys' brains, the researchers were able to train the ...

It seems that reality trumps classic science fiction as new research takes the bionic arms of the Six Million Dollar Man from fantasy to feasibility. Scientists from the United States have developed an artificial hand and a groundbreaking surgical technique that work in tandem and promise to restore the sense of touch to amputees. According to the Daily Mail, two patients have successfully ...

Further hope that victims of paralysis or amputation could one day reclaim some form of motion came this week in the form of a robotically-enhanced, tobacco-chewing moth. The Society for Neuroscience's yearly gathering in San Diego saw a presentation on research in which a tobacco hornworm moth's brain was connected to electrodes and amplifiers at the base of a fairly common kit of robotic ...

Scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio have developed a breed of "super mice." These new mice are able to run 20 yards a minutes, for five hours, without stopping. They even have a metabolism that we're sure is the envy of all the chubby mice out there. They'll eat 60 percent more food than the average mouse, but weigh about half as much. They're ...

The flying car is finally approaching reality -- maybe -- but inventors around the world are still working to combine other vehicle types to come up with a more efficient (and fun) means to get from point A to point B. Such is the case with Rudy Heeman, an inventor in New Zealand who has created a device called a hoverwing. Like other similar craft we found on YouTube, Rudy's hoverwing is a ...