[technorati tags: karaoke, muzzle, karaoke squawk, gadget, stupid]
Sep 1, 1999
Karaoke Muzzle
Self-lighting cigarette
Smokers, breathe easy (if you still can) — technology has finally solved the pressing problem of not being able to light up on a windy day. Israeli company Gashbam Enterprises has invented a self-lighting cigarette — which also solves the problem of forgetting your lighter or using the last match. The sulphur and phosphorous-anointed tip turns the cigarette into a device operated just like a match, so you can strike it against a rough surface on the side of the pack to get it lit. To prevent breakage, the cigs are reinforced with bamboo and tobacoo leaf slivers. There ya go, smokers — cancer risk remains, but at least no more will you be at risk of singeing your eyebrows while trying to light up in a wind tunnel. Self-lighting cigaretteSandia’s Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin
Scientists at Sandia National Laboratory generated temperatures of greater than 2 billion degrees Kelvin, hotter than the interior of the sun. To do it, they fired up their Z Machine accelerator, seen here in operation, to produce incredibly hot plasmas. From the Sandia news release:
The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.
The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares maintain their extreme temperatures.
The very high radiation output also creates new experimental environments to help validate computer codes responsible for maintaining a reliable nuclear weapons stockpile safely and securely — the principal mission of the Z facility.
“At first, we were disbelieving,” says Sandia project lead Chris Deeney. “We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result and not an ‘Ooops’!”
Sandia’s Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin
[technorati tags: Sandia, machine, billion, degrees, Kelvin]
Crazy Kent - He likes having his picture taken in bins.
Sometimes, after giggling at a gag site, your mind drifts to logistics of how one would pull off such a long-running stunt. Imagine dragging a trash can to each of the 50 states plus the United Kingdom. Then think about working through the details of getting somebody to take a picture of you in said trash can - and not getting run over if you were, say, in it in the middle of a highway. Or over in Centro Ybor in Tampa. Kent is indeed crazy.Facet makes water look like Laser
Well almost - but you can for sure impress your plumber.
More: Blue LED Faucet LightTired of that same old monotonous water? Bored with water that doesn't look like futuristic alien mouthwash? Need to make your midnite bathroom appointments more exhilarating? Then you need to get the blue LED faucet attachment from ThinkGeek. You can turn any faucet in your home into a streaming blue lagoon of techie-bliss in just minutes. How does it work? Just attach to the end of your faucet (universal adapters included), and when the water flows through the magic chamber, it simply turns on the blue LED array and illuminates the stream with a soothingly powerful crystal blue hue.
True Facts... Maybe
These facts are not guaranteed to be true. But they probably are.
Hewlett Packard's first product was an automatic urinal flusher.
All of David Letterman's suits are custom made; there are no creases in his suit trousers.
Cranberry Jell-O is the only flavor that contains real fruit flavoring.
Fewer than half of the 16,200 major league baseball players have ever hit a home run.
In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.
Richard Versalle, a tenor performing at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, suffered a heart attack and fell 10 feet from a ladder to the stage just after singing the line "You can only live so long."
If the entire population of earth was reduced to exactly 100 people, 51% would be female, 49% male; 50% of the world's currency would be held by 6 people, one person would be nearly dead, one nearly born.
In 1920, Babe Ruth out-homered every American League team.
Topless saleswomen are legal in Liverpool, England, but only in tropical fish stores.
Toxic house plants poison more children than household chemicals.
The original name of Bank of America was Bank of Italy.
More "True Facts"
Hewlett Packard's first product was an automatic urinal flusher.
All of David Letterman's suits are custom made; there are no creases in his suit trousers.
Cranberry Jell-O is the only flavor that contains real fruit flavoring.
Fewer than half of the 16,200 major league baseball players have ever hit a home run.
In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.
Richard Versalle, a tenor performing at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, suffered a heart attack and fell 10 feet from a ladder to the stage just after singing the line "You can only live so long."
If the entire population of earth was reduced to exactly 100 people, 51% would be female, 49% male; 50% of the world's currency would be held by 6 people, one person would be nearly dead, one nearly born.
In 1920, Babe Ruth out-homered every American League team.
Topless saleswomen are legal in Liverpool, England, but only in tropical fish stores.
Toxic house plants poison more children than household chemicals.
The original name of Bank of America was Bank of Italy.
More "True Facts"
[technorati tags: true facts, true, facts, gossip, celebrity, celebrity gossip, stupid]
The Noise Shirt and its hanger/charger
The Tampere University of Technology is working on machine washable and wirelessly rechargeable wearable technology.
They prototyped a Noise Shirt which has a microphone that measures the surrounding environments noise level and displays it as a vertical 5 step equalizer bar with the LEDs. Each LED marks a rise above a certain decibel level. The three lower LEDs go from 65dB to 84dB. The top two LEDs mark a noise level exceeding 85dB and 100dB. Continuous exposure exceeding 85dB is the limit set by the European Union for recommended use of hearing protection.
The device has a small battery with a wireless recharging induction loop in the neck tab. The garment is functional whenever charged and won’t require any user input.
The team created a special clothes hanger for wirelessly recharging the shirt. The hanger is shaped to make the shirt’s neck tab drape over the hanger neck, to make the two inductive coils meet.
The system takes about 3 hours to recharge the empty Lithium-polymer battery and depending on the amount of ambient noise the Noise Shirt will run from 2 to 4 hours.
The next step in the research is using wireless communications and a mobile user interface in order to access services and applications produced outside the garment.
[technorati tags: wireless, communications, shirt, recharge, battery, clothes, shirts, stupid]
What's Next in Gadgets
Periodical Time did a small survey of new Gadets, which will be launched in the market in the near future.
E-mail can be read only when a laptop is open, right? Microsoft's proposed solution is SideShow. Laptop makers are planning to design small screens on the outer body so you can read incoming messages or choose music without opening the case. SideShow will be supported by the Windows Vista operating system, launching this year.
The 2007 Mercedes-Benz S-Class has a radar-guided park-assist option too, as well as a "night view assist." By shining invisible headlight- mounted infrared beams up to 500 ft. ahead of the car, it can display a black-and-white nightscope view on the dashboard.
2007 S550 available this month; $85,400.
Some camcorders have ditched the tape, relying instead on internal memory. Others capture high-definition video for playback on big-screen TVs. Sanyo put both innovations into its Xacti HD1, which also features a next-generation organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display.
This month; $800.
Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard
Soft Hardware. You may have heard about the jacket with iPod controls stitched to the sleeve. Eleksen, the maker of "electroconductive" fabric products, now wants to introduce a qwerty keyboard that you can roll up and put in your pocket. The ElekTex keyboard will use Bluetooth technology to connect wirelessly to PDAs and smart phones.
June 2006; $150.
Fly coach, and the dream of watching movies on your laptop quickly fades, thanks to the reclining seat in front of you. Intel's new laptop design lets you pull the screen forward from behind the keyboard and even raise the screen to eye level. Elements of the design may appear this year in laptops priced at $1,100 and higher made by Intel partners.
Samsung's SGH-P300 is slimmer than Motorola's Razr. Its thickness is slightly less than 9 mm. It looks like a pocket calculator, but it's a tri-band world phone with a built-in MP3 player and 1.3-megapixel camera with video-recording capability.
Now in Europe, $600 to $700; coming soon to the U.S.
Robosapien maker WowWee Robotics teamed up with Philips to build the Smart Companion Operating Technology. SCOTY (pronounced Scotty) is a camera- and Wi-Fi—equipped butler who sits in your living room, obeying voice commands to play specific music, read new e-mail and even report intruders.
September 2006; $400.
Blue is cold, red is hot—any kid knows that. So Delta developed the Brizo bath faucet, which uses lighting to change the water color depending on the temperature; it prevents children and the elderly from accidental scalding. The electronic faucet can be turned off or on with a touch, or with a wave of the hand.
Available within two years; $300 to $500.
It was perhaps inevitable that Honda, with experience in safety technology and motorcycle design, would be the first to introduce a motorcycle air bag commercially. If crash sensors mounted on the front fork detect an impact, a computer quickly decides whether to deploy the bag. Honda Gold Wings will offer air bags as early as this spring.
E-mail can be read only when a laptop is open, right? Microsoft's proposed solution is SideShow. Laptop makers are planning to design small screens on the outer body so you can read incoming messages or choose music without opening the case. SideShow will be supported by the Windows Vista operating system, launching this year.
The 2007 Mercedes-Benz S-Class has a radar-guided park-assist option too, as well as a "night view assist." By shining invisible headlight- mounted infrared beams up to 500 ft. ahead of the car, it can display a black-and-white nightscope view on the dashboard.
2007 S550 available this month; $85,400.
Some camcorders have ditched the tape, relying instead on internal memory. Others capture high-definition video for playback on big-screen TVs. Sanyo put both innovations into its Xacti HD1, which also features a next-generation organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display.
This month; $800.
Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard
Soft Hardware. You may have heard about the jacket with iPod controls stitched to the sleeve. Eleksen, the maker of "electroconductive" fabric products, now wants to introduce a qwerty keyboard that you can roll up and put in your pocket. The ElekTex keyboard will use Bluetooth technology to connect wirelessly to PDAs and smart phones.
June 2006; $150.
Fly coach, and the dream of watching movies on your laptop quickly fades, thanks to the reclining seat in front of you. Intel's new laptop design lets you pull the screen forward from behind the keyboard and even raise the screen to eye level. Elements of the design may appear this year in laptops priced at $1,100 and higher made by Intel partners.
Samsung's SGH-P300 is slimmer than Motorola's Razr. Its thickness is slightly less than 9 mm. It looks like a pocket calculator, but it's a tri-band world phone with a built-in MP3 player and 1.3-megapixel camera with video-recording capability.
Now in Europe, $600 to $700; coming soon to the U.S.
Robosapien maker WowWee Robotics teamed up with Philips to build the Smart Companion Operating Technology. SCOTY (pronounced Scotty) is a camera- and Wi-Fi—equipped butler who sits in your living room, obeying voice commands to play specific music, read new e-mail and even report intruders.
September 2006; $400.
Blue is cold, red is hot—any kid knows that. So Delta developed the Brizo bath faucet, which uses lighting to change the water color depending on the temperature; it prevents children and the elderly from accidental scalding. The electronic faucet can be turned off or on with a touch, or with a wave of the hand.
Available within two years; $300 to $500.
Biscuit-eating dummy tests crumbs
Experts have invented a mannequin with a motorised mouth to test the amount of crumbs biscuits produce.Staff at the Mcvitie's laboratory in High Wycombe, Bucks, designed the Crumb Test Dummy to test which baking techniques produce the most crumbs.
The motorised mannequin has plastic teeth and is designed to replicate human eating.
A Mcvities spokeswoman said the crumbs produced by a biscuit show if it has been cooked to perfection.
"Eating lots of biscuits is obviously an enjoyable prospect for most people but we haven't yet found a human who can test on this scale," Mcvitie's brand manager Liz Ashdown added.
"The Crumb Test Dummy has a never-ending appetite and doesn't need to stop for breath."
The motorised mannequin has plastic teeth and is designed to replicate human eating.
A Mcvities spokeswoman said the crumbs produced by a biscuit show if it has been cooked to perfection.
"Eating lots of biscuits is obviously an enjoyable prospect for most people but we haven't yet found a human who can test on this scale," Mcvitie's brand manager Liz Ashdown added.
"The Crumb Test Dummy has a never-ending appetite and doesn't need to stop for breath."
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