If you’ve ever been around an audiophile for more than five minutes, you know that they tend to be an intense, obsessive lot. Even more obsessive than the guy that spends tens of thousands of dollars on surround speakers, acoustic tile and amplifiers is the guy that tinkers his way to a speaker company specializing in a pair or two of half-million-dollar speakers. Looks aren’t of any essence at all, and fluid, harmonious sound is the only objective. In all cases, the desire for ultimate audio pushed these manufacturers to break out of the typical tall, rectangular wood box to develop something that looks straight out of a science fiction or horror movie.

Continue Reading

The Kinect has been used for some truly amazing things, from medicine to videoconferencing. But, surprisingly, it took until now for somebody to pair the camera good at detecting three dimensions with a printer capable of cranking out three dimensions.

But, it finally happened, and it happened in…Barcelona? For tourists?

Continue Reading

OK, so they’re useless and silly. That’s the entire point of a Rube Goldberg machine. They also let engineering students show off their prowess in a cheap and usually non-fatal way (a moment of silence for those who did not survive the tragic dihydrogen monoxide explosion at the 1995 Rube Goldberg Championships, please). And some students at Purdue have just creamed the world record with a machine that shows the entire course of human history, right up to the Apocalypse.

Continue Reading

Batteries: can’t live with them, can’t live without them. They pretty much run our modern world, but they take forever to charge, and sometimes don’t even discharge fast enough to power everything we need. Their efficiency is constantly improving, but with new plug-in hybrids and other uses, we need more efficiency, all the time.

And now we might have it thanks to…packing material?

Continue Reading

But wait, you say. We’ve had three-dimensional microscopy for years. I remember seeing images of that stuff in the science museum when I was a kid. And what does this have to do with making gadgets cheaper?

You’re right, we have had 3D microscopes for years…but they were huge and clunky. They involved either a bunch of lenses surrounding an object, or moving cameras to create the full image. The big deal with this lens is that it throws all that out the window.

And, in fact, it was designed to make your gadgets cheaper, partially by being cheap itself.

Continue Reading

Unless you happen to be a fetching pool boy checking alkalinity in the middle of a porno, cleaning a pool is really the dirty underside of pool ownership. Cooling down on a scorching day and playing nude pool volleyball with friends of the opposite sex may be great, but skimming dead bugs and fighting algae is all-out balls. I’d wager a bet that behind not having the money or space, pool maintenance racks as the main reason keeping the majority of the country from owning a pool.

Continue Reading

For the chronically overweight, the short trip from the living room couch to the refrigerator represents one of the last remaining forms of legitimate daily exercise. And now some designers have gone and thrown that right out the window.

This here is the Refrigerator 2 from R & R Associates, a cold box that integrates a 14.1-inch television right into your freezer door. The LCD television sports a resolution of 1280 x 760, works with either cable or satellite and is even Internet ready. It also has an FM radio and dual 2-watt speakers. Oh yeah–and it’s built into a refrigerator.

Continue Reading

You know that old, high-flow toilet that you’ve got sitting in your bathroom? Apparently, the thing isn’t only wasting water every time you drop a onesie or two-piece, it’s wasting electricity.

Tom Broadbent, a graduate of England’s De Montfort University in Leicester, points to this inefficiency with his new HighDro Power design. The device creates electricity from one of the most vile and useless phenomenons on Earth–toilet waste water. As the water comes pouring down through the pipes after a good newspaper read, it spins the turbine within the HighDro, working similar to any other water turbine. In other words, you’re poopin out wattage and green dollar bills, friend.

Continue Reading

The Vodka industry is really running out of tricks to get you to pay way to much for 750 ml of tasteless mixing alcohol. We already have vodkas derived from about every possible piece of starch imagineable and vodkas from big-mouthed celebrities like Donald Trump. What else can the industry do to get you to the bottom of their bottle today?

Continue Reading