Vancouver Moose

FLYING CARS, airbags for pedestrians, high tech speed bump, and a new toy to maim yourself

High-tech Speed Bump Detects Damage To Army Vehicles:

Study Says Minicar Buyers Sacrifice Safety:

“Consumers who buy minicars to economize on fuel are making a big tradeoff when it comes to safety in collisions, according to an insurance group that slammed three minimodels into midsize ones in tests”.

NC’s Xcite Bike Blurs Line between Motorcycle and Skateboard:

“It seems like humans are always looking for a new and exciting way to maim themselves. We always feel the need to push our limits to the extreme and completely blow convention right out of the water. It was from this attitude that the Xcite Bike was born”.

Parajet Skycar Gears Up for Production:

At the beginning of the year, the Parajet Skycar made a record breaking journey from London, England to Timbuktu in Africa. Since then, Parajet International has been working hard to find another company to help the produce their little piece of automotive goodness. Now, they have finally been able to enlist the help of Rage Motorsports to produce the Skycar and bringing it to the public.

Hood Mounted Air Bag Could Provide Much Needed Protection for Pedestrians:

When the airbag is deployed, it will cover several inches across the bottom of the windshield as well as providing more coverage on both of the A-pillars. These areas have been identified as the most likely place to be impacted during a pedestrian/vehicle collision and it is estimated that this system could reduce serious injuries by about 50%.

Previous Tech Talk:

• Cloak of INVISIBILITY, Emergency Vending Machines, Bendable Concrete, and Nuking your Cell Phone
• Colbert’s consolation prize, NASA nanosatellite, and Toronto student’s incredible space colony
• Twittering using MIND CONTROL, Chip speed breakthrough, Conficker eye chart, hacking Macs, keyboard shortcut database, and what to do with a mini-server

Cloak of INVISIBILITY, Emergency Vending Machines, Bendable Concrete, and Nuking your Cell Phone

Vending Machines in Japan Offer Free Drinks in Case of Emergency:

Major earthquake, flood, storm or other natural disaster in your area? Out of water and the roads are blocked? Japan’s famous vending machines have got you covered. Following a mutually beneficial agreement between Japanese vending machine companies and local municipalities, specially marked beverage vending machines that dispense drinks for free have been set up in public areas.

Bendable Concrete from University of Michigan:

Traditional concrete is brittle and is easily fractured during an earthquake or by overuse.

By contrast, the new concrete composite can bend into a U-shape without breaking. When strained, the material forms hairline cracks, which auto-seal after a few days of light rain. Dry material exposed by the cracks reacts with rainwater and carbon dioxide in the air to form “scars” of calcium carbonate, a strong compound found naturally in seashells, said study co-author Victor Li of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

The flexible material is just as strong after it heals.

Berkeley – ‘Invisibility Cloak’ Successfully Hides Objects Placed Under It:

A team led by Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has created a “carpet cloak” from nanostructured silicon that conceals the presence of objects placed under it from optical detection. While the carpet itself can still be seen, the bulge of the object underneath it disappears from view. Shining a beam of light on the bulge shows a reflection identical to that of a beam reflected from a flat surface, meaning the object itself has essentially been rendered invisible.

Microwaving a cellphone is surprisingly cool:

Previous Tech Talk:

• Colbert’s consolation prize, NASA nanosatellite, and Toronto student’s incredible space colony
• Twittering using MIND CONTROL, Chip speed breakthrough, Conficker eye chart, hacking Macs, keyboard shortcut database, and what to do with a mini-server
• Robot Children, Robot Researchers, Robot Pirate Deterrent, Robot Mind Readers!

Colbert’s consolation prize, NASA nanosatellite, and Toronto student’s awesome space colony

Brazil crackdown on sat-hackers bouncing ham signals off US military satellites:

“Brazilian radio-cops are handing out $20,000 fines to satellite hackers who bounce their ham signals off FLTSATCOM — an array of disused US military satellites — using them as range-extenders for purposes as diverse as trucker-chatter to avoiding the logging cops in illegal Amazon logging operations:”

20 Things You Didn’t Know About Living In Space:

“Exploding boobs, toilet target practice, the second birth…”

10 things you don’t know about black holes:

“Ah, black holes. The ultimate shiver-inducer of the cosmos, out-jawing sharks, out-ooking spiders, out-scaring… um, something scary. But we’re fascinated by ‘em, have no doubt – even if we don’t understand a whole lot about them”.

10 things you don’t know about the Milky Way Galaxy:

So you’ve lived here all your life – in fact, everyone has – but what do you really know about the Milky Way galaxy? Sure, you know it’s a spiral, and it’s 100,000 light years across. And of course, BABloggees are smarter, more well-read, and better looking than the average population, but be honest: do you know all ten of these things? Really?

Liar.

Democracy be Damned: NASA Nixed “Colbert” ISS Node:

Colbert, we have a problem

“NASA has bucked the will of the people and named the International Space Station’s next module “Tranquility” instead of the rightful winner of the online voting contest, ‘Colbert’ (after the comedian Stephen Colbert)”.

But Colbert didn’t walk away empty handed.

Astronaut Sunita Williams, who ran the first marathon in space two years ago, announced on his show on Tuesday that Colbert would get something in the new node named for him – and it’s not the toilet, as had been rumoured. Williams said his name would grace the node’s treadmill, due to launch in August. The exercise equipment will be called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill.

NASA Nanosatellite To Study Antifungal Drug Effectiveness In Space:

PharmaSat weighs approximately 10 pounds. It contains a controlled environment micro-laboratory packed with sensors and optical systems that can detect the growth, density and health of yeast cells and transmit that data to scientists for analysis on Earth. PharmaSat also will monitor the levels of pressure, temperature and acceleration the yeast and the satellite experience while circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. Scientists will study how the yeast responds during and after an antifungal treatment is administered at three distinct dosage levels to learn more about drug action in space, the satellite’s primary goal.

Toronto student’s space colony design wins NASA contest:

Yam’s description of the settlement runs 92 pages and includes detailed drawings using the free downloadable software Google SketchUp.

And it leaves no stone unturned, covering everything from emergency procedures to which foods will be grown on the station, based on their nutrient content.

Yam’s plan calls for 15 years of planning followed by 12 years of construction and another three years to make the settlement habitable. His estimated cost to build the station is $563 billion US.

The project even delves into how the society on the station would work and borrows heavily from Canadian policies, including adopting a tax regime based on the Canadian income tax system and deciding who lives on the station based a point system modeled on Canada’s immigration policy.

Previous Tech Talk:

• Twittering using MIND CONTROL, Chip speed breakthrough, Conficker eye chart, hacking Macs, keyboard shortcut database, and what to do with a mini-server
• Robot Children, Robot Researchers, Robot Pirate Deterrent, Robot Mind Readers!
• Thirty Meter Telescope, Cyberspies, UN Digital Library, New Vehicle from Segway, and The Onion previews a new Video Game

Twittering using MIND CONTROL, Chip speed breakthrough, Conficker eye chart, hacking Macs, keyboard shortcut database, and what to do with a mini-server

Top 15 Ways to Extend Your Laptop?s Battery Life:

Conficker Eye Chart: How it works:

“Many readers have been wondering what the easiest way is to determine whether their computer has been infected with the Conficker worm. Previously I’ve pointed them to this Conficker Eye Chart — and that recommendation still holds — but now I want to respond to further questions about how it works.”

Experts: Malicious program targets Macs:

Mac computers are known for their near-immunity to malicious computer programs that plague PCs.

But that may be changing somewhat, according to computer security researchers. It seems that as sleek Mac computers become more popular, they’re also more sought-after targets for the authors of harmful programs.

Hackers Weigh In: 8 Big Things to Do with a Mini Server:

Tiny computers are everywhere—our cell phones, handheld gaming devices and set-top boxes, to name a few—so it should be no surprise that Marvell Technology in Santa Clara, Calif., one of the companies that makes the chips that go into such devices, managed to cram an entire home server into the SheevaPlug, a two-inch by four-inch (five- by 10-centimeter) box that plugs into any wall outlet and is almost indistinguishable from an oversize power supply.

Major Step Toward Faster Chips Achieved:

A team of scientists and engineers from Stanford, the University of Florida and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the first to create one of two basic types of semiconductors using an exotic, new, one-atom-thick material called graphene. The findings could help open the door to computer chips that are not only smaller and hold more memory — but are also more adept at uploading large files, downloading movies, and other data- and communication-intensive tasks.

Learn Better Keyboard Shortcuts at ShortcutWorld.com:

ShortcutWorld is aiming to make a comprehensive repository of lists that will have every keyboard shortcut for any given program. Already they have a pretty good list of programs going. Currently ShortcutWorld offers complete lists on Firefox, Winamp, Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Fireworks, XP, Google Chrome, CS4, and Outlook. That’s a pretty good start!

U of Wisconsin – Twitter Telepathy: Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets:

“Life-Altering Gadget of the Day: At the University of Wisconsin’s Neural Interfaces lab they’re using BCI2000, brain-computer interface software designed by neural injury specialist Gerwin Schalk, to convert thoughts into tweets”.

Previous Tech Talk:

• Robot Children, Robot Researchers, Robot Pirate Deterrent, Robot Mind Readers!
• Thirty Meter Telescope, Cyberspies, UN Digital Library, New Vehicle from Segway, and The Onion previews a new Video Game
• ‘Vampire Batteries’ in BC, Italian predicted earthquake, and liquid mercury