Author Archive

Driving Both directions?

Found these photos of a double ended Mini Cooper that BMW presented at a car show in Germany. It can apparently be driven from direction. Just think of the stares you would get while driving this car down the road. For that matter, forget backing out of parking spaces. Just pull in one direction, and [ READ MORE ]

Self healing walls

The University of Leeds’ NanoManufacturing Institute is currently building a proof of concept house in the Greek mountains. The Greek mountains are prone to frequent minor earthquakes. The plan is to build a house that will automatically heal cracks in the walls. The walls will contain nano particles that will liquefy under pressure, flow into [ READ MORE ]

EMI launches DRM free downloads in Itunes

This is all over the tech sites, so you may have already heard, but I thought I would post anyway because it’s such big news. EMI has announced that it will be offering its music downloads without DRM for sale on Itunes. This is a big step for the music industry, and one that is [ READ MORE ]

Museum Plagiarius: A museum of copied products

On the plagiarism note, I found this rather cool looking museum set up to show off some of the more blatant knockoffs of brand name products. In some cases even the packaging and the boxes the item was sold in were ripped off. I’m all for competition in the market place, but blatantly copying a [ READ MORE ]

Students Suing anti Plagiarism service TurnItIn

Two students from McLean High School in Virginia are suing the Anti-plagiarism service Turnitin for copyright violations. Turnitin is a company that provides teachers with an easy way to catch students who have plagiarized their papers. It actively crawls the internet archiving and categorizing material posted on websites. When a teacher or student submits a [ READ MORE ]

Google Search Trends

Last year I turned on Google’s search history feature for my account. basically what happens is that Google keeps a record of all searches you do while logged into your account. It also keeps links attached to your search record of any site you went to as a result of the search. This is really [ READ MORE ]

Space junk just misses airliner

A Russian satellite came down in the pacific ocean near New Zealand Tuesday night and narrowly missed an airliner that was flying from Santiago, Chile to Auckland, New Zealand. The Russian space agency had warned New Zealand and surrounding areas that the satellite was coming down, but it wasn’t supposed to be coming down quite [ READ MORE ]

Color Night Vision goggles

A company called Tenebraex has come up with a pair of night vision goggles that can create a color image rather than the traditional green monochromatic view of night vision goggles. The goggles are completely mechanical with no computer parts. So there is no heavy power pack required. The color view does require some light. [ READ MORE ]

High School kid creates Nuclear Fusion at home

Found this story about a High School senior that created nuclear fusion in his home. it seems that he bought all the parts needed from his local Home Depot and Ebay. This is actually a bit scary. Just think, your neighbor might be building a fusion reactor in his basement next door. Check out the [ READ MORE ]

Sugar powered batteries

Researchers at Saint Louis University in Missouri have come up with a fuel cell that can run on nearly any sugar source. It converts the sugar into electricity and potentially can create power sources that are much smaller than current lithium batteries. Converting sugar into power is not a new concept. Several years ago some [ READ MORE ]