According to legend, University of Tokyo professor Masayuki Nakao was bitten by a radioactive ramen bowl when he was a kid, which gave him the ability to spit 1-micron-wide bowls made out of silicon—full of dozens of 20-nanometer-think carbon noodles floating in an ethanol soup—at supersonic speeds. Or maybe he did this one with a metal particle beam to demo a new circuit manufacturing technology using carbon nanotubes. Whatever it is, they are low on sodium: two molecules per serving. [Pink Tentacle]
What do you do if you’ve got a surplus US Air Force helicopter turboshaft engine, and a jet boat hull? Stupid question: you do one hell of a modding job and bolt them together of course, like these nutcase guys have done. Their 23-foot aluminium white-water jet boat, dubbed Squirt 2, is powered by a 1,370 hp engine that generates about 166kg-m of torque. And there’s nothing much more to say, other than “bravo.” or possibly “boom!” [Hacked Gadgets]
Asustek has dropped some details on that Eee Desktop PC EP20 we’ve seen floating around. First off, it has a more catchy name—the Asus Eee Box.
Sure we’d all love to see the little bus-powered 2.5″ Iomega eGo drives hit 1TB, but that’s not happening today. Instead, Iomega is porting their sleek, shiny, colourful design to the 3.5″ realm, launching 1-terabyte Super eGo (get it?) drives in blue, red and black. For the time being, they’re only USB 2.0—no FireWire or eSATA options—you still need a power supply, and we’re gonna guess that they’re spinning at 5400rpm. The good news is that they’ll cost just US$270, not bad for a hefty TB.
OLPC has agreed to supply 65 thousand XO computers to the state of Caldas, Colombia, providing an injection of technology to a rural area of the country. The first 15,000 will be distributed throughout the most remote areas of the state by the end of 2008, while the remaining 50,000 will be offered in the capital, Manizales, and other remaining areas of the state by the end of 2009.
We’ve been talking about the upcoming Sony Ericsson Paris mobile phone for a while, but we’ve not had much to go on. But now this new promo vid confirms that it’ll have some kind of weather widget and also demos Google maps app in action, plus the (presumed) 5-megapixel camera. Also looks like there’s an orientation sensor in there. Oh, and it’ll make calls too. [Youtube]
This concept from designers Chromoly would be perfect if your boss is the pushy type, and you fancy unsettling them a bit: notice-board tacks shaped like Ninja throwing-stars. Just make sure you scream loudly and jam one in the wall near the door before they walk in, and voila: instant respect. Shame it’s just a concept: I’ve been practicing my shout already. [Designboom]
Maurin Donneaud has created this giant walk-on rug computer keyboard, going for stomp-sensitive design rather than touch. It’s a home-made affair, with foam separating the conducting-fabric contacts inside until you press down, and is powered by an Arduino board. So, while it won’t let you bash out tunes like Tom Hanks in Big it will let you stamp out emails to your pals— all that leaping around would probably be fairly good exercise. At last: a way to keep your fave Giz Editors in good shape. [Hacakaday]
In a breakthrough for future human prosthetic limbs, two monkeys at the University of Pittsburgh have successfully thought-operated a robot arm and used it to feed themselves for the first time. The macaques have electrodes implanted in their brains, monitoring about 100 cells, the signals from which drive the robot arm. The trained monkeys can now use the arm to grab food, even if it’s moved around, and often reach for more while still chewing on the first treat. They’d better not show them any cyborg smasher movies though: as the saying goes “monkey see… monkey do”, eh? [New Scientist]
