Dominic Harris of Cinimod Studio, who recently brought you the hypnotising Illuminating Table, has just produced a new artwork that’s even more startling. Particularly startling if you were walking the streets of Gdansk last Friday with a bit too much goldwasser swirling inside you: it’s a huge, flashing, LED-lit UFO. And it flies. Ok… it’s slung 160 feet beneath a Mil Mi2 helicopter, but that doesn’t detract from a clever piece of flying art. Check out the video below the gallery to see it in action. Updated.
How do you read three lengthy reviews at the same time, really really fast? You jump to our review matrix of the iPhone 3G, first judged exclusively by the Three Amigos of Appledom: Ed Baig of USA Today, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and David Pogue of the New York Times.
newVideoPlayer("iphoneinterview_gizmodo.flv", 520, 410,""); Apparently life in New Zealand must be really tough, with all those orcs, goblins, and trolls trying to cut your head off, and steal your powerful jewellery. That’s what it seems from listening to this radio interview with the man who may be the first guy on Earth to buy an iPhone 3G: according to him, the whole getting an iPhone 3G thing is a result of a bet with his friends about surviving for three days in the streets of Auckland with no more help than the Yellow Pages. Hint for other iPhone 3G campers around the world: call a Chinese masseuse and ask for the special. [Thanks Brett -- I'm not joking, the name of the tipster is Brett]
We’ve all seen that crazy footage from the 60s where the military is testing out various flying saucer prototypes–some which crash, some which can hover a whole three feet in the air–but now someone has actually developed a potentially viable flying saucer. And it uses plasma, not giant fans.
Over at Boy Genius Report they’re reporting that an insider has labelled the BlackBerry Thunder “in no way shape or form market-ready.” Apparently typing on the keyboard is incredibly annoying and the screen ripples at a slight touch. That’s contrary to what you’d hope after yesterday’s news, and it actually gets worse. Updated: Crackberry responds to rumour, and confirms multitouch.
It’s clearly “Star Trek Comes Nearly True” time, first with the life-signs detector, and now a tiny NMR machine that’s effectively v1.0 of the medical tricorder. Scientists at Harvard Medical School have come up with a neat way to coat bacteria and viruses with nanoparticles, and have simultaneously shrunk all the detector electronics for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy into a 2mm-square chip. Their prototype device uses a microfluidics network and eight of these chips inside magnetic coils to detect specific nanoparticles: future versions will use more and be portable. It’s apparently 800 times more sensitive than standard NMR machines, and is able to detect just 10 bacteria in a single sample. Beep Beep. [New Scientist]
Here’s a close-up look into the Tornado Intercept Vehicle, a heavily-armoured, modified Ford F-450 that was used in the famous Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers. With its plates, small windows and top turret, it looks like a cross between a B-17 Flying Fortress, a Panzer tank and a Mad Max truck. The new version of the Interceptor, however, looks like it’s out of a Batman movie:
Some guys over at Metacafe have posted this video of possibly the best USB gizmo ever. It’s a DIY desktop USB popcorn maker. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? It uses a minimum of parts, and “high intensity heater lights” driven only by the power from your PC. I was sceptical at first (and still am) but the electronics kind of make sense, and the video is convincing. If you’re a bored cubicle-monkey and fancy trying it out for yourself, the video shows you how… and you could then cheer up those work days with a snack of DIY popcorn. What’s your take, guys? Real or not? [Metacafe via Crunchgear]
We mentioned it back in February, and Samsung has now come good with its promise, announcing today that it’s started mass-production of 128GB SSDs. They’re of the slightly slower but cheaper multi-level cell technology, with a read speed of 90MBps and write speed of 70MBps. And Samsung claims they’ll have a life span around “20 times longer than the generally accepted 4-5 year life span of a notebook PC hard drive.” It’ll be interesting to see what this move does to the price of SSDs, particularly now that we like them again. Press release below.
If you weren’t too keen on Walt’s review of the iPhone 3G, Dan Warne over at APC has gone and written his own review – and it takes an Australian viewpoint as well. How he got his hands on an iPhone, I have no idea. But I commend him for the effort – it’s a pretty solid review. If you’re wondering what he thinks of it… well, hit the link. I’m not going to rewrite it for you.
