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What All Glasses Will Look Like in 2020
Posted by Mark Wilson at 1:00 AM on September 26, 2008
The latest in designer eyewear, these just-announced, newly-patented "Avant-garde Frames" reduce the strain of glasses that generally pinch your nose and weigh down your ears. By shifting the support to a headband-like contraption, the glasses can hang over your eyes without imposing upon delicate surround tissue or muscles—especially important while jogging. They may look funny to you now, but we're pretty sure headphones looked silly once upon a time, too. Inventor Huang Mei only requires someone to purchase his patents to roll these babies into mass production.
It's one thing to tinker in your garage to restore that old gas-guzzling muscle car that you think will get you some action. It's something entirely different to invent an electricity-generating wind turbine out of scrap parts that could revolutionise personal power in developing nations, especially if you're in college. Max Robinson has done just that, designing a turbine out of spare parts that costs less than US$40 to build out of readily available parts and can power a home's lighting for up to two and a half days or a radio for over a day. No word on how long an OLPC would last. [
Well, here's something you don't expect to see in the listing for a house on a real estate website: a toilet equipped with a pedal-powered contraption that drags toilet paper across your filthy bits, allowing you to wipe hands free. And, one assumes, leaving a train of vile used TP behind your toilet.
IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, are a sad fact of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you'll see the influence of these deadly weapons in this list of the US Army's top inventions for 2007. Every year the Army selects the top refinements, outright new inventions, or streamlined weaponry, and pumps out a list. This year's list features several new types of Humvee armour, GPS-guided artillery rounds, and a wheeled contraption for vehicles called SPARK (above), which sniffs out IEDs before they have a chance to do any damage.
Ruth Amos, an 18-year-old student from the UK, has come up with a simple and ingenious device for helping the elderly hobble their way up stairs with as little chance of hip-breakage as possible. Dubbed the StairSteady, it's essentially a bar that one can hold onto as they walk up the stairs, moving up or down with them while they move and keeping them steady. It's a bit pricey at US$642 due to the absolutely worthless US dollar, but that's a lot cheaper than a hip replacement. Kudos, Ruth. [
Malcolm Gladwell (smart guy, puffy hair) has a feature in this week's
Seriously, how is it possible that the wearable chair isn't the hottest accessory around today when it was patented 30 whole years ago? Look at it! You strap it to the backs of your legs and you can just sit back and rest easy whenever you want! I wouldn't have to submit to the cruel tyranny of standing under my own volition any longer! It'd be perfect for concerts, the subway or the unemployment line, where you'd presumably run into the inventor of these things, Darcy Robert Bonner. Now that this thing has been rediscovered after being lost for so long, it's time to make the dream a reality. [
Attention, lazy, lazy people! Say hello to Selfy the Easy Bed. Yes, that's the name of the product. It's a bed that makes itself in the morning, using a couple of rails that hold onto the sheets to lift and tuck everything in, giving you a neat bed to crawl into at the end of the day. Sure, it was invented for the sick and infirm, but I think your laziness could qualify as a sickness if you're really looking to justify this thing. Also, did I mention it's called Selfy the Easy Bed? [
Apart from bringing us laws, wars, peace, hanging chads, lobbies, sex scandals, First Ladies and Rough Riders, there have been Presidents and Founding Fathers who have brought us all kinds of gadgets and inventions. Jump to see the best tech that the fearless leaders of the free World had to offer us.
