US ski resorts are now getting the Magnestick Safety System. Permanent electromagnets affixed to ski lift seats are switched on when a child, wearing a vest with a metallic plate, hops in. Voila! No slipping or sliding off the lift prematurely. More »
SSD, Smesh Smesh Dee. Here’s my visual tribute to magnetic tape, the storage medium that can be measured in MBytes, minutes and metres.
Touchscreens are great, but for many of us nothing beats old fashioned tactile controls. That seems to be one of the reasons why Lyndsay Williams of Girton Labs is in the process of developing SenseSurface–a system that allows users to stick working knobs to on-screen virtual controls. Apparently, the magnetic knobs can be placed anywhere on an LCD because the movement is picked up by a “unique sensing surface” attached behind the screen. It seems fairly unnecessary, but I’m sure that there are practical applications for this for music and graphics fields–or anyone who is tired of smudging up a touchscreen. A video of SenseSurface in action is available after the break.
The patent shown is for an aircraft to be powered off the ground using a plasma technology. Subrata Roy, a University of Florida aerospace engineer, proposes the existing technique of passing a magnetic wave through a conducting fluid can produce a force strong enough to lift an aircraft off the ground. Granted, the example in the patent is only 15 cm, and attempts by others haven’t gone particularly well. But with phrases like magnetohydrodynamics being thrown around, I keep flashing back to the space travel scene in Contact and getting excited. Subrata Roy must be a poet. [WIPO via Ubergizmo]
We all know the hassle of digging into a pocket to twiddle the controls on our MP3 players, but until smart clothing becomes mainstream we’re stuck with it. Unless someone takes this magnetic control concept and manufactures it for real, that is. The Pocket Pal is simple: the control stays outside, but is magnetically fixed to the body, which sits inside your pants pocket. Twiddling the control is easy, and would let you adjust volume or skip songs. I’m not sure what’ll happen if you lose the knob—would any magnet/iron object do?—but I like the lateral thinking here. [Inventables via Gizmowatch]
Rubik’s Cubes are nice if you actually want to think, but how about for those times when you’re just sitting there and you want something to fiddle with? The Neocube has 216 spherical neodymium magnets that connect and make a cube, a sphere, or any other obscene shape that springs to mind. Show me a man who doesn’t like playing with magnets and I’ll show you a man I don’t much care for. All yours for just US$34.95. Bonus video after the jump.
Those of you who are familiar with Arthur C. Clarke’s 1955 novel Earthlight may recognise a new weapon from DARPA dubbed the Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition (MAHEM). In the novel, a commander unleashes “The Stiletto”—a weapon consisting of a jet of molten metal hurled through space by an electro-magnet. The MAHEM concept works in much the same way, using a magnetic field to propel a chunk of molten metal that will morph into an aerodynamic slug in flight.
Straight out from Alice’s Wonderland, this magnetic table and dinnerware are designed with four objectives: 1) store your plates, cups and cutlery, upside down, under the table, 2) arrange them neatly on top, 3) erase the data from any hard drive that comes near, and 4) cause head and eye injuries to kids and pets. Or drive them mad. And yet, we still want it. More pics after the jump.
So at first glance what we have here looks like a well designed four-port USB hub, with a handy top-placed port for convenient thumb-drive plugging. It’s not multicoloured, it doesn’t have a photo frame built in, it doesn’t transform. It’s just a plain old hub. With magnetic mounting. Sorry, what? Magnetic mounting? So someone can stick it to their PC case? With magnets? Now, call me silly but that sounds a teeny bit daft. No? Someone might mess up their data with it. It costs US$15 from gadget4all. Update: So, it’s supposed to be quite hard to damage data on a hard drive like this. Doesn’t mean I haven’t done it though. [Gadget4all via Pocket Lint]
