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God is trying to send Rhys Millen a message: quit trying to backflip a truck, you'll hurt yourself. The question is how many times it will it take for him to receive it.
If you're a longtime Giz reader, you may remember that on last New Years Eve, Rhys Millen was supposed to perform a backflip in a truck on live TV. One problem: he broke a bunch of his vertebrae during a practice run and had to cancel. Well, he's gonna give it another go this year, and to get you all amped up for it, Red Bull has released the video of his crash. Want to see a dude do half a backflip in a pickup truck? Follow me, ye of strong stomachs.
Hello there, I'm in Tokyo for a few weeks. The remnants of the summer heat linger like a mosquito; even as it rains you can feel. My first morning here, a 4.8 earthquake rumbled through the city. Judging from the poise Lisa's family displayed, Japan's citizens are far better at responding to earthquakes than even Californians. Part of that comes from the common frequency of quakes in the region, but I'd also like to give credit to the good old Earthquake simulation truck, pictured in the video above. Advanced technology, indeed.
Gearheads at Carnegie Mellon University are partnering up with tractor-maker Caterpillar to build the world's largest robotic dump truck, a 700-tonne ground mover capable of hauling 240 tonnes of earth. In case you can't wrap your head around that amount, that's like 33 African bull elephants worth of dirt.
It's not what I would call a Bond-calibre flipping licence plate, but the system that a Queens truck driver hooked up in his rig is chock-full of ghetto ingenuity. Apparently, Orlando Payano mounted his licence plate on a hinged piece of metal then ran an attached cable through his cigarette lighter. When he went through a toll booth, all he had to do is pull the cord and abracadabra! No licence plate caught on camera.
Hey dudebro, looking to take a bro-dtrip but afraid you'll make the ultimate braux-pas: not bringing enough beer and having a totally whack sound system? Chill out man, Party-A-Cargo's got your back with its tow hitch mounted kegerator. The Party-A-Cargo Ultimate can store up to 160 glasses of beer and contains a jockey box with two 15cm by 22cm speakers and a 25cm subwoofer.
PopSci got their hands on this 2.5-ton home-built frogtruck, a 260-horsepower treaded monster which is the first-ever amphibious vehicle that can fully retract its drive assembly. The path for the perfect amphibian truck was as hard as the ones this thing can now travel through at 50kph: the mud flats, bogs, ice fields, snow slopes, rivers and lakes of the Alaskan tundra.
Terry Kenney's Dragon Power Station prototype works by harnessing the kinetic energy of trucks passing over plates buried in the road and turning that energy into electricity. The system he's got set up now in the Port of Oakland, with 2,500 trucks passing over it in a day, is enough to power 1,750 homes. It's a very interesting concept that can be extended to busier streets, harnessing a little bit of the energy that would otherwise be lost.
At 10.45 EST this morning, the Jules Verne docked at the International Space Station, with a 7,500-pound cargo containing equipment, supplies, water, food and gases—and no human driver. The AI-assisted landing of the European space truck after a 26-day journey was described as "text-book" and here it is, courtesy of NASA TV. While the Jules-ISS hook-up is not the first unmanned docking, anything with an automated system that can track down an object that is moving at 27,00 kilometres per hour and attach itself with just a 2-centimeter leeway, is pretty damn awesome in Giz's book. [NASA]
Researchers at New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute believe that truckers can put down the caffeine and NoDoze in favour of blue LED light to keep them awake on long rides. Apparently, certain wavelengths of blue LED light can trick the brain into thinking it is daytime—thereby increasing alertness. Possible applications of the technology include bathing the entire truck cabin in light, installing the LEDs in truck stops for quick "light showers" and blue light goggles. Yeah, I'm sure that will go over well with rugged trucker types. [New Scientist via Daily Tech via Tech Digest]
At 10.45 EST this morning, the 