As a child, learning to ride a bike vexed me to no end. While my friends zipped around the neighbourhood on two wheels, I plodded along on four, thanks to an embarrassing set of “training wheels”. Good news: They’re doomed.
How do you upgrade a tortoise? With wheels, of course! Say hello to Tonka the tortoise.
The idea behind these segmented, eight-part wheels is that your car can take a turn while maintaining speed and traction by having the wheels lean like the Tower of Pisa,
What is this? A clock? Steering wheel? The final, gruesome bout of sponsorship an F1 driver is subjected to before he dies? We’re so confused and oh so cold. [Yab Design via Nerd Approved]
Passing around the salt and pepper isn’t any kind of strain on our bodies, but what if you could roll it on the table instead of lifting it?
Scouring the recently-posted PopSci archives on Google Books, reader Wesley Treat has put together a collection documenting the magazine’s odd, decades-long obsession with the idea of a personal monowheel.
The Corvini C6W is a (crazy? brilliant?) 6-wheel Italian sports car that’s specifically not a Photoshop.
Is this tire really the “Holy Grail of Eco-Transportation,” as Treehugger believes? Maybe. Time will tell if the electric engine inside the Active Wheel from Michelin will catch on and further drive down the cost of electric vehicles. For now, let’s delve deep into this tire-motor combo, and you can decide for yourself if it has what it takes to kill the gas-guzzling combustion engine for good.
This 37-inch tire can take the explosion of an IED along with a few rounds of rife fire and still haul an armoured Humvee out of a battle at 90kph. Completely airless and supported by a honeycomb-inspired series of hexagons, the tire’s structure can distribute weight loads evenly while taunting the enemy that it doesn’t even require a hubcap (unlike Michelin’s Tweel). The tires are expected to teach the military by 2011 when they’re promised to carry comparable costs to current models. [CNET]
