By CrunchGear, on 2009.12.26, 02:34.21 pm
Let’s just start with the lede:
Inventor Le Trung spent Christmas Day with the most important woman in his life – his robot Aiko.
The science genius enjoyed a festive dinner with his mum, dad and his £30,000 fembot which he designed and built by hand.
Le, 34, from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, even bought gifts for his dream girl, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese, helped cook the turkey and hang up decorations.
Yep. You read that right. Either the Daily Mail is having a larf or this is the craziest thing I’ve seen in all my years as someone who has not had sex with (presumably ambulatory) robots.
Basically Mr. Trung built his own fembot and basically dotes on it. He had a hear attack because he spent so much time working on it. It knows when it’s being tickled. Sadly, we can’t tell if our leg is being pulled.
[Lou, vacuum!]
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.25, 02:30.33 pm
It’s expected that the European Commission will pass legislation that will require manufacturers to include a noise limiter on portable media players. This is being done, of course, because listening to said devices at extraordinarily loud volume levels is quite dangerous; up to 10 percent of users are in danger totally destroying their hearing by keeping the players on too loud.
The limit—and all of this is set to go down next week, so get your complaining in now if you’re against the idea—will be set to 80 decibels.
Some players, says the Daily Mail, can output sound up to 120 decibels, which is about the same intensity as the sound of a jet engine taking off. You don’t want to be exposed to that for any length of time.
Of course, there will always be the “I don’t want Brussels telling me what to do” crowd, but look at it like this: yes, I’m sure that within 8.2 seconds of the limiter being put into place someone will come out with a hack or software override. The point is, how many people are going to go out of their way to implement the work-around?
I find it hard to believe that 80 decibels isn’t loud enough for the average person. Maybe some higher end headphones would do the trick, that way you don’t have to blast your music just to be able to hear it on the subway?
Flickr
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.18, 11:00.00 am
 UK-based Lok8u (Get it? Locate you?) is a GPS-enabled wristwatch meant to be worn by children. The watch also features a built-in cell signal, too, which enables location information to be relayed rapidly to parents while waiting for the GPS chip to get its bearings or when there’s no line-of-sight to GPS satellites.
It appears that you can order it online from the UK right now, and the company has an office in New Jersey and a US sales e-mail address on its web site.
The device itself costs £149.99 ($245) plus a required 18-month cellular plan for text alerts and location services ranging from £4.99 ($8.15) to £19.99 ($32.65) per month depending on the number of automatic text alerts you want sent to you.
Location information is available using included mapping software or you can use your own cell phone to send out a text message containing a special code as well. If the watch is removed from your child’s wrist, a text message and e-mail alert are immediately sent to you. You can also set up a “Safe Zone” for your child – basically a neighborhood perimeter that, when crossed, will send you alerts.
Num8 – The world’s first GPS locator that locates your child [Lok8u via Daily Mail]
By CrunchGear, on 2009.09.09, 02:30.19 pm
While the developed nations of the world spend huge amounts of money trying to eek out just a little more efficiency from traditional solar panels made from silicon, an industrious young lad from Nepal has figured out how to use human hair to get 9V of electricity from the sun. The fine articles are a little light (ha!) on the science, but even if there’s some hyperbole in these reports you’ve got to admit that it’s still wicked cool to use human hair to convert solar rays into electricity.
Milan Karki has been on a quest to find reliable, renewable energy for his little village for some time. When he realized that Melanin, the pigment in hair that produces color, is a conductor of electricity he knew he was on to something.
‘First I wanted to provide electricity for my home, then my village. Now I am thinking for the whole world,’ said Milan, who attends school in the capital, Kathmandu.
Solar power via human hair is not only remarkably cheap, it’s also something that could be field serviced by nearly anyone, which I think is the real take-away from this story. It’s one thing to install a solar power solution, but it’s another to maintain it over the long haul. If villagers in Nepal can service these things themselves, look out world!
Via Daily Mail, by way of Dvorak.
By CrunchGear, on 2009.08.26, 09:20.01 am
Normally, you probably wouldn’t consider drinking your own shower water after you had used it, but throw a couple of plants in there and you may well reconsider. Or, perhaps you’ll react like the Drudge-ushered Daily Mail commenters and say stuff like “WHAT IS THIS GARBAGE, I EARN THE RIGHT TO WASTE WATER AND I’LL BE DAMNED IF SOME EGGHEAD SCIENTIST SAYS OTHERWISE.”
The idea really isn’t all that novel. Strange in a domestic setting, perhaps, but nothing you wouldn’t find in nature. As the shower water collects on the bottom of the tub, it’s run through a series of filters and chemical-soaking plants. After getting a nice cleaning from the plants, the water goes underneath the tub and into further network of filters. When it’s all said and done, the water leaves the system perfectly drinkable.
The invention hasn’t been prototyped yet, and exists only as these fancy drawings. So far, at least.
And readers of a certain age may recall the wetlands episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, where he describes how wetlands are nature’s coffee filters. Keep in mind the show is designed for elementary school kids, so the terminology is somewhat simplified.
Thanks to YouTube, I’ve embedded that very episode here for your viewing pleasure. It’s broken into three parts, but this is only part one; interested parties can find the remaining parts on YouTube proper.
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Feel free to drink your shower water, kids
Normally, you probably wouldn’t consider drinking your own shower water after you had used it, but throw a couple of plants in there and you may well reconsider. Or, perhaps you’ll react like the Drudge-ushered Daily Mail commenters and say stuff like “WHAT IS THIS GARBAGE, I EARN THE RIGHT TO WASTE WATER AND I’LL BE DAMNED IF SOME EGGHEAD SCIENTIST SAYS OTHERWISE.”
The idea really isn’t all that novel. Strange in a domestic setting, perhaps, but nothing you wouldn’t find in nature. As the shower water collects on the bottom of the tub, it’s run through a series of filters and chemical-soaking plants. After getting a nice cleaning from the plants, the water goes underneath the tub and into further network of filters. When it’s all said and done, the water leaves the system perfectly drinkable.
The invention hasn’t been prototyped yet, and exists only as these fancy drawings. So far, at least.
And readers of a certain age may recall the wetlands episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, where he describes how wetlands are nature’s coffee filters. Keep in mind the show is designed for elementary school kids, so the terminology is somewhat simplified.
Thanks to YouTube, I’ve embedded that very episode here for your viewing pleasure. It’s broken into three parts, but this is only part one; interested parties can find the remaining parts on YouTube proper.