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Unbelievably enough, researchers in California have developed an artificial muscle that can expand more than 200% when electricity is applied to it. By using carbon nanotubes, they have added a level of durability that can not be matched by current artificial muscle materials. If an area of the nanotube fails, the region around it becomes…
Billy Chasen, the artist who encased a still-working, exploded iPod in resin, put a new piece up at the American Heart Association’s 2008 Heart of New York Gala at the classy Waldorf Astoria hotel in NYC. Watch as a heart sprays blood all over the inside of a glass cube! Be made curious by the…
Here’s an unexpected patent from Apple: a system for projecting 3D images. Sure, we’ve seen 3D panels from Sharp and 3D projectors that require glasses, but this is a projector setup that requires no glasses. And this makes sense for Apple why? https://gizmodo.com/sharp-ll-151-3d-reviewed-28519 Really, it makes zero sense for any consumer products. Apple doesn’t sell…
Beleaguered smartphone maker Palm lost $31.5 million this quarter, despite the Centro’s success—no surprise, given that their living-in-the-past handsets are losing marketshare, not to mention the whole deader-than-dead Foleo. [NYT] https://gizmodo.com/iphone-greedily-eats-north-american-market-share-334516
If you were claustrophobic and sitting in a room filled with all of the competitors trying to step to Asustek’s Eee PC—you would be freaking out right now. This time, the wannable comes in the form of the G10IL PC from Taiwanese manufactuerer Elitegroup Computer Systems. Users can expect Intel’s new Atom processors, an 8.9…
Breville is selling this $130 high tech toaster. For that price, you get a stainless steel case, an LED indicator and slider that is as smooth as a DJ mixer’s cross fader, motorized lifts and clamps that are capable of 7 pounds of lift (yes), and electrical elements that are rated to last 90 years.…
We just got the Olympus E-420, and before we shoot a million test shots (rough approximation), we thought we’d take a look at it’s biggest claim to fame: it’s the smallest and lightest DSLR around. Here you see it with the relatively handy and lightweight Nikon D40x, which in body is almost totally identical to…
The problem with cool strap-on heads-up displays a few lucky soldiers get to use on the battlefield today is that they’re bulky affairs that make them look like half-assed cyborgs. Plus, the interface is limited. The Pentagon wants to develop contact lenses that’ll put “first-person-shooter-type video game” graphics on top the soldiers’ vision. Yes, they…
Games, Anime, and all things nerdy. Big Pirates fan as well.
Games, Anime, and all things nerdy. Big pirates fan as well.
Buy.com has the 500GB Western Digital Elements external hard drive for $100 shipped, marked down from $140. (Around the web, this drive sells for $115-$140.) Now that Time Machine is compatible with any hard drive networked to an Airport Extreme, some of you might be interested in picking up something. This is the best deal…
Once again we dip into the bin of impressive but implausible concepts with this Tancher Transformer phone design from Shkinder Maxim. The device can be configured in countless ways to act as a multimedia player and projector with support for holographic image projection and 3-D scanning. If that wasn’t outrageous enough, there are also ideas…
I’ve actually been running Firefox 3 since it hit beta, and have been pushing it on people since beta 2, when the sweet new address bar hit. But Mozilla says that it’s now is ready for the ungeeky plebes to climb aboard, at beta number four. Previously, they considered the ride potentially too bumpy for…
Just as we had suspected all along, Verizon has officially won the open access C block of the 700MHz spectrum. AT&T walked away with a nice-sized chunk, too—227 regional licenses that’ll nicely patch up the holes not covered by the huge swath they bought from Aloha Partners last year. The 700MHz band is spectacularly suited…
Approved?? nevermind, I guess my comments didn’t make the cut. Oh well. thanks anyway jan
Forget fridge magnet poetry— you know you only used it to make up smutty phrases anyway—stick these fridge leaves on that boring metal door, and you’d have your own indoor forest. Granted it would be much more “lovely” if it was made of real leaves not plastic ones, but I reckon they’ve got a charm…
Pocket Shock-It is a portable pub-sized version of one of our old favorites. It emits a “juddering jolt of pure electrical power,” with games inspired by the deadliest of cinematic contrivances, but without all them bullets. https://gizmodo.com/shock-roulette-zap-your-friends-and-neighbors-173492 In “Lightning Reaction,” four people grab hold as the thing powers up. Everyone watches each other like they…
After over a year of waiting, you finally got that packet o’ bits known as Windows Vista SP1. We’re gonna guess you downloaded it almost immediately—that’s what we did. So, tell us how about it. Share your experiences, good or bad, below. But first… Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an…
Another day, another patent lawsuit for Apple. This time they’re being sued by the firm Mirror Worlds. The patents at issue deal with a “document stream operating system,” which means files are stored in a chronologically ordered stream, and whoa, are archived automatically. Sounds like Time Machine, even though the suit doesn’t name Time Machine…
High-def channels consume bandwidth like Britney Spears at a Frappuccino trough (props, last night’s South Park). That’s a problem for twinkly satellite providers Dish Network and DirecTV, who just don’t have the capacity to blast every channel in HD—so the FCC just gave them the nod to downcovert broadcasters’ HD signals until 2013. Basically, it…