Inventors and Remarkable People
Good Vibrations: the musical and military instruments of Leon Theremin
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After the close of WWII, Russian schoolchildren presented the U.S. ambassador with a “gesture of friendship” in the form of a two-foot wooden replica of the Seal of the United States. Behind the beak of the eagle was a miniscule listening device so ingeniously designed that it took eight years before a routine check unearthed it. The era of electronic bugs had begun, and it was largely thanks to the brilliant mind of Leon Theremin: musician, inventor, and prisoner in Stalin’s gulag. Read More
The space-age Aerohotel concept
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We've seen some incredible examples of terraforming in recent years - most notably "The World" in Dubai - and if the fact that the government of the low-lying Maldives is looking to buy land elsewhere to escape global warming is any indication, the practice of resurrecting land from the waters may be about to become a whole lot more commonplace. But why shift all that dirt around if you can just use stilts? Alexander Asadov's futuristic Aerohotel concept is an alternative to man-made islands that would provide a 650 foot wide circular playground perched over 200 feet above the waterline using only three supports designed to cause minimum disturbance to the ocean floor. Read More
iPhone Firmware 2.2 Jailbroken, PwnageTool and QuickPwn 2.2 now available
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It will never cease to amaze us how quickly the iPhone Dev Team can bust open a new version of the iPhone Firmware. This time, around 48 hours after iPhone Firmware 2.2 hit, we already have a new version of QuickPwn and PwnageTool. Before you go ahead and jailbreak your iPhone 3G, please make sure you fully understand the following caveat: If you use QuickPwn instead of PwnageTool, you may not be able to unlock your iPhone 3G once an unlocking tool is made available. Read More
The checkered history of automation
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"If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker” – attributed to Albert Einstein after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One law of science that has forever remained unchanged is the law of unintended consequences. When an idea is born its full range of repercussions is completely unpredictable, and the history of technology is a littered with fascinating examples of how one breakthrough can spawn something totally unexpected. In the hands of others, some do lead to tragedy, but more often than not we profit from technology's unexpected boons. Gizmag's Kyle Sherer follows some of these strange tangents to discover how an 18th century chess playing machine, French duck faeces, and a 60s movie called “Sex Kittens Go to College” are linked to the development of the computer, automobile, telephone and even space exploration. Read More
iPhone 3G baseband hacked, one step closer to an unlock
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The iPhone Dev Team has posted a video showing their recent progress with the iPhone 3G. They have hacked their way in to the PMB8878 baseband processor, which gives them unrestricted access to the iPhone 3G hardware - and, you guessed it, the means to unlock the phone for use on any carrier. Read More
Happy Birthday! NASA celebrates 50 years
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October 1, 2008 Cochlear implants, ultrasonically welded swimsuits, DustBusters, and freeze-dried food. You owe more to NASA than you think. Fifty years ago today, NASA’s employees turned up for their first day at work. One-hundred and fifty manned missions, $810.459 billion present-day dollars, and 382 kilograms of moon rocks later, the ripples from the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have influenced society and the development of technology in ways we rarely detect. Kyle Sherer takes a closer look at the history and major achievements of the last half-century. Read More
HE DID IT!! Fusionman completes successful English Channel Crossing
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He made it! Earlier this week we reported on the incredible challenge undertaken by Fusionman Yves Rossy in attempting to fly solo across the English Channel using his home-made jet-powered wing, a feat he successfully completed on Thursday at 1:19 BST when he parachuted into Dover less than 15 minutes after leaving the skies above France. Great picture gallery of the event.
Stephen Hawking to send DNA into space
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Along with daughter Lucy, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is planning to send his digitized DNA into space as part of NCsoft’s Operation Immortality. The pair hopes the exercise will help publicize the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics; a competition that will award $10 million to the first person or team that can sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less. Read More
'The Yorkshire Aestel' – one of the original knowledge Gizmos to go under the hammer
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September 18, 2008 'The Yorkshire Aestel' belongs to a small group of only seven known aestels; the most celebrated of which is the Alfred Jewel. An aestel is a pointer designed for the reading of manuscripts and most were commissioned by Alfred the Great, famous warrior king of England and one of history’s great champions of learning, justice and civilisation. King Alfred commissioned and sent aestels to all the bishops of his kingdom to accompany a copy of a translation of Pope Gregory I's Regula Pastoralis. Curiously, despite being one of the first man-made objects specifically designed to assist with furthering knowledge, this rare object is only expected to fetch between UKP10,000-15,000 when it goes to auction – perhaps this is a reflection on our modern values, perhaps the opportunity for a treasured possession of true meaning. A gold pointer steeped in history and the very roots of hand-written monastic scholarly endeavour , and dating from the late 9th Century is surely worth much more. Read More
Berners-Lee announces World Wide Web Foundation
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and from the beginning a strong advocate for keeping it free and open to everyone, has officially unveiled an organization designed to do just that. The World Wide Web Foundation states its goal as seeking "to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web's capability and robustness, and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet." Read More
Fishing for profits on world caviar market
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August 28, 2008 Until recently, the Caspian Sea has been the world's main source of the sturgeon that produces the black fish roe delicacy we know and covet as caviar. Sadly, over-fishing and pollution have led to dwindling fishing yields in the region. Now scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have begun farming sturgeon with a view to supplying the growing caviar market. Given they now have 40,000 sturgeon in outdoor pools, and the average female sturgeon can produce US$3,000 worth of caviar, it looks like becoming big business. Read More
Wrist-worn GPS navigation 1920s style
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A 1920s-era wrist-mounted display that allowed the sophisticated gentleman to peruse his planned route; a 1930s “electro massager” rewarded the user with a “zappy ending” in the form of electrical shocks; and a pair of glasses equipped with two battery-powered lights alternately provided its wearer with illumination and set their head on fire. Outlandish contraption expert Maurice Collins is exhibiting these, and 50 similar items, at the British Library Business and Intellectual Property Centre. Read More
Student develops low-cost wind turbine for the developing world
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A student from the University of Portsmouth in the UK has created a wind turbine made totally from recycled matter. Aimed at servicing the renewable energy needs of some of the word’s poorest countries, the low cost wind turbine is designed to be built by unskilled workers in less than a day using locally sourced scrap materials. Read More
Historic recordings by inventor of stereo sound re-engineered
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Historic recordings by the inventor of stereo, Alan Blumlein, have been digitally re-engineered to remove the crackles and hiss from the original 78 pressings so they can now be heard as they were meant to sound. The recordings, which include Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in 1934, were made by Alan Blumlein, an EMI research engineer, who lodged the patent for “binaural” sound in 1931 and have now been digitally re-engineered by sound engineer Roger Beardsley. Read More
Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick to pen autobiography
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July 21, 2008 Kevin Mitnick, the infamous computer hacker who was sentenced to solitary confinement in 1999 after prosecutors spun stories of his ability to "start a nuclear war by whistling into a telephone," has signed a deal with Little, Brown and Company to publish his autobiography. Read More
400th robotic-assisted heart surgery
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The rise of robotic surgery has marked a new age in medical science and one of its pioneers has just reached a major milestone. Dr. W. Randolph Chitwood, Jr. has performed his 400th robotic-assisted mitral valve repair at Pitt County Memorial Hospital. Read More
The Mundaneum – the analog internet
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Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson. Now Belgian Paul Otlet another pioneer of information management and universally accessible information is beginning to gain recognition for his Mundaneum. Great video here on the life of the man who used terms like web of knowledge, link, and knowledge network to describe his vision for a central repository of all human knowledge – 100 years ago. Read More
French cyclist to attempt channel crossing on pedal-powered airship
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May 1, 2008 Those magnificent men in their flying machines... the first purely human-powered aircraft, the Gossamer Albatross, crossed the English Channel in 1979 with its pilot Bryan Allen pedaling the feather-light winged plane across in two hours to collect the UKP100,000 Kremer prize. This feat caught the imagination of French cyclist Stephane Rousson, who this European summer will attempt to cycle across the Channel pedaling a twin-tilting-rotor helium airship. It's the first pedal-powered airship of its kind, complete with very delicate aerodynamics that mean Rousson will need to chance upon one of the three windless days of the year if he hopes to stay up-diddly-up-up and not go crashing down-diddly-own-down. Read More
Kalashnikov Burglar Alarm
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April 14, 2008 The Kalashnikov has been the common man’s rifle for sixty years and has been responsible for more misery and wasted humanity than any other invention of history. Now an ingenious Afghan inventor, Hanif Molavizadeh, has built one into a burglar alarm - a highly effective, seat-of-the-pants mash-up that includes a cell and speaker phone, sensors, and armed response. Trigger the alarm by waving a hand outside the window of Molavizadeh's one-room home and the alarm sounds. It also calls Molavizadeh's cell phone so he can have a conversation with the would-be burglar via a speakerphone in the alarm, and if he doesn’t like the answers he gets, he can fire the Kalashnikov remotely. He’s working on an equally punitive anti-theft system for his car. Read More
35th Anniversary of the first public cell phone call
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April 4, 2008 With around half the world's population expected to be carrying a mobile phone by the end of this year, it's hard to believe that its just 35 years since the first ever public cell phone call was made. Yesterday marked the anniversary of the historical call made on the streets of New York by portable cell phone inventor Martin Cooper, then general manager of Motorola’s Communications Systems Division. Read More
Barilliant - new system for an old industry
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Alcohol is one of the world’s most traded commodities. Central to the liquor industry are the millions of liquor serveries which serves millions of litrer of alcohol each day, a glass at a time. The biggest problem of this massive service industry is shrinkage – around 10-15% of tap beer goes straight down the drain in most pubs. New bar management system Barilliant monitors and minimizes wastage by accounting for every milliliter of alcohol using sensors, wireless technologies, and RFID staff identification, right down to how effectively every barman pours a beer. The system can be expected to save 5 to 10 percent of total throughput – very big bikkies. Read More
Groundbreaking system to prevent collisions between whales and sea-craft
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An unlucky passenger who died when a high-speed ferry rammed into a sperm whale in the Canary islands was the world’s first known victim of a new form of pollution – ocean noise. In places where marine traffic is heavy, vessels fast and whale numbers expanding, violent encounters are increasingly common. The cause of the accident, says marine biologist and Rolex Awards for Enterprise Laureate Michel André, most probably lay in damage to the whale’s sensitive hearing apparatus caused by the rising roar of man-made noise throughout the oceans. The whale was stone deaf – and simply didn’t hear the ferry coming in time to avoid it. Julian Cribb reports. Read More
Light up the World: tens of thousands benefit from pioneering solar project
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Tens of thousands of people living in disadvantaged areas around the world now have reliable household lighting thanks to Scots-Canadian photonics engineer Dave Irvine-Halliday. For ten years he has been supplying low-cost lighting in developing countries through his foundation, Light Up The World, an achievement that has earned him a Rolex Awards for Enterprise. It is a project with potential to make a huge difference to the world as a whole: each year the kerosene lamps that flare in the homes of the poor liberate 244 million tonnes of CO2. Dave’s solar lighting sets offer huge scope to reduce those emissions and save poor people money at the same time. Francesco Raeli reports. Read More
RoboTrac: pre-programmable, semi-autonomous tractor concept
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February 14, 2008 Designed to perform a range of pre-programmed agricultural tasks in vineyards, coffee farms, orchards and nurseries, this futuristic driver-less tractor concept aims to boost efficiency, minimize crop damage and remove humans for hazardous environments using GPS and Internet to track its location. The Valtra RoboTrac from 25 year old Estonian industrial designer Hannes Seeberg - whose portfolio also includes an intriguing Skylift self-propelled boarding aircraft boarding system - combines an 85 hp engine diesel engine and rear-wheel steering in either a two or four wheel drive configuration with the remotely programmable computerized navigation system to enable anything from tilling and plowing to planting and spraying.
World's biggest fish gets a black-box flight recorder
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This year the secret life of one of the Earth’s largest and most mysterious creatures, the whale shark, will be laid bare for the first time when some of the gentle giants off Western Australia’s coral Ningaloo coast are equipped with "black box flight recorders". The project is the result of a collaboration between two Laureates of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise – Australian Brad Norman who set up the world’s first photo-ID system for identifying whale sharks and Briton Rory Wilson, who has developed the world’s most sophisticated device for monitoring the activity of animals in the wild. With capabilities beyond those of GPS-based animal tracking systems, Wilson's logger monitors changes in an animal’s acceleration in every direction – forward/back, up/down or sideways - at a rate of up to 32 times a second, and, combined with a compass, determines the animal’s speed, direction and position. Julian Cribb and Graeme O'Neill report. Read More
The Electric Super Tipper Truck
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Most of us first encountered the concept of a tip truck in the sand pit as toddlers – and they’ve been pretty much all the same basic concept since then. The electric-powered Super Tipper Truck is not confined by traditional thinking as it does not require a traditional power train and with no problems about storing lots of heavy batteries for delivering massive electrical power to each in-wheel motor, the Haishan Deng-designed Super Tipper delivers more unloading and loading options, greater accuracy, greater worker safety and more efficiency to the construction industry. “I set out to find a ‘new way’ for this important equipment of construction,” said innovative designer Haishan. “The concept concentrates on enabling more possibilities for the loading and unloading process. Common trucks can only unload to backward or sidewards”.
iPhone named Time Magazine Invention of the Year
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November 6, 2007 Having crashed its way into the lexicon as well as the marketplace in spectacular fashion in June, Apple’s iPhone has been recognized as Time Magazine’s Invention of the Year for 2007. Read More
Remarkable inventor pioneered human-powered flight
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September 6, 2007 The aeronautical world is mourning the loss of visionary inventor, designer and engineer Dr Paul MacCready, who passed away on 28 August 2007. Among his very long list of accomplishments, he was most widely known as the "father of human-powered flight". Using a craft he created, the Gossamer Condor, MacCready made the first sustained, controlled flight by a heavier-than-air craft powered solely by its pilot's muscles.
Key component of calculus identified two centuries before Newton
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August 16, 2007 New research suggests that a key aspect of the calculus, commonly attributed to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz in the late 1600s, may in fact have been discovered more than two centuries earlier by scholars at the Kerala School in southwest India. Read More
Happy birthday to the WWW
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August 7, 2007 The invention of the Internet cannot be pinned down to any specific time, place or person as it was developed primarily for military and scientific applications throughout the 60s and 70s in the US. The World Wide Web on the other hand, the basic software building-block that makes access and categorisation of the billions of documents that sit on the Internet possible, can be attributed to one person - Tim Berners-Lee. The world wide web turned 16 yesterday – here’s the original post that started it all. Read More
13-year old CEO seeks $100k in venture capital.
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May 21, 2007 Thought YOU were ambitious? How's this from a 13-year-old: "Our goal is to achieve 1 million dollars in revenue by the end of middle school, which is next year." The surprise hit of this year's TiECON, the Elementeo chief has already booked 450 sales of his upcoming first product. His whole executive team is around the same age, including his 11-year-old sister, VP of sales. He's looking for US$100k in investment capital, or 2500 pre-orders, to start production of Elementeo - and with his ability to deliver an elevator pitch like this on demand, you'd have to back him to get it. Via VentureBeat.
HP Garage gets listed on National Register of Historic Places
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May 18, 2007 The garage-start-up that becomes a global company is part of every budding entrepreneurs dream. In America, the HP Garage has become a symbol of what can rise from humble beginnings with hard work and determination. Now the National Park Service has begun listing the famed HP Garage and house at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto on the United States National Register of Historic Places. Recognized as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, the garage was the building in which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard set up shop in 1938. One hopes that they’ll subsequently consider the Cupertino garage where Wojniak and Jobs kicked off Apple in 1976 and the rented Menlo Park garage where Sergei Brin and Larry Page set up Google in 1998. Read More
Scientists move a step closer to being able to make objects invisible
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May 4, 2007 A computer model designed by a mathematician at the University of Liverpool has shown that it is possible to make objects, such as aeroplanes and submarines, appear invisible at close range. Scientists have already created an ‘invisibility cloak’ made out of ‘metamaterial’ which can bend electromagnetic radiation – such as visible light, radar or microwaves – around a spherical space, making an object within this region appear invisible. Until now, scientists could only make objects appear invisible from far away. Liverpool mathematician Dr Sebastien Guenneau, together with Dr Frederic Zolla and Professors Andre Nicolet from the University of Marseille, have proven - using a computer model called GETDP - that objects can also be made to appear invisible from close range when light travels in waves rather than beams. Scientists predict that metamaterials could be of use in military technology, such as in the construction of fighter jets and submarines, but it will be some years before invisibility cloaks can be developed for human beings. Read More
Dupont's ETFE - the miracle polymer that's shaping public architecture
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May 2, 2007 Dupont's innovative ETFE polymer is 1% the weight of glass. It stretches to three times its normal length without losing its elasticity, has controllable shading and noise insulation properties, and never gets dirty due to the non-stick properties it shares with its cousin Teflon. Laid out in sheets or blown up in pillows, it's being used in a number of fascinating major architectural developments, including the stadium and aquatic centre being built for Beijing's 2008 Olympics. It's developing a reputation as a "miracle polymer" for public architecture. Read More
Scientists Develop New Tool To 'Freeze' Crime Scene Memories
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April 27, 2007 The Crime Scene Investigation TV writers regularly impress us with their rapid deployment of new technologies, so it’ll be interesting to see how long it is before we see Gil Grisham or Horatio Kane employing the latest innovation developed by scientists at the University of Portsmouth. It’s a self-administered interview that 'freezes' the memory of crime scenes in the minds of witnesses. The tool - a self-administered interview applied by witnesses at crime scenes - combats natural memory decay by using the latest research in cognitive psychology techniques. It 'freezes' images and details of crime scenes and perpetrators in the minds of witnesses, particularly small and seemingly insignificant details that provide major leads for detectives that turn out to be crucial in solving cases. Read More
