Your Very Own Air Guitar

Do you like music? Do you like lasers? Do you like making music by using lasers? Would you like doing all that without holding a heavy and awkward box of wood and strings? How silly of us to even ask: of course you would. BAM! Introducing the Air Guitar.

The Air Guitar distills decades of design and style into a single handheld device, enabling anyone to create music with the press of a button and a flick of the wrist. Don’t feel like actually playing music? BAM! Presets. Ten of them, in fact. So, what are you waiting for? Honestly. There’s no genuine reason you should be waiting. We both know you want to be a famous rock star, and putting it off any longer just got substantially more embarrassing

The Flying Hovercraft - Hammacher Schlemmer

Here’s a fun new way to kill yourself. A mini Ekranoplan.

This is the hovercraft that glides over land and water yet also soars in the air up to 70 mph with the aid of integrated wings. A 130-hp twin-cylinder, liquid-cooled gasoline engine — turbocharged and fuel-injected — drives its 60” wood/carbon composite thrust propeller while a 1,100-rpm 34” lift fan inflates its durable vinyl-coated nylon skirt for hovering above the ground. Operating in fresh- or saltwater and up to 30% inclines over sand, mud, grass, swamp, desert, ice, and snow, its wings and horizontal elevator enable pilots to simply hop over water- or land-based obstacles up to 20’-high unsurmountable to a typical hovercraft. A joystick controls three vertical rudders and the elevator, a twist friction-lock throttle controls forward speed, and a variable drive system controls the lift fan for hovering. Braking is provided by lowering the lift fan’s rpms; comes to rest on Kevlar composite landing skids. Its low center of gravity and composite fiberglass/PVC hull enable it to operate in winds up to 25 mph and waves up to 6’ when in flight. Two nine-gallon gasoline tanks provide a 160-mile range. Supports pilot/passenger payloads up to 600 lbs. for flight. Requires registration as a boat.

Glare, Dust, and Fog Free Glass

This will be nice on my next phone. Especially Apple with it’s shiny glass screens needs to do something about the constant smudging.

One of the most instantly recognizable features of glass is the way it reflects light. But a new way of creating surface textures on glass, developed by researchers at MIT, virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare — and whose surface causes water droplets to bounce right off, like tiny rubber balls.

The new “multifunctional” glass, based on surface nanotextures that produce an array of conical features, is self-cleaning and resists fogging and glare, the researchers say. Ultimately, they hope it can be made using an inexpensive manufacturing process that could be applied to optical devices, the screens of smartphones and televisions, solar panels, car windshields and even windows in buildings.

Biochemist creates CO2-eating light that runs on algae

This is one of very very few ideas that I’ve seen that actually could work to prevent global warming. We’d need a hell of a lot of these lights, but everyone needs light, right?

Our atmosphere is filling up with CO2 and we seem to be the major cause of that. The generally accepted solution seems to be cutting back on emissions as quickly as possible, but implementing such cuts is problematic because everyone has to agree to do more, which essentially ends up costing a lot of time and money.

There is an alternative to such measures, though. Instead of relying entirely on cutting emissions, why don’t we start taking CO2 out of the atmosphere?

That’s exactly what biochemist Pierre Calleja is trying to do, and his solution almost sounds too good to be true. Calleja has developed a lighting system that requires no electricity for power. Instead it draws CO2 from the atmosphere and uses it to produce light as well as oxygen as a byproduct. The key ingredient to this eco-friendly light? Algae.

Steve Wozniak: Windows Phone is “intuitive and beautiful”

Wow, you couldn’t get a much better endorsement than this. It’s nice to see some real competition heating up in the mobile OS market finally.

Woz revealed how he considered the platform to be easy-to-use, and complimented how apps look “more beautiful than on Android or iPhone”. In fact, he had a great deal of praise for Windows Phone, and WPCentral highlighted a few of his most positive comments:

“Compared to Android, there’s no comparison”

“Intuitive and beautiful”

“Just for looks and beauty, I definitely favour the Windows Phone over Android”

“I’m just shocked; I haven’t seen anything yet that isn’t more beautiful than the other platforms”

“It makes me feel ‘Oh my gosh, I’m with a friend, not a tool’” (referring to UI interactions and graphics)

“I just really like the experience and will be carrying the Windows Phone everywhere”

The Next Web noted that Wozniak later added to his comments: I did give my opinion that the Windows Phone had superior visual appearance and operation cues that were also more attractive. In my opinion, it sets the mark for user interface. …I surmise that Microsoft hired someone from Apple and put money into having a role in the UI and appearance of some key apps. I also surmised that Steve Jobs might have been reincarnated at MS due to a lot of what I see and feel with this phone making me think of a lot of great Apple things.”