Category: Sci/Tech

One of my favorite features in Wired has always been the Found column, the backpage crystal balling of artifacts from an imagined future. Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future has stolen …er borrowed this same idea as a way of getting its corporate clients to read its annual forecasting report. A great idea, in that future forecasts aren’t usually worth the tender tree meat they’re hammered into, and I speak with *some* authority, having put in my time at that bastion of future falderaldry, the World Future Society. Anyway, kudos to the Institute for appropriating a great idea. One of their clients, Proctor & Gamble, says some of the mocked-up future products in the report have actually inspired real products. Now that’s a kind of forecasting worth paying the big bucks for.

[Pictured above is the RFID Locating Lamp (shines a spotlight on RFID tags in range) and an RFID Blocker whose slogan reads: “Keep Them Out of Your Stuff!” Ahem to that, brother]

NOVA’s awesome three-hour documentary, The Elegant Universe, based on Brian Greene’s bestselling book about string theory/bleeding-edge physics, is now online. There’s also a really nice companion website. If you haven’t seen this yet, you really should check it out. Gorgeous, lucid, and tripped out. Who needs drugs when our universe is possibly this loopy (literally)?

Which John Shirley novel was it where people walked around with sat TV feeds crawling all over the surface of their clothing? I think it was City Come A-Walkin’ Anyway, we’re one step closer to that surreality with these “interactive clothes” with “flexible micro-screen” electronics stitched into them, from Uranium-Jeans. Euro purchasers of the garments can have them pre-wired with scrolling phrases, icons, and shapes, or custom-designed on the website at purchase. And they can update their clothes’ screens via phone text messaging. The first Uranium-Jeans store has opened in St. Tropez (natch), with a second due to open in LA later this year (natch 2.0).

Um… I have a question: Does a woman with THAT body need to advertise that she’s “SINGLE” (that’s what’s scrolling across her ass) and have a flashing red rose on her back?

While we’re on the subject of lists, PCWorld has published their list of the Best Tech Products of 2006 (ah…so far?). These lists are a great way to see what products have some sort of consensus, and a great way of getting hipped to products you might not otherwise be aware (like the Canon Pixma MP950 printer/scanner or Avvenu, the free remote access service, or how about SideStep.com, the bargain travel site?). A lot of good stuff here. Each item is linked to an in-depth review on the mag’s site.

Street Tech’s staff photographer Jay Towsend writes:

“Cue Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 2000” … it’s Omni magazine’s 1982 predictions for the future.

“Some are pretty accurate. Others….well….um….I’m still waiting for the train that can travel from New York to Los Angeles in 21 minutes.”

* * * And then there are those things we can thank Gopod never came to pass like: Businessmen of the future will wear tight-fitting body suits that reveal the male body, and make-up to their meetings!

Parachuting out of a plane is a good way to get someplace on the ground, but you tend to end up not too far from where you jumped. Doesn’t give you too much flexibility, if you’re say, James Bond, and you want to travel a couple hundred klicks from where the plane….ah dropped you off. Enter the carbon-fiber wing, a lightweight system that allows a paratrooper to travel up to 124 miles from the drop point. Of course, to get that kinda glide time, the troopers have to bail out at 30,000 feet. The German company developing the wing is working on a small turbo-jet drive so the same range can be had without the extreme altitude.

How freaking amazing are these? That’s Japanese Emperor Hirohito touring his war tubas. No, they weren’t a deafeningly loud section of the military marching band, they were a pre-radar acoustical listening technology, designed to pick up the distant rumble of aircraft engines. I wonder if any of them survive?

[Via The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society]

Thanks, Alberto!

Spotted this in the June 2006 issue of IEEE Spectrum that arrived today. Yes, that’s really a pair of micro- machined eye glasses on a fly. Source: Micreon GmbH. Photo by Frank Korte/Gunter Kamlage/EPA/Landov.

The flocking behavior of birds (schooling of fish, swarming of insects) have long intrigued and inspired scientists exploring the cybernetics of systems and how they can self-organize. While these ideas are frequently applied in artificial intelligence and robotics, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have devised a way of applying flocking to RSS feeds streaming through cyberspace, with similar content automatically grouping together. Explains the piece in New Scientist:

“When a new article appears, software scans it for words similar to those in existing articles and then files the document into an existing flock, or creates a new one. The team has used the system to categorise online news stories from CNN and the BBC. The next step will be to allow people to click on a bird to display its document.”

If you saw the recent Mythbusters where they powered a rocket with salami, you might not be so surprised to learn that PopSci has a piece about ones powered by Oreo cookies, Snickers bars and Pixy Stix. As the piece they wrote about the project so succinctly puts it:

“The energy in food is typically released when, through a complex biochemical pathway, sugars, starches and fats react with oxygen from the lungs. It’s a form of slow-motion burning that, thankfully, rarely involves fire.

“But you can liberate the same amount of energy in much less time by mixing the Snickers with a more concentrated source of oxygen—say, the potent oxidizer potassium perchlorate. The result is basically rocket fuel. Ig­nited on an open fireproof table, it burns vigorously, consuming an entire candy bar in a few seconds with a rushing tower of fire.”

Read the rest of the piece and see a video of the candy-powered rockets here.