Want to be an astronaut? Good news! Apparently all it takes to get the best conditioning possible is being able to bounce around on a trampoline and get beaned by the occasional ball. That’s because Spaceball is — according to Scott Carpenter, one of NASA’s Mercury Seven astronauts — “the best conditioning exercise for space travel.”

As for the game itself, it’s a little confusing to figure out — or to figure out which part is fun, at least. You bounce around in your compartment while trying to toss the ball through a little tunnel in the middle and get it by your opponent. Spaceball supports two players under 200 pounds each, and takes up an area of your yard that’s 14′ by 8½’.

It’s all yours for only $700, or quite a few space bucks for you astronauts-in-Spaceball-training.

Hammacher Schlemmer, via Gizmodo, via Geekologie

Continue reading...

Free heat with minimal investment. Having a serious interest in renewable energy, I recently got the urge to try and create a solar insert that would simply slide into my existing window casings to help with the heating of my 1996 mobile. I saw on the local news one night how a local man built a sol…
By: Slezridr

Continue reading...

If you want to move a building a little over to the side and, oh, upside-down, then it looks like all you have to do is set off explosives on just one side. That’s what it looks like what happened in this video in Turkey, anyway. Wish it also included what led up to this amazing building barrel roll…


By: fungus amungus

Continue reading...

Cutting a pizza into eight equal slices is difficult with a regular pizza slicer. You always end up with a couple of really large slices and a couple of thinner slices. That’s not really fair, now is it? If only there was some ridiculous and impractical implement to solve this idiosyncratic problem!

This Equalizer Multi-Blade Rocker Pizza Cutter guarantees that all of your slices come out exactly even. Of course, it also costs between $190 and $250 depending on the size, so you’d better have a really, really big problem with off-sized slices of pizza to want this thing.

A Kitchen via Book of Joe

Continue reading...

Improving upon the Mimo 710 USB-powered monitor is the 710-S, which adds a stand that’s also a protective clamshell cover. The 710-S has the same 800 x 480 pixel resolution for its 7″ screen, but with a higher 500:1 contrast ratio. It’s got a dual-headed USB cable, which means you can plug it into a second port if you find that it’s not getting enough power with just one.

It’s all yours for $150 — about $30 more than the older 710. Mimo also has the 740 USB-powered touchscreen for $220, though it still uses the old 710 base — any chance of seeing the clamshell on that one, Mimo?

Check out more of the 710-S in the gallery below.

Continue reading...

Think, which plans to make a small all-electric car, expects to secure a fresh round of funding and emerge from bankruptcy next month, according to a company representative.

Settling its debts and boosting its capital will allow Think to start producing its electric city car by the end of year. …

Continue reading...

Now you can give a scientifically accurate answer when someone asks what kind of mutt you’re walking on the end of that leash with this Genealogy Kit. Just swab some goo from your dog’s cheek and send it into the lab, and they’ll do some sophisticated testing to figure out exactly what breeds are present in your dog’s DNA.

The $59.95 price gets you a fancy certificate, spelling out exactly what percentages of 93% of the most common breeds in the U.S. encompass the ancestry of your beloved bowser. Or, if you’re an A.K.C.-registered purebred snob, this will be further proof of pedigree. Now you can strut around, confident that your dog is what you say he is.

Just hope when someone asks what kind of mutt that is on the end of that leash, the questioner is not talking to the dog.

Via Hammacher Schlemmer

Continue reading...

No, this Speaker Phone doesn’t make calls. It’s literally a speaker, and an awesome one at that.

This homemade speaker is crammed inside the body of an old phone. The sound comes out from behind where the number pad used to be. Even cooler is the fact that you turn it on and off by taking the phone off the hook. Simply plug in an iPod or other audio source and it’ll do the rest. I want one.

Flickr via Make

Continue reading...

Hi’ been updating the blog, finnally have some thing taeteful, well thats in the eye of the behnolder. But news on its way. Will be looking for new pieces on Environmental Tchnology. Techy Gizmos BlackBerry Mobile Devices in general. What’s happening at Nasa! And as much interesting items as we can find and publish our [...]

Continue reading...

We love wireless keyboards and mice, but we don’t like that using both means two dongles, each hogging its own USB port. Logitech feels our pain, debuting today its Unifying receiver tech, letting you connect multiple wireless peripherals to the same (tiny!) dongle.

Up to six wireless devices can communicate with the same dongle, though the 2.4GHz wireless tech is proprietary, working only with Logitech products designed to use it. Right now it’s just these babies, also announced today: Logitech’s M505 (August, $50) and M705 (early 2010, $70) mice, plus the K340 (September, $50) and K350 (September, $60) keyboards. Each ships with one of the receivers, so you’ll have an extra when you buy both a mouse and keyboard.

Full press release, with more details on those specific products, after the jump.

Continue reading...

Look out all you stoners and dopers, because the cops could soon wield a handheld device that detects your favorite controlled substance. Spit into this little plastic test tube, and you’re busted — any cocaine, heroin, cannabis, amphetamines, and methamphetamine you might be partying with is no longer a secret.

Phillips, a company that makes TVs and all kinds of other techno-stuff, created this sophisticated dope-a-lysing device using nanotechnology, with a clever use of electromagnets and nanoparticles that can separate the sober from the impaired. After 90 seconds, the verdict shows up on a color-coded readout.

Philips hopes to roll out this privacy-invading drug tester in Europe by the end of the year, perhaps destined to become the next tool in the loathsome War on Drugs in the United States. My suggestion to Phillips: Create a gizmo that detects texting while driving.

Via Technology Review

Continue reading...

If you’ve been watching the development of nano projectors in the past couple of years, you knew it had to happen: a point-and-shoot digital camera with a projector on board. This Nikon Coolpix S1000pj works like a conventional 12.1 megapixel camera with a 2.7 inch LCD viewscreen, but that’s where the similarity ends.

Its projector can play back pictures and video at a relatively big 40-inch size. Not only that, but it can mix music, effects and transitions with those pictures. Sound like a lot of whizbang for $430, but we’ve seen projectors like the one inside this camera, and even in total darkness they look downright lame.

Lame now, but imagine what this technology will be like five years from now. Super-bright HD projectors inside every still/video camera. Set up a guerrilla theater anywhere. Bore the world with pictures of your kids. It’s a bright future. Nikon also rolled out three more digital cameras — read about them in this press release:

Continue reading...

If you imagine robots to be slow, lurching machines, think again. Sure, Honda’s Asimo isn’t going to beat anyone in a race, but that’s not the only robot on the block. This robot hand at the Ishikawa Komuro Lab manages to bounce a rubber ball far faster than any person can.

I’d like to think that there are positive uses for this, but we all know that when robots can move this fast, it’s going to end badly for humanity. But at least we have entertaining YouTube videos along the way!

Ishikawa Komuro Lab, via BotJunkie

Continue reading...

Equally creepy and beautiful, this Spoticam lamp has been designed with more than a wink to the CCTV cameras we see in cities and gardens the world over. A product from the Antrepo Design Industry, it can either be screwed to the wall or used as a table lamp.

While they say it’s available in either white or aluminum, Antrepo’s previous designs have been mere concepts. It’s probable, however, that they’re looking for a manufacturer, so hopefully there’s someone out there who can help them.

AntrepoVia MoCo Loco

Continue reading...

Like most things Japanese, the promotion for Google Japan’s “Favorite Places” campaign is decidedly strange, yet innovative. Designed to promote the use of Google Maps, the campaign will plant life-sized Google Map markers at various hot spots around Tokyo during the month of August.

At each location, pedestrians will be able to view videos inside the giant map marker of popular Japanese figures detailing their favorite places in Japan. If you can’t make it out to Tokyo to marvel at the oversized Google iconography, you can at least check out the official Google video here.

Via Google Japan

Continue reading...

Geez, we’ll never suck Earth into a black hole at this rate. The faulty weld that shut down the Large Hadron Collider late last year isn’t the only problem plaguing the 17-mile-long ring. Though connections between the magnets have been patched up (5,000 of the splices have been redone), a few dozen of the magnets themselves are underperforming.

From the New York Times:

In an e-mail exchange, Lucio Rossi, head of magnets for CERN, said that 49 magnets had lost their training in the sectors tested and that it was impossible to estimate how many in the entire collider had gone bad. He said the magnets in question had all met specifications and that the problem might stem from having sat outside for a year before they could be installed.

“Training” a magnet involves cranking up its electric current until it fails, and repeating the process to make the magnet able to handle higher currents. Retraining the underperforming components would be both costly and time consuming — two areas where the 15-years-in-the-making, $9 billion project is already stretching it.

At the very least, the magnets won’t halt the operations of the LHC, which is expected to get a launch window from CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) this week. That said, underpowered means just that: the magnets won’t be able to handle the requisite seven trillion volts it would take for us to rip open rifts to other dimensions and handily destroy the world. As it stands, CERN researchers think the LHC’s ailing magnets will be able to handle four trillion at most.

Baby steps, LHC. You’ll get there.

Via New York Times

Continue reading...

If you’re picking out a new phone, you usually have only two camps to choose from. Do you want that expensive smartphone, with its tons of apps and proprietary software, or that cheap dumbphone — a handset that does calls and texts but sucks deeply at anything beyond that. That’s why we’re a little relieved to see these two new handsets, the INQ Chat 3G (with a QWERTY keyboard) and the INQ Mini 3G candybar.

The two phones promise to bring “mobile Internet to the mass market.” Considering INQ’s first handset beat out the BlackBerry Storm and Google Phone to win Best Mobile Handset last year, they might have a decent shot of actually doing that.

Each includes a native Twitter application that INQ developed with Twitter. You also get one-click apps for Facebook, Skype, IM, not to mention push Gmail. Of course, they both sync music and videos from your PC or Mac, but they won’t tell you how — special software lets you use whatever media player you want. Both handsets can get new apps over the network, plus they also do tethering. Internal memory is light but expandable to 4GB. The Chat also includes GPS and that keyboard — which felt even more finger-friendly than a BlackBerry during a hands-on with some preproduction models last week.

Sound too good to be true? They are — INQ’s handsets won’t available in the U.S., though the company has plans to expand here in 2010. In the meantime they’ll be in Europe starting in the fall. No pricing yet, but word is they’ll be in on the “value” side. See the full press release after the jump.

Via INQ

Continue reading...