I know it looks crazy, but what you see up above is a photograph, not a conceptual render. That’s “Level Green,” a permanent installation in Volkswagen’s Autostadt visitor center at their Wolfsburg, Germany factory built by Berlin-based J Mayer H architects. It’s stuffed to the gills with auto parts displays and glossy vertical touchscreens where visitors can acquire more information about Volkswagen and the company’s push to be green.

The installation was made mostly with sheets of wood composite and — appropriately — spray painted with car paint. Now if only it had the exterior of this Star Trek-looking building then we’d have a gen-u-wine sci-fi structure.

Check out more of Level Green in the gallery below.

Continue reading...

More and More Scientists Serve Up Science for Mass Consumption

Continue reading...

Waterloo Labs is a group of breathlessly enthusiastic engineering nerds in Austin. For their latest project, they rigged up a big screen with accelerometers that sense the position of any impact. They then projected Half-Life onto the screen and hired a shooting instructor to shoot guns at the image. The shooting instructor is so cool he not only wears sunglasses at night, but he wears sunglasses at night when he’s shooting.

The best part of the video is when the lovable engineering nerds decide not to miss out on the fun and take shovels to the screen. They have no illusions about being cool and instead giggle like schoolgirls as they whack away with the shovels. Great job, Waterloo Labs! But next time, if you really want to endear yourselves to us videogaming nerds, bring crowbars instead of shovels.

This post is from our sister site, Fidgit, which is all about gaming. Head on over for more game news and reviews.

Continue reading...

There’s a new way to mail printed postcards directly from your iPhone, with a little app called Shoot It! This $0.99 iPhone application lets you take a picture with your iPhone’s camera, or select a picture from your picture library, and for less than a buck you can mail a glossy postcard. We downloaded Shoot It! from the App Store and gave it a try on our iPhone 3GS. Click Continue to see what happened.

Continue reading...

11/8/09 Wonderful news – another Oldies Club dog is staying with his foster family. Welcome home George!

Continue reading...

Updated 12/8/2009 – could you help by printing out and displaying Max’s poster? [pdf format]

Max is a beautiful 11 year old long-haired German Shepherd who is desperate for a long-term foster
home where he can be given the love and care he needs for his final years.
Max lived all his life with an elderly owner who [...]

Continue reading...

Although AV receivers have fallen a bit out of favor in recent years as simpler gear gets the big marketing bucks, models like the TX-NR807 from Onkyo just might keep the category relevant. The NR807 has an Ethernet connection that can directly access online music services like Pandora and Rhapsody, not to mention any music on your PC. And yes, it’s Windows 7 compatible.

Of course, you get all the supercalafragalistic technology that you’d expect from a state-of-the-art home theater component: The TX-NR807 does 7.2-channel sound, is THX Select2 Plus certified, has no less than six HDMI 1.3a inputs, and upconverts all your video to 1080p. Onkyo also says it’s one of the first receivers with Audyssey DSX technology, which “allows the back surround channels to be retasked for front-wide speakers to expand the width of the soundstage, or for front height speakers to provide vertical ambience effects.” Sounds kind of complicated, but possibly worth it.

The power rating is an impressive 135 watts per channel. I doubt many will spend the $1,100 list price for this baby, but those who do will no doubt be pleased. Hit the jump for pictures of the back panel and remote control.

Continue reading...

11/8/09 Nike has got his paws truly under the table and has been adopted by his foster carers!

Continue reading...

Yes, there are other highly capable audio and video players other than iPods. Case in point: Microsoft Zune HD, which you can see in action for the first time in the spy video above. Since we showed you the product shots of the gorgeous 720p player that’ll be available on September 8th, pricing has been leaked, too — the 16GB Zune HD will retail for $220, and the 32-gig version will be $290. Those prices undercut Apple’s iPod touch products by a country mile.

We’ve also found out that besides the games and apps that will be available on the Microsoft Zune HD, its Wi-Fi capability will let you surf the Web on a self-rotating multitouch Web browser, and even includes a newly revealed “search with Bing” query box. Apple’s going to have to do something impressive to match this OLED-screened beauty.

Via TechEBlog

Continue reading...

You’re looking at a world record holder. Sure, Evoia looks like a ridiculous toy, but this mini robot is really a proxy for Panasonic EVOLTA AA alkaline batteries, which allow this little sucker to “race” at Le Mans for 24 hours. That, my friends, is a world record. To be exact, this guy smacked down any allusions that the Energizer Bunny is the king of going and going, circling the Le Mans track 5.6 times and traveling a total of 14.82 miles.

Granted, the intrepid helmeted bot wasn’t traveling at Le Mans-like speeds, poking around at a fast-turtle’s pace of 0.6 mph for 24 hours. It followed an infrared beam from a lead golf cart, and boy, do we feel sorry for that driver whose job it was to travel at such a tedious speed for a night and a day.

Whether Evoia could have kept on going and going after the 24 hours remains to be seen, but his performance was good enough to be entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as “the longest distance covered by a battery-operated remote-controlled model car.” Check out the video of Evoia’s glorious sendoff:

Continue reading...

Normally, when a kettle lets you know your water is boiling you’ll hear a high pitched whistle. It’s annoying, so you turn it off quickly. It’s worked pretty well for a while now.

But Naoki Kawamoto’s Musical Kettle turns that annoying whistle into song by putting a sort of flute at the spout. Instead of one high-pitched whistle, you get the song of your choice. But you should still turn the stove off right when it goes off. Just ignore the song, if you can.

via Boing Boing

Continue reading...

Sony’s been working on new and improved batteries, ones that use olivine-type lithium iron phosphate as the cathode material. They say that these fancy new batteries offer up four times the life of current lithium ion batteries and charge up in a mere 30 minutes.

Sounds awesome! Unfortunately, the new batteries are only available in power tools at the moment, but they’ll phase over to consumer electronics “gradually.” Well, something to look forward to I suppose.

Sony Insider via Oh Gizmo via Boing Boing Gadgets

Continue reading...

There’s all sorts of buzz going around on the internet today about the Chevy Volt and the 230 mpg rating it’s getting from the government. But when you look at how that number was reached, you’ll see that it’s not so cut and dry.

Essentially, the Volt can drive 40 miles on battery power before kicking in the gas engine. So if you drive 10 miles, you’ll get infinite miles per gallon. If you drive 50 miles, you’ll get 250 miles per gallon. But if you drive 300 miles, you’ll be down to 62.5 miles per gallon.

It’s still impressive, but it’s the kind of car where MPG isn’t as good an indicator of fuel efficiency as normal vehicles.

CNN via Engadget

Continue reading...

WARREN, Mich.–The gas-electric Chevy Volt will get triple-digit mileage, including an estimated 230 mpg for city driving, General Motors said Tuesday.

The 230 mpg–teased in a stealth advertising campaign on billboards and during baseball games–is based on a draft methodology for electric vehicles developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, …

Continue reading...

It may be a few more decades before the universal translators of “Star Trek” become a reality, so in the meantime one Japanese company has added yet another weapon to country’s language arsenal that is decidedly powerful. The TalkMaster Slim looks and feels like the sexy iPod of the past, but instead of pumping tunes the tiny device is devoted to helping Japanese students become just a little bit better at English than you’ll ever be at speaking Japanese.

The TalkMaster Slim features audio playback of both English and Japanese preset phrases, 2 gigabytes of memory available to record and playback your own language practice, a text breakdown of your current study material, a fully packed bilingual dictionary, and the ability to speed or slow down the pace of your study phrases. Priced at 39,800 yen ($400) you can see the TalkMaster Slim in action here.

Via TalkMaster

Continue reading...

Last month I went to a marvellous party, as Cole Porter might have said. It was a mini-festival that’s held on a private estate in Norfolk, UK, every year and all the guests camped in front of the house, which was built in 1712, for the duration of the weekend.

So far, so bucolic, you might say, adding, what the frack has this got to do about technology? Before the party proper started on the Satuday night, we were treated to a display by the Darkroom, a motion graphics studio from New Zealand, projected onto the front elevation of the house.

It’s pretty impressive, as you can see. Pac Man, scuba divers, zippers — they even demolished the house to reveal a greek temple behind it. And don’t mention the zipper, the windscreen wipers or the ping pong balls.

Via YouTube

Continue reading...

Radio Frequency (RF) technology is one of the best things a remote control can have. Since it doesn’t need a line of sight to your equipment (like infrared does), an RF remote will let you control your system from anywhere in your home. RF is to infrared as DVD is to VHS — a clearly superior upgrade. Yet RF has been around a long time, and the tech hasn’t trickled its way down through consumer electronics like you’d expect it would, pretty much staying confined to high-end gear and custom systems. For most brands, remotes are accessories, commodities, add-ons — not worthy of the latest and best.

Most brands other than Harmony, that is. The Harmony 900 remote control, which Logitech unveils today, is the only off-the-shelf remote control I’ve ever seen to include an infrared (IR) blaster system, which lets you use the through-walls magic of RF tech with your existing gear. Even better: The remote is as simple to set up as any other Harmony remote, since it uses the same Web-based setup system. All this, and a sleek touchscreen to boot.

I’ve been using the Harmony 900 for the past week and can honestly say it’s the best remote control I’ve ever used, and that includes a couple of touchpanels. Read my hands-on impressions after the jump, and find out if it’s really worth it’s sticker-shocking $400 pricetag.

Continue reading...

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a wild creature of the dark — a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center.The ‘eye’ at the center…

Continue reading...

Increasing domestic natural gas production and retrofitting buildings to be more efficient should form the basis of a low-carbon U.S. energy policy, according to a statement put out Monday during the Clean Energy Summit.

The summit, held for the second year in Las Vegas, brought together some of the …

Continue reading...