Riding a stingray would normally be crazy enough, but not for designer Nils Poschwatta. His stingray is instead a cybernetic mishmash and rides like a jetbike.

The project, called “Creature Guard,” is something Poschwatta whipped up in his spare time. The ray-bike itself is one of the vehicles for the Creature Guard, which is described as “an institution to protect endangered animals and any kind of organism that needs help.” So, Power Rangers for critters. The images you see are actually not a render, but instead a 1/4 scale model made mostly out of clay.

Check out more of the Creature Guard’s bionic ray jetbike down below.

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Oscar is a playful, friendly boy who is looking for a home where he will have company and people to play with! He is good with children and other dogs and needs to find a nice warm fireside where he can spend his retirement years. Do you have a space in your home for him?

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Oh my. Somebody has gone and combined two of my favorite things in the world – video games and drinking beer – and created a masterpiece. The Arkeg is, yes, an arcade game with a keg built in.

The setup houses a 5-gallon keg as well as a PC pre-loaded with 104 classic games. It’s got a 24-inch screen, a 2.1 sound system with a powered sub and two arcade controllers and a trackball. I want one so badly. Unfortunately, it’s $4,000, so I’ll just have to stick with beer out of a bottle and my Xbox 360, which isn’t that bad of a compromise.

Drink n Game via Uncrate

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Hook up a webcam and microphone to your PlayStation 3, and Sony will figure out just how much you’re enjoying that content playing in front of you. Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) applied for a patent for emotional tracking software, a system that senses a combination of body gestures, sounds you’re making, facial detection, and group interactions to accurately determine your emotional reaction to a game or TV program. Then, that data can be sent over the network for all to see.

Sony is concentrating on laughter for this application, but the concept can also detect sadness, excitement, anger, joy, interest, and boredom. Considering that Sony already has face detection inside its cheapest digital cameras, the idea of determining emotions via software is not that far-fetched.

Besides using laughter as a controller for a video game, this tech could be useful in a social media setting, gathering “enjoyment data” that could be compiled from millions of viewers. That could end up as a sortable emotional rating for a TV show you’re considering downloading. We can also imagine this as another step toward Big Brother watching everything we do, carting us away for not enjoying a certain political speech.

Silicon Era, via Kurzweil AI

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A Chinese man has resorted to building robots after a number of years of poor harvest and now make’s his living building robots. Aside from them being completely amazing, this is also a great video on account of his wife’s commentary about halfway through. Anyhow, check this out !



Another video cou…


By: randofo

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Installation artists Mags Harries and Lajos Héder have completed the largest public art installation for Austin, Texas: a set of 15, 30-foot-tall “sunflowers” studded with solar power petals. The flowers use the energy gathered during the day to power blue LEDs at night, illuminating the bike path they flank. On top of that, they toss about 15 kilowatts of extra energy into the grid daily.

The project was originally part of a call to block the unsightly truck docks around the back of a strip mall, and is titled “Sunflowers, An Electric Garden.” We have to wonder how the residents of Austin find the piece, though — the start of something great, or is it just an eyesore?

Click through for a shot of the solar sunflowers at night.

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O_O Check out this giant pitcher plant from the Phillipines.



You’ve heard of venus flytraps? Regular pitcher plants? Small fry compared to this behemoth. Nepenthes attenboroughii (named after Sir David Attenborough) is way bigger than those relatively tame plants, and dissolves its prey with &quot…


By: Lithium Rain

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Sure, you could just throw your trash away. But then how would you let all of that pent up aggression out? Not in a healthy way, I bet. A healthy way like beating up a bag full of trash.

The Do Box punching bag is a mix between a punching bag and a garbage bag. Fill it up with compost or garbage, hang it up, and go to town. When you’re done, empty it into the trash and fill it up with new trash. Makes perfect sense!

Droog via Nerd Approved

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Meet young Buster, king of the ball game. He’s very young and fit for his age and loves to play and go for long walks so he’d suit an equally active owner.

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Sasha’s an outdoor girl and would be happiest in a home where she can live outside in a large kennel with a run. However, she still loves to be a family dog – she’s very friendly, plays football and loves her walks. She likes most other dogs but she hasn’t lived with young children.

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SimCity players will recognize the term “Arco.” That’s short for arcology, a massive building that contains all the elements of a city within one structure. Now three ambitious architectural firms have designed a 1200-foot-tall arco especially for New Orleans. Dubbed NOAH (New Orleans Arcology Habitat), this massive triangular-shaped building would be as strong as those leaking New Orleans levees were weak.

The proposal places this 30 million-square-foot monstrosity on the Mississippi riverfront, just across from the central business district of New Orleans. Atop the multi-cavity all which will attempt to be hurricane proof, there will be 20,000 residential units, three hotels, 1,000,000 square feet of commercial space, plenty of cultural facilities and offices, a 20,000 healthcare clinic, and of course, just for fun, a trio of casinos.

The green structure will be bristling with solar panels, water turbines, wind turbines, fresh water recovery, and a passive solar glazing system. Now all these optimistic architects need to do is find somebody with enough money to build such a fantastic utopia. Click Continue Reading to see a video demo of this magnificent city of the future:

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Finally, the iPhone doesn’t have to have an inferiority complex because of the lack of immediate notification of Gmail messages. That’s because GPush is now available on the Apple App Store for $0.99, letting you know immediately when you received an e-mail, rather than delivering you an e-mail at whatever interval you decided to pull it from the server. Does this make the iPhone just like a BlackBerry for Gmail users? We installed GPush on our iPhone 3GS, and here’s a mini review:

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Heading off to school can be all fun and games if you know who your roommates are gonna be. Think you can trust your new roomy? What about your roomy’s creepy friends? Not to send you off to school a sniveling paranoid mess, but do you really know who you’re living with?

To help put your paranoia to rest, ThinkGeek has developed a laptop safe to hold your precious new Airbook, with room for some cash, small electronics and more. It bolts onto the furniture in your dorm, so unless they’re stealing the whole bed, no one is getting your valuables. The DormVault ($80) will hold a 17″ laptop and more, and it bolts from the inside to your furniture with included mounting brackets, bolts and wingnuts; it also comes with a combination lock.

Cheaper than a Rottweiler, and less likely to get you kicked out of the dorm, the DormVault is an extra layer of protection. It ain’t Fort Knox, but it might make roving hands move down the hall to a more accessable source. Now go buy you and your new roomy a pizza to start off the school year right.

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Braille labelers have been around for a while, but they’re clumsy and prone to mistakes. A design team from MIT has produced the 6dot Braille Labeler. This portable embosser electronically produces adhesive labels using a standard Braille keyboard.

The 6dot Labeler just won the People’s Choice James Dyson award. It’s portable with a neck strap and shaped to rest on the table or lap, with an automatic cutter and a tab that helps visually-impaired users peel the backing off the adhesive tape.

This is a few steps beyond a prototype and has already been looked at by two companies to take into development. A simple design for something most of us take for granted.

Via Fast Company

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Sharp has unveiled another unique innovation for the Japanese cell phone market called the Mirumo 934SH. The unit’s most distinctive feature is its odd double-sided display (“miru mo” in Japanese meaning “see also”). When the waterproof handset is open the user can use the standard full color display to carry out normal functions, but when closed the outer display offers a low-power, black and white screen that has the ability to show off any number of applications and animations.

The company is calling the innovation a “memory liquid crystal” display because it uses only a small fraction of the power consumed by the phone’s main display and remembers your most often used display screens. Unfortunately, this is yet another Japan-only handset, but at least now you can salivate over what may lie in the future for U.S. cell phones.

Via IT Media

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A successful NASA flight test on Monday, Aug. 17, demonstrated how a spacecraft returning to Earth can use an inflatable heat shield to slow and protect…

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Since JetBlue offered a 599$ ticket for a month of unlimited travel a few days ago it was obligatory to use that to do something AWESOME! Hence the Two Hands Project.



Two Hands Project is a Documentary on Maker/Hackerspaces that will be shot in a month during a whirlwind tour of as many USA spaces …


By: lamedust

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