Quick, what can you cook using a mango, a block of Swiss cheese, a jar of extra spicy salsa, and some celery? While it can tricky to come up with a way of combining the ingredients on hand to create a tasty meal, the Smart Fridge from designer Ashley Legg aims to provide both inspiration and guidance.

A touch screen panel mounted in the door lets you enter the ingredients when you buy them, and delete them as you use them, thereby creating an inventory of what’s inside. It then uses this information to come up with recipe suggestions, and can even deliver step-by-step spoken directions to guide you through the cooking process.

This all sounds great as far as it goes, although manually inputting the data seems a bit tedious. What if it had a scanner that could read the register tape from your shopping trip? That would make things much easier, and would allow it to include non-refrigerated items in your overall inventory.

Good concept, but I think it needs a little tweaking.

Yanko Design

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Navistar, Inc. today announced that one of the nation’s most environmentally sustainable cities and a leading advocate for energy-efficient transportation.—Portland, Ore.—will be the initial launch market for Navistar’s eStar™ truck—the first full-production, purpose-built all-electric truck.

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Bombardier Transportation and the Augsburg Transport Authority (Stadtwerke Augsburg Verkehrs GmbH) have signed a cooperation agreement to install the contactless and catenary-free BOMBARDIER PRIMOVE system for trams as a pilot project in the city of Augsburg.

“We are delighted to extend our long and successful partnership with the Augsburg Transport Authority to include this innovative development in electric mobility. The PRIMOVE catenary-free technology is now mature for installation into a demanding urban tram network. Over time catenary-free operation will become a standard element of light rail systems and we are confident that PRIMOVE will be the clear choice for many cities in the future”, said Eran Gartner, President, Systems Division, Bombardier Transportation.

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DARPA and Dallas’s Southern Methodist University have teamed up to build a better retinal scanner. Ideally you’d want someone standing still, looking straight forward, and scan the full eye. Now? DARPA and SMU claim they could possibly scan all the eyes in an unaware crowd.

The system is called Smart-Iris, and it builds upon years of research done at SMU originally meant to improve the cameras on stuff such as aerial drones and soldiers’ helmets. The new lens is able to combat against common retinal-scanning pitfalls such as glare and dim lighting or obstructions like eyelashes. The real kicker, though, is that the system only needs to scan a portion of the eye to get a read.

That means that even if you were on the move and not looking at the sensor, it could theoretically gather enough data as it needs within a matter of seconds. “Ideally, when you walk down a hallway, no matter where your head is looking, the device can grab your eyeball and detect what it needs to,” SMU professor Marc Christensen said.

What would the technology be used for? Well, eye scanning, of course, but it could also photograph pages on a book with exceptional clarity, or detect counterfeit cash. As for other, more Big Brother-ish applications, Professor Christensen told Wired, “You can let your imagination fly with that one.”

Via Wired

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