Ewee-PT to rival the Segway

The Segway didn’t actually capture the hearts of most commuters but no doubt that the innovative vehicle is very useful. The Ewee-PT joins the bandwagon by offering the same function. It works similarly by allowing the rider to balance on his own, lean to accelerate or decelerate, and control with a joystick.

The wheels are smaller than the Segway’s but those reduced the cost of production making the Ewee-PT more affordable at $1,039.
(techfever)

The Other End of The 70 Gigapixel Budapest Photo

You've seen the 70-gigapixel picture of Budapest. Here's a picture of the gear that took the shot. That's two Sony A900s with massive 400mm Minolta lenses attached. Combined, these guys took 20,000 images to create the world's largest photo. [Wired]

Tomorrow’s Skyline Blends Glass And Concrete With A Liberal Helping Of Green

From green roofs to tree filled corridors to entire high rise floors left to plants and wildlife, forward looking architects are combining technology and imagination to bring nature into modern homes and buildings.

Greening your home or building can have a host of benefits. For Anthi Grapsa and Konstantinos Chalaris' entry in the Piraeus Tower Competition 2010, modern agricultural techniques are incorporated on the upper floors in order to resolve the problematic green space to inhabitant ratio of the town. In MVRDV's "Pushed Slab" energy efficient office building, balconies and terraces will house potted trees, offering employees a relaxing place to socialize.

An expansive green roof like that of Studio Shift's Stadt Krone concept provides a vast area to utilize for agriculture, below which thousands of city inhabitants can reside. Other green roofs, like the Vivanta Hotel's, are more economical, providing reduced heating and cooling needs for the building below, along with a mechanism for capturing rainwater to later be used for irrigating the grassy roof.

Above is a taste of some current and possible future designs that embrace nature as much as they do technology and functionality. [Arch Daily]

DIY Wearable Computer Turns You Into a Cyborg

Someday humans and computers will meld together to create cyborgs. But instead of waiting for it, Martin Magnusson, a Swedish researcher and entrepreneur, has taken the first step and created a wearable computer that can be slung across the body.

Magnusson has hacked a pair of head-mounted display glasses and combined it with a homebrewed machine based on a open source Beagleboard single computer. Packed into a CD case and slung across the shoulder messenger-bag style, he is ready to roll.

A computer is a window to the virtual world, says Magnusson.

"But as soon as I get up and about, that window closes and I'm stuck within the limits of physical reality," he says. "Wearable computers make it possible to keep the window open. All the time."

Magnusson's idea is interesting though one step short of integrating a machine inside the body. In 2008, a Canadian film maker Rob Spence decided to embed a tiny video camera into his prosthetic left eye. Spence who is still working on the project hopes to someday record everything around him as he sees it and lifecast it.

For his wearable computer, Magnusson is using a pair of Myvu glasses that slide on like a pair of sunglasses but have a tiny video screen built into the lens. A Beagleboard running Angstrom Linux and a Plexgear mini USB hub that drives the Bluetooth adapter and display forms the rest of this rather simple machine. Four 2700 mAh AA batteries are used to power the USB hub. Magnusson has used a foldable Nokia keyboard for input and is piping internet connectivity through Bluetooth tethering to an iPhone in his pocket.

Magnusson says he wants to use the wearable computer to "augment" his memory.

"By having my to-do list in the corner of my eye, I always remember the details of my schedule," he says.

Check out photos of his gear:

The innards of the homebrewed machine are glued to a CD case. The CD case is slung across the shoulder by attaching it to a strap using velcro.

What the homebrewed computer looks like:

Photos: Susanna Nilsson

IBM Creates the Most Detailed Map of the Brain To Date

In a paper published earlier this week, IBM researchers made huge strides in mapping the architecture of the brain, charting three times as many connections as any previous study. Where does such a map lead? The future of cognitive computing.

Specifically, the study traced long-distance connections in the brain of a Macaque monkey, the "interstate highways" which transmit information between distant areas of the brain. Said one of the researchers:

We can now gain unprecedented insight into how information travels and is processed across the brain...a stepping stone to both fundamental and applied research in neuroscience and cognitive computing.

Their map depicts 6,602 long-distance connections between 383 different regions of the brain, allowing researchers to grasp how and where the brain sends information better than ever before.

Such data will allow scientists to more accurately perform theoretical analysis—the same type of projections that optimize search engines or track social networks—which will be essential in developing computer chips that can keep up with our brain's immense computational power and navigate its complex architecture.

And of course it's fairly mindblowing to remind yourself that all of this work is being done to chart the vast, mysterious region existing inside your noggin right now. [KurzweilAI]

Small Fuel Cell Olympics

Do you know the future? Do you know what will happen during the Helinski Olympics of 2030? Finland will be there, I would hope. Finland will be represented by a small fuel cell powered vehicle that’ll offer tours around the whole arena of sights showing off the fabulousness of indigenous Finland. See Finland’s entirety in this fantastic environmentally sound, tiny cute car. Made from local glass, wool felt, recycled bio plastic, bent birch plywood, and ceramics.

Designer: Miika Heikkinen

The Most Beautiful Way to Clean-Up Space Junk

Space junk is everything from spent rocket upper-stages that measure meters across, to lost bags of tools let go by careless astronauts, to shattered Chinese satellites to flecks of paint moving at 25 times the speed of sound. Under the wrong circumstances any piece of junk could kill a perfectly good satellite or even an unlucky space-walker. How should we prevent dead satellites from adding to this dangerous cloud of debris? 

Dr Kristen Gates has one idea, and it's beautiful and simple. It's dubbed GOLD—the Gossamer Orbit Lowering Device—and it's just been revealed at the "Artificial and Natural Space Debris" session of the AIAA Astrodynamics Specialists Conference.

GOLD is not much more than a football-field sized balloon (made of gossamer-thin but super-tough material, a little like solar sails) that is flown into orbit deflated in a suitcase-sized box and then fastened to a dead satellite. It's then inflated to maximum size, and the huge bulk of the balloon massively increases the atmospheric drag that satellites experience up there in the void. This drag is due to the rare molecules of gas that hover around above the fringe of the atmosphere, and it's the same drag that resulted in the premature deorbiting of the famous Skylab satellite in the 1970s, when the mechanics of orbital drag weren't as well understood. The drag acts to slow a satellite in its orbital path, and then simple orbital mechanics means the satellite descends into the atmosphere where the denser air heats it to the point it burns up.

GOLD has numerous advantages: It's cheap, it can be built into rocket upper-stages before they're launched so that new rockets never pose a space junk threat, and its proposed material is tough enough that even though the balloon envelope will definitely be damaged by space junk itself, it'll never tear and generate more junk by itself.

(gizmodo)