Crowdfunding push for EZ-EV open source electric kit car

Welcome to the newsletter for Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine. These are the headlines for January the 22nd, 2013. Crowdfunding push for EZ-EV open source electric kit car Electrical engineer Gary Krysztopik has been driving his self-built, open-framed, three-wheeled electric "hotrod" on the roads and highways of San Antonio (TX) for over three years now, but folks still can't help staring as he zooms past. While also working on gas-to-electric conversions (including a VW Bug and a Porsche Carrera), he's been busy refining and tweaking the design for his "battery box on wheels" and is now preparing to release the EZ-EV car as open source plans, build-it-yourself kits and complete vehicles. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile NASA team pushing towards thermal nuclear propulsion systems Nuclear-powered rocket engines are not new. In the 1960s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union developed and tested thermal nuclear rockets fitted with flight-worthy components. However, Project Rover and NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Nuclear Rocket Application) programs were defunded in the early 1970s just before test flights were to start. Now, as part of the Advanced Exploration Systems program at NASA, the Nuclear Cryogenic Propulsion Stage team is tackling a three-year project to demonstrate the viability of and to evaluate materials for thermal nuclear propulsion systems for use in future deep space missions. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Print your own InMoov animatronic robot Now that 3D printing technology is taking off, some truly unique projects are beginning to emerge from all sorts of talented people. Take Gael Langevin, a French sculptor and model marker who has spent the better part of the last year designing and engineering his own animatronic robot called InMoov. And it's open source, so if you're feeling confident, you can try to build one yourself using a list of off-the-shelf electronics and parts he shares on 3D file sharing site Thingiverse. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Aston Martin unveils Centenary Edition Vanquish Last week, on January 15, Aston Martin celebrated its centenary. To mark the occasion, the car maker unveiled its Centenary Edition Vanquish. Billed by Aston Martin as the "ultimate GT car," this bespoke version of the luxury coupe will be available worldwide, though only 100 vehicles will be built. The company has also announced that similar centenary editions of the V8 Vantage, DB9 and Rapide are in the offing. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Footsies-friendly Bottlebench social garden furniture Designer Maarten Pauwelyn has created a social outdoor seating set that looks perfect for long lazy days playing footsies in the garden with friends. Named "Bottlebench," the outdoor setting features five reclined seats that are all fixed to a central point. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile ASB GlassFloor replaces painted lines with LEDs Multi-purpose sporting courts can be a jumble of different colored lines and markings that can be confusing to spectators and players alike. Similar to LEDSSPORT's Pulastic LED Court, the GlassFloor flooring from German company ASB uses LEDs embedded in the floor to display the line markings for different sports at the flick of a switch. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile "Shareway" presents a vision of transport infrastructure in 2030 American-based studio Höweler + Yoon Architecture has developed an intriguing concept for modern urban infrastructure between Boston and Washington called "Boswash." Central to the design of this imagined mega-region is the firm's "Shareway" design – a bundled transport concept that seeks to redress the nightmare of the urban commute by connecting public and individual transport to a single artery along the 450 mile (724 km) route of the existing Interstate 95. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Researchers create LED that produces warm white light from a single phosphor Researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) have come up with a solution to the cold, bluish look of white LED (light-emitting diode) lights currently available. By creating a new lighting-emitting material, or phosphor, the researchers claim to have developed what could be the world's first LED that produces a warm white light from a single source of emission. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile 3rd Person View lets you star in your own action videos If you like to shoot point-of-view videos of your "extreme" endeavors, perhaps you sometimes get people saying "How come we never get to see you in any of these?". Well, you can address that by using something like the BoomPro or Go360 – both devices suspend your camera from your helmet, allowing it to get a shot of you. Soon, however, you may be able to get something a bit fancier, in the form of the 3rd Person View. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Google rumored to be launching 2nd generation Nexus 10 Though its sales haven't approached iPad levels, Google's Nexus 10 is a beast. It has the sharpest display of any tablet, one of the fastest mobile processors, and a US$400 starting price. But, impressive as its hardware is, the Nexus 10 isn't perfect. Google reportedly realizes this, and is ready to improve on its formula with a 2nd-gen Nexus 10. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Nanobubbles used to kill and treat different cells at the same time U.S. scientists are developing a technique that will target and kill cancer cells while simultaneously treating others in the same sample. Centered on fine-tuning the use of cancer destroying nanobubbles, the research holds promise for treating cancer patients in a way that's far more targeted than chemotherapy. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile NASA sends Mona Lisa to the Moon High art recently met high tech as NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) received an image of the Mona Lisa via laser. Traveling about 240,000 miles (386,000 km), the image was sent to the probe in lunar orbit using a laser beamed from NASA's Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging (NGSLR) station at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland as a demonstration of lasers as a deep-space communications tool. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Specially-coated cotton collects water from desert fog – and releases it as liquid In arid places where fog occurs overnight, some people utilize so-called "fog harvesters" to acquire fresh water. These are typically pieces of netting that collect fog droplets, which then roll down into a container below. Various researchers have tried to increase the efficiency of these harvesters, such as by making them from a combination of hydrophilic (water-absorbing) and hydrophobic (water-repelling) materials. Now, a team of scientists have done something a little different – they've created a cotton-based fog-harvesting material that switches between being entirely hydrophilic and entirely hydrophobic. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Real-world Tetris: Hasbro to release Jenga Tetris and Bop It! Tetris If you've as much as looked at a computer in the past 30 years, there's a good chance you've played Tetris. The block rotating and slotting video game has been ported to almost every machine imaginable, and is played 35 million times per day online. But Tetris is about to break out into the real world, with toy firm Hasbro announcing a licensing deal which will see it release multiple face-to-face games based on the brand. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile BMW-designed bobsled runs its first race Last November, BMW DesignworksUSA announced that it was in the process of designing a new state-of-the-art two-man bobsled for the US Bobsled Team. At the time, only a vague teaser sketch of the sled was available. Now that one of the prototypes has been raced, however, we get to see some actual photos – and the thing looks pretty sharp. Its performance is also promising. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile One hundred Harvard Kilobots swarm together Robots by the dozen are prohibitively expensive, so actually testing how large swarms would work together is often limited to computer simulations. That's where Harvard's Kilobots are beginning to bear fruit – at a cost of US$14 each in batches of a thousand, they're a tenth the cost of their cheapest competitor. At such bargain-basement prices, Michael Rubenstein, Christian Ahler, and Radhika Nagpal at the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group have begun to build their own little robot army. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Hobbyist builds working replica of Iron Man's laser gauntlet Given that most real-life superheroes don't have the budget of Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne, you would assume that their gadgetry wouldn't be quite on par with what we're used to seeing in the movies. German cyber weapons hobbyist Patrick Priebe recently dropped us a line, however, to tell us about his latest homebuilt creation – a working laser gauntlet, just like the one made famous by a certain Iron Man. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Sony announces the Xperia Tablet Z – the world's thinnest and lightest 10-inch tablet Sony has announced a new premium device, known as the Xperia Tablet Z. Unveiled on the company's Japanese mobile site early this morning, the tablet features a number of high-end specs and, like its namesake Xperia Z smartphone, is fully waterproof. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Avoid snooping UAVs with a Stealth Wear hoodie Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or "drones") are fast becoming an ever-present eye in the sky, potentially granting governments greater strike and surveillance capabilities than even Orwell's fictional Big Brother could hope to wield. In response, NYC artist Adam Harvey has created a series of garments which claim to reduce the effectiveness of UAVs. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Sandables mold into any shape for precise woodwork Finding the perfect tool for any job can sometimes be a daunting task, especially when that job requires precision, such as with woodworking. So what could be a better tool than one that you can mold specifically for the task at hand? That's why several collaborators recently created Sandables, a set of sanding tools that can be reshaped like gritty modeling clay for more accurate woodworking. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Mathematical model predicts Hollywood blockbusters With Hollywood movie studios increasingly gambling astronomical sums of money on the next big thing, they might want to pay attention to the work being done by Akira Ishii at Tottori University. His research group claims to have developed a mathematical equation that combines advertising, word-of-mouth, and social networks to predict if a movie will be successful. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Hut-to-Hut: an "eco-hut" fit for the ecotourist? With its Hut-to-Hut prototype, Norwegian architectural outfit Rintala Eggertsson, with the help of students from Trondheim's University of Technology, has set out to design accommodation with the conscientious/pious (delete according to your preference) ecotourist in mind. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Boeing to upgrade survivor locator devices for U.S. Airforce Boeing has been awarded contracts worth US$13.6 million to upgrade the U.S. Air Force's Combat Survivor Evader Locator (CSEL) radio and the CSEL ultrahigh frequency (UHF) base stations that support it. The purpose of the contract is to bring the personal survival radio and the CSEL network in line with the latest Information Assurance standards to protect them against jamming and other interference by hostile forces. 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