Toyota i-Road – a fully-enclosed, tilting, electric three-wheeler

Welcome to the newsletter for Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine. These are the headlines for March the 11th, 2013. Toyota shows the i-Road – a fully-enclosed, tilting, electric three-wheeled competitor for the motorcycle Toyota rocked the automotive world a few hours ago with full details of a new form of transport it will exhibit at the Geneva Motor Show which begins tomorrow. Toyota's i-ROAD is a fully-enclosed, two-seater, three-wheeled, fully-electric, Personal Mobility Vehicle (PMV) which looks to be more a competitor for the motorcycle than anything we have seen before from the world's largest automotive manufacturer. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Don't judge a book by its title: The Ferrari LaFerrari (F70) hybrid hypercar The 288 GTO, the F40, the F50, the Enzo, the ... LaFerrari? They really want us to call it that? It's not the strongest model name, but Ferrari's latest creation is its most powerful, technological masterpiece to date. Flirting with 1,000 horsepower, the Ferrari LaFerrari isn't your typical green car, but it is Ferrari's first production hybrid and its most efficient car ever. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Beyond Google Glass: Creating next generation augmented reality Todd Humphreys and his students at the University of Texas in Austin are tired of waiting for augmented reality that meets the promise of the technology we've been hearing about and seeing in science fiction for years now. So they set out to build it themselves, and presented a very rough prototype for the first time at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW) in Austin on Friday. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile AgustaWestland unveils world's first electric tilt rotor aircraft The engineers at UK-based aerospace firm AgustaWestland are no slouches when it comes to tilt rotor aircraft, having recently developed the intriguing commercial-use AW609. It seems, however, that they've been holding out on us ... over a year and a half ago, they began secretly test-flying what they have now publicly unveiled as being the world's first electric tilt rotor airplane. It's known simply as Project Zero. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Tricycle House pedal-powered RV offers lots of home comforts The idea of living life on the road in an RV can be appealing. Unfortunately, most RV's aren't very environmentally friendly, nor are they self-sufficient. However, the Tricycle House isn't like most RV's, as it relies on pedal power to move between destinations, and boasts several pieces of clever folding furniture to provide those much-needed home comforts. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Not a fan of SimCity's restrictive DRM? Civitas might be the answer The long-awaited new version of SimCity has finally released, and the launch has been filled with plenty of problems for players. The always-online DRM is causing major server issues, leaving many players facing long waits or unable to play the game at all. With that in mind, a group of gamers have taken to Kickstarter to introduce a project called Civitas – a DRM-free city planning game. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Modular Teal campers and shelters hit the market The modular, build-it-yourself Teal camper is officially available for purchase. Teal debuted its first model, the Tail Feather, at the Colorado RV, Sports, Boat and Travel Show last week and has begun production on the camper, which features a few structural changes from when we last saw it. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Lamborghini spits fiery venom with the Veneno For years, Lamborghini has been looking to the skies for inspiration. Fighter jets have inspired such releases as the Reventón, Sesto Elemento and even the Aventador. The all-new Veneno takes sharp, angular jet-inspired design to an extreme level. Lamborghini will build only a handful of these hardcore racecars-for-the-road. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Self-sustaining "farmscrapers" proposed for Shenzhen As one of the most densely populated cities in China, Shenzhen has been dealing with a sudden population boom for years now, leaving urban planners scrambling for innovative building designs that manage resources and space more efficiently. There have been a few unusual proposals, but the latest design from French architectural firm, Vincent Callebaut Architects, probably takes the cake. The group recently revealed its concept for "Asian Cairns," a series of six sustainable buildings that resemble a stack of pebbles and produce their own food. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Futuristic Russian hybrid delayed until 2015 The launch of Russia's first hybrid car, the ë-mobile (often called Yo-mobile or Yo-mobil) has been delayed until 2015 which, on the plus side, is a year more befitting the prototype's futuristic looks. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile KTM X-Bow GT – full technical details revealed KTM has displayed the GT version of its X-Bow roadster for the first time at the 2013 Geneva Auto Show. While the previously released images revealed that the new X-Bow would get a practicality boost over the X-Bow R on which it is based with the addition of a windscreen, side windows and doors, we now have full technical details on the Austrian manufacturer's latest street-legal go-kart. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Improved ion engines will open up the outer Solar System The phrase "engage the ion drive" still has the ring of a line from Star Wars, but these engines have been used in space missions for more than four decades and remain the subject of ongoing research. Ion engines have incredible fuel efficiency, but their low thrust requires very long operating times ... and therein lies the rub. To date, erosion within such an engine seriously limits its operational lifetime. Now a group of researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has developed a new design that largely eliminates this erosion, opening the gates for higher thrust and more efficient drives for manned and unmanned missions to the reaches of the Solar System. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Researchers find molecular switch to make old brains young again It's no secret that juvenile brains are more malleable and able to learn new things faster than adult ones – just ask any adult who has tried to learn a new language. That malleability also enables younger brains to recover more quickly from trauma. Researchers at Yale University have now found a way to effectively turn back the clock and make an old brain young again. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Apple considering April release for iPad 5, iPad mini 2? Apple surprised everyone last October when the iPad 4 arrived just seven months after the iPad 3. That begged the question: would the company release the iPad 5 in the device's typical March/April timeslot? Recently, all signs pointed to "no." A new report, though, says that Apple is still considering launching new iPads within the next couple of months. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile When scooter and pogo stick combine, JumpX is born Remember a few years ago when Razor scooters were the thing every kid wanted to have? While the trend may have died in the mainstream, there are still dedicated scooter riders out there, and a quick trip to any skatepark will likely yield just as many scooter riders as skateboarders. A company called Fuzion Scooters is looking to mix things up a bit by adding a little bit of pogo stick action to the JumpX scooter. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Toyota rips the lid off the FT-86 We've been following Toyota's FT-86 from its concept days to its production debut as the GT86. Now it's gone topless, with Toyota unveiling the FT-86 Open Concept Geneva Motor Show. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Supermassive black hole found to rotate near speed of light The rotation of a supermassive black hole (SBH) has been definitively measured for the first time by combining x-ray data obtained by the x-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton (soft x-rays) and NuSTAR (hard x-rays). The SBH at the center of a galaxy called NGC 1365 was found to be spinning at 84 percent of the maximum speed allowed by general relativity – or roughly speaking, the edge of the black hole is rotating at 84 percent of the speed of light. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile SQUID spawns vehicle-stopping Pit-BUL and NightHawk devices We've all seen movies where a strip of retractable spikes at a checkpoint tears up a vehicle's tires, or where a roadside cop throws a chain of linked spikes across the highway in front of a car. While such devices are pretty effective, there's always room for improvement. That's where the Pit-BUL and NightHawk car-stopping devices come into play. Both devices are based on a single other existing product, known as the Safe, Quick, Undercarriage Immobilization Device ... or SQUID, for short. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Quantum "spooky action at a distance" travels at least 10,000 times faster than light Quantum entanglement, one of the odder aspects of quantum theory, links the properties of particles even when they are separated by large distances. When a property of one of a pair of entangled particles is measured, the other "immediately" settles down into a state compatible with that measurement. So how fast is "immediately"? According to research by Prof. Juan Yin and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, the lower limit to the speed associated with entanglement dynamics – or "spooky action at a distance" – is at least 10,000 times faster than light. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile Nikon COOLPIX A: hands-on with the latest large-sensor compact camera After the success of the Fujifilm X100, the Sony RX100 and the Canon G1 X, Nikon has finally embraced the idea of putting a large sensor in a compact-sized camera. The result is the Nikon COOLPIX A – which packs a 16.2-megapixel DX-format sensor and fixed 18.5mm lens into a surprisingly small body. Gizmag got to spent some hands-on time with the newly-announced camera ahead of its release. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile The Rolls-Royce Wraith – the most powerful Rolls ever After a couple of months of drip feeding silhouette images of its new model Wraith, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has finally turned the lighting up on the new fastback at the 2013 Geneva Motor Show. Powered by a V12 engine married to an 8-speed automatic transmission, the Wraith produces a refined 624 hp (465 kW) and 800 Nm of torque from 1,500 rpm, which outdoes the Ghost's 563 hp (420 kW) and 780 Nm of torque, making the new coupe the most powerful Rolls ever. Read on Desktop or Read on Mobile You are receiving this email because you signed up for our daily newsletter at http://www.gizmag.com. If you would like to switch to our daily newsletter, click here If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe. COPYRIGHT GIZMAG (C) 2013