Have you ever tried changing lenses on a DSLR, in a situation where you weren’t able to put the camera down? The problem is that it essentially requires three hands. You need two hands to twist off the old lens and put its rear protective cap on, and to un-rear-cap the new lens and twist it onto the camera – your non-existent third hand, meanwhile, is required to hold the camera body. Because photographers are in reality limited to two hands, they instead perform a sort of awkward juggling act, in which they risk dropping the camera or one of the lenses. The Backer Capper, however, is a product-in-development that’s designed to make the task considerably easier. Read More

Two hundred and fifty years ago, brewer Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease for his St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin, Ireland. To commemorate this event, the Guinness company could have rolled out a stretch limousine, but it decided to go one better by launching a “deep-sea bar” in the chilly waters of the Baltic off Stockholm, Sweden. Designed by London-based Jump Studios, the modified tourist submarine was commissioned as part of the Guinness Sea Experience competition, that included an underwater trip inside the Guinness sub as a prize. Read More

For three decades, the annual GTI-Treffen held at the Austrian Lake Wörthersee’ has been one of the highlights of the European calendar for Volkswagen enthusiasts. It is increasingly a venue where Volkswagen communes with its closest fans and presents an array of concepts to assess market viability. This year it showed five new cars: the Golf GTI Cabriolet which had debuted at Geneva International Motor Show, plus four completely new concepts - the Polo R-WRC, Polo WRC Street, Golf GTI Black Dynamic and Golf GTI White Concept. Read More

In the most economically excluded regions of the world about 1.5 million children die of dehydration every year. When patients get to hospital for IV therapy, there may be not enough staff to monitor the drip, and the child may die from receiving the wrong amount of fluid, which is also potentially fatal in cases of over-hydration. In order to help health care workers in those places, engineering students at Rice University have developed a prototype of a technically simple yet ingenuous IV drip system that adds an element of automation to the process. Read More

Designed for the utmost portability, designaffairs studio's FLYM folding portable speakers are made for any device with a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack without need of additional power. Read More

Mitsubishi Motors has today announced that it is to enter two electric cars into this year's Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, taking place this July. In addition to the electric production i-MiEV taking part, Mitsubishi is entering its i-MiEV Evolution, a prototype developed from i-MiEV technology, purpose built for the Pikes Peak event. And compared to the production model it's a wee beastie. Read More

It's been a good news week for those suffering debilitating spinal injuries. First we looked at a breakthrough that enables quadriplegic patients to move robotic arms using just their thoughts and now, in related news, surgeons at the Washington University School of Medicine have reported the successful rerouting of working nerves in the upper arms of a quadriplegic patient, restoring some hand function. Read More

Last year, a team of U.S. researchers applied the pruning shears to computer chips to trim away rarely used portions of digital circuits. The result was chips that made the occasional mistake, but were twice as fast, used half as much energy, and were half the size of the original. Now, building on the same “less is more” idea, the researchers have built an “inexact” prototype silicon chip they claim is at least 15 times more efficient than current technology in terms of speed, energy consumption and size. Read More

Designed to overcome the frustration of listening to phone calls in noisy environments, Kyocera's new URBANO PROGRESSO smartphone provides an alternative to the traditional speaker by transmitting sound through vibrations in the handset’s display screen. Read More