James Holloway

Clerkenwell Design Week kicked off in London on Tuesday. Though primarily catering to fans of light shades and soft office furnishings, there are some interesting and innovative gems lurking among the event's 60-odd showrooms. Among them was Ying Chang's Sketch Objects, a series of paper plates, bowls and vases waterproofed on the inside with resin.  Read More

They may not make for the showiest videos, but some of the most interesting problems in robotics are to do with the subtleties of human interaction. Even something as apparently simple as receiving an object poses great difficulty, but it's a problem that will need to be solved before multipurpose robots are ready for the home. By building a database of captured human motion, Disney Research and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology are making strides towards building a robot that can take an object handed to it by a human.  Read More

"Imagine opening a hatch in a submarine under water. The water will flow into the submarine with enormous force. It is precisely this energy potential we want to utilize." This is how German engineer Rainer Schramm describes his idea for storing energy under the sea. By using surplus energy to pump water out of a tank at the seabed, the water is simply let back in again when there's an energy shortfall, driving turbines as it rushes in. The deeper the tank, the more power is generated.  Read More

With eight days of his already successful Kickstarter campaign still remaining, John O'Nolan has cited the uncertainty surrounding Yahoo's newly-announced US$1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr as a reason to back his open source, non-profit blogging platform, Ghost.  Read More

It's seventy years to the day since No. 617 Squadron of the Royal Air Force returned from Operation Chastise, in which specially designed bouncing bombs were dropped in an attack on the Möhne, Sorpe and Eder Dams in Germany during World War II. Though the bouncing bomb is without doubt the invention for which Barnes Wallis is most renowned (thanks in no small part to its depiction in the film Dambusters) Wallis' other work before, during, and after World War II was of great importance, and in some cases, far ahead of its time. Gizmag spoke to Dr. Andrew Nahum, Principal Curator of Technology at the Science Museum where many of Wallis' papers are archived, about swing-wing aircraft, earthquake bombs, improbable mathematics lessons, and the geodetic Wellington Bomber.  Read More

The architectural designs of Tom Wiscombe are overtly futuristic, to the point that were you to drop his concepts into the depictions of the London and San Francisco of the year 2259 in Star Trek Into Darkness, they wouldn't look out of place. His Lo Monaco House almost resembles a futuristic shuttle on a launchpad, yet the influences for this design are entirely removed from the realm of space fantasy – according to Wiscombe himself, that is.  Read More

The app for Philips' smartphone-controlled color-changing LED light bulb, Hue, has been updated with a number of well-thought out additions which multiply the possibilities for automating its behavior in all sorts of interesting and useful ways.  Read More