James Holloway
RobotLabs has launched a KickStarter campaign to develop a robot lawnmower. Though that may not sound particularly new, the company claims other automated lawnmowers aren't true robots because they don't adhere to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. In other words, they're not safe enough, RobotLabs claims. RobotLabs claims its SmartMow is different, shutting down almost instantaneously when people or animals get close. Read More
Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill Architecture has unveiled plans for Imperial Tower, which would become Mumbai's tallest building and surely one of the world's most slender skyscrapers, should it come to be built. Read More
Three years ago, Google's Eric Schmidt announced that every two days, more information is created than was the case from the dawn of humanity up to 2003. According to IMS Research, by 2020 web-connected devices will create 2.5 quintillion bytes of information every day, with 22 billion internet of things devices up-belching information to the web. To marshal all that data, IBM has come up with a platform it calls MessageSight, which will allow any one organization to pool information from up to a million sensors and devices, at a rate of 13 million messages per second. Read More
NASA's autonomous, solar-powered explorer GROVER has been kitted out with ground-penetrating radar to take to Greenland's ice sheet on Friday. There the robot will spend a month analyzing the accumulation of snow and how this contributes to the ice sheet over time. The scientists involved hope to identify a new layer of ice that has formed since summer 2012, an unusually warm summer which saw melting across 97 percent of the area of the ice sheet. During that time, an iceberg twice the size of Manhattan calved from the Petermann Glacier, part of the ice sheet. Read More
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques have come up with a car-mounted laser scanner the size of a shoe box, that can survey the contours of road surfaces at speeds of up to 100 km/h (62 mph). The system detects potholes and other road damage in need of repair. According to the Institute, the Pavement Profile Scanner (or PPS) has surveyed 15,000 km of road since mid-2012, in which time it has proven cheaper, faster and more accurate than existing systems which require hefty attachments to the carrier vehicle. Read More
In the ProDesk3D, 3D printing outfit botObjects has come up with not only the first full color desktop 3D printer, but thanks to its anodized aluminum body, unquestionably one of the prettiest. Read More
A US school has cut a six-figure sum from its winter energy bill by replacing its oil-burning boiler with woodchip biomass ones. The switch has reduced the school's carbon footprint by between 35 and 45 percent. The boilers are housed in a brand new green-roofed building which has become only the third LEED-certified power facility in the US. Read More
Mobile start-up Sion has developed a quad-core Android smartphone named the V1sion that it hopes to bring to the market unlocked and without a contract for under US$299. The company claims its performance bests that of a Galaxy S3 thanks to its Samsung Exynos 4 Quad (aka Exynos 4412) processor. The company says that the compelling bank-for-buck ratio is possible using crowdfunding, and that the number of backers will determine the final price. Read More
When Lego kit specialist The Daily Brick made contact to see if we'd like to review its Lego iPad Dock Kit for Retina or iPad mini, bits were champed. This was partially because I don't actually have a Lightning dock for my Retina iPad, and partially because… you know… Lego. But as fun as Lego is, most of the joy is in the building. Is a Lego iPad dock really up to the rigors of daily use? Gizmag built one to find out. Read More
The latest LED lighting product to hit Kickstarter, Klauf Light Bars are semi-portable, low-cost LED strips which can be connected end-to-end more or less straight out of the box. They come in 6-inch and 12-inch (15 and 30 cm) lengths, which can be arranged as you like up to a length of 15 feet (or about 4.5 meters). They can either be slotted together directly or connected with cables, which is handy if you intend to install them under kitchen cabinets which extend around a corner (recommended), or make giant illuminating nunchaku (less so). Read More
