Loz Blain

Anyone who's ever had to drum up the courage to visit a male fertility center will agree that today's process for sperm counting is at best awkward, and at worst embarrassing, messy and intimidating. So if you'll pardon the pun, it will come as a relief to many that a "lab on a chip" device is being developed that can let guys do their own sperm counts at home - avoiding the embarrassment and inconvenience, if not the mess. That's gonna be fun at parties. Warning: uncomfortable anecdote after the jump.  Read More

Imagine you're a competitive sailboat racer, about to go into the richest and most storied of all sailing races with a squillion-dollar boat and a razor-sharp crew. Now imagine somebody hands you a device that can quite literally map out the wind activity up to a kilometre out in front of you, showing wind speed, direction and turbulence - and giving you the almost superatural ability to adjust your sails and take maximal advantage of a wind pattern before you even reach it. It's almost an unfair advantage, isn't it? Well, this is the situation that BMW Oracle Racing's Russell Coutts finds himself in as the team gears up to take on defending champions Alinghi in the 2010 America's Cup. The device is called a Racer's Edge laser wind sensor, and it's built around a technology base that's being used to optimise wind power generators. We caught up with Phil Rogers, CEO of Catch the Wind, Inc, to find out more.  Read More

This week, Loz Blain and Mike Hanlon agree to disagree on the upcoming iPad, we take a look at a couple of upcoming stories on next-gen sex toys, check out the Metal Storm virtual minefield and look at how Thailand is moving to prevent petrol fraud.  Read More

Call me childish, but I reckon this is one of the best gadgets I've seen in years. The SoundRacer plugs into the cigarette lighter socket of your boring family car, then sends an FM signal to your car stereo that makes your car sound like a roaring V8, faithfully matching revs and basically making the meekest of cars feel like a monster truck. So you can enjoy a ribald hoon factor from the driver's seat without looking or sounding like a petrolhead to passers-by or the local constabulary. We had a blast making the demo video after the jump.  Read More

We've gone to a new format for our first podcast of 2010 - Loz Blain and Mike Hanlon sit down for a broad and fun discussion on a few recent stories that we see as real potential life-changers. Starting with the Digital Gastronomy project and moving on to cover some of the fun, fascinating and scary things Mike saw at last December's robotics trade show in Tokyo, it's your chance to sit in on the kind of discussions that happen every time the Gizmag team gets together.  Read More

Everyone loves a treehouse - they seem to inspire a universal feeling of childlike wonder, and done right they really tickle the old 'living in harmony with nature' glands too. We've covered some beauties over the years here at Gizmag, but this one has to be the grand-daddy of them all. The work of architect Robert Harvey Oshatz, the Wilkinson Residence makes use of a steeply sloped block to put the house's main level right up in the tree canopy. Stunning from every angle, it uses curves and waves to echo the owner's love of the natural landscape with a slightly musical theme.  Read More

America's team BMW Oracle Racing (BOR) has taken full advantage of a "wide open" set of design rules for this year's America's Cup to produce one of the most staggering and ambitious vessels ever seen on the water. Throwing out the cloth main sail, team BOR have fitted the BOR 90 with a gargantuan, motorized, solid carbon-fiber wing, nearly twice the size of a Boeing 747 wing at 190ft, or 57 metres tall. The engineering and logistics surrounding this incredible boat are mind-boggling - imagine trying to work out where to store the giant wing structure, how to transport it and how to fix it vertically onto a boat - let alone how to sail the thing - but the benefits of a non-deforming main sail include the potential for the multimillion-dollar trimaran to travel at up to 2.5 times wind speed. It's a crazy, massively expensive and hugely risky experiment that's never even been prototyped, and will only get a few weeks' worth of testing before it races in February.  Read More

Prosumer-level video equipment is getting cheap enough that serious image quality is well and truly within the reach of the hobbyist. And thus, you've got a whole new market of amateur videographers trying to work out how to get pro effects like sliding dolly shots into their work. Devices like the UKP175 GlideTrack SD strike an excellent balance between smoothness, quietness, portability and low cost - and the results look amazing, as you'll see in the demo video after the jump.  Read More

There's not a lot that's particularly remarkable about the MD80 mini spy camera - it's pretty tiny, it records reasonable 640x480 video in AVI format at 25 frames per second, and it can be set to standby for up to 250 hours until it's activated by a sound, making it a good little spy cam unit. It's pretty similar to any number of helmet cam/mini video cam units but for one fact - it costs less than US$25 on eBay, delivered to your door. For the price it's an outstanding product and the sort of thing you could habitually carry around in your car, recording driving conditions for an instant evidence stockpile in case of an accident or incident. And more broadly it's an example of how Chinese design and manufacturing can get a competitive, quality product to market at a price point that absolutely annihilates the competition, to the point where if you're still concerned about quality, you might just as well buy five of the things in case four break. Which they're not doing nearly so much these days.  Read More