Good Thinking

It's one of the most common and infuriating dining problems everyone encounters: getting ketchup to pour smoothly out of bottle and onto your plate. You've probably heard a number of solutions from "tap the 57" to "spin the bottle between your hands," but even those methods can still drown your fries in sauce in the end. Luckily, science - or rather, a research group working at MIT - has finally taken notice and concocted an impressive solution. By coating the inside of any bottle with the slippery LiquiGlide coating, anything from ketchup to mayonnaise to jam flows right out like water, barely leaving a smudge behind. Read More

The creative fellows at Pensa are turning a few heads with their Street Charge concept that would seek to turn everyday city street signs into illuminated charging stations for mobile devices. Read More

Tourists want to experience the "sights and sounds" of everywhere they travel, but usually viewing the sights is much easier than hearing the sounds. It's one thing to look at the Statue of Liberty; it's quite another to be able to listen to the sounds around it. The UK designer behind the Listen Here concept would like to redress the balance by giving tourists a chance to hear audio from all over a town without having to actually go to each place. With microphones at different locations transmitting data to a central map, tourists would be able to simply point at a different and hear live ambient sound from all around a city. Read More

The G8 Summit, the annual meeting of leaders from eight of the world’s largest economies, is always a popular venue for protestors who don’t like what some of those leaders are doing. While you may not be able to make it to this year’s upcoming event in Maryland, an advocacy group known as One could still get your message out – by using what could best be described as a giant inkjet printer to paint it on the street. Read More

Nobody likes having to carry around a keychain full of keys, or – worse yet – arriving somewhere only to discover that they haven’t brought the key they need. The BOLT system offers an alternative. It allows you to open multiple padlocks, all using your vehicle’s ignition key. Read More

It's hard to think of a better travel garment than a big, oversized hooded sweatshirt. It's super-comfortable, warm, and easy to take off when you're frying in the stale, recycled air of a plane. Burton takes the hooded sweatshirt to a new level of travel-friendliness, by adding some key elements that include an integrated pillow. Read More

Last month we told you about a team of Brigham Young University engineering students, who created a clever Batman-inspired wall-climbing system. They were competing in the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s 2012 Service Academy and University Engineering Challenge, in which teams had to design gadgets that would allow soldiers to safely and quickly ascend vertical surfaces. Given that the Brigham Young entry didn’t take first place, however, we thought it only made sense to take a look at the entry that did ... and that would be a little something known as the Personal Vacuum Assisted Climber (PVAC), designed by a team from Utah State University. Read More

The keyring is a true nemesis for those of us with short nails - such a simple contraption capable of bringing such deep frustration and resentment. Two innovative redesigns improve upon the traditional keyring, making keys easy to organize for all. The Freekey lets you pop it open with a push and the Carabiner Key gets rid of it completely. Read More

When an anesthetized obese patient is lying on their back on an operating table, the weight of their abdominal fat can make it difficult for them to breathe. It can also press down on and displace their organs, making certain procedures more challenging. Mehdi Razavi, director of electrophysiology clinical research at the Texas Heart Institute, had encountered such problems first-hand, with patients of his own. He decided to turn to Houston’s Rice University, to see if its students could come up with a solution. In response, a group of bioengineering seniors created something called the R-Aide, which uses vacuum-powered suction cups to lift up patients’ bellies. Read More