Good Thinking

Imagine if the only way of propelling yourself on a bicycle was to reach down and turn one of the wheels with your hand. It would be pretty inefficient, yet that’s essentially how a wheelchair works. Of course, wheelchairs are set up so that the push-rims can be reached very easily, but the propulsion process still comes down to the wheels being directly pushed forward by hand. ROTA Mobility, however, has an alternative. It’s called the RoChair, and it’s a wheelchair that is rowed by pushing and pulling on a front-and-center-mounted lever. Read More

Designer Christopher Daniel has conceptualized plans for this prefabricated house, which morphs and adapts according to its setting. Dubbed California Roll, the structure is best suited to a desert environment and incorporates a homogeneous exterior which reflects the sun's heat. Read More

When Canadian media artist Nicholas Hanna first moved to the Chinese city of Beijing, he was quite taken with the water calligraphy that he saw people creating in the parks. The art form consists of using a large brush to paint Chinese calligraphy on the road, in water, so the characters disappear as the water evaporates. Hanna decided to put his own spin on it, and rigged up a cargo tricycle with a computer-controlled dot matrix water release system, that squirts out passages of Chinese poetry on the road behind him as he rides. Read More

New Cosmopower, a small Japanese company, has created a floating capsule to be used in the event of earthquakes or tsunamis. Following the devastating loss of life during the Tohoku earthquake in March this year, the "Noah" capsule was designed to preserve life in the face of another major catastrophe - just like its biblical namesake. Read More

When it comes to the development of new plastics, two things have generally happened – a plastic is created and then a use is found for it, or a long trial-and-error process is undertaken in order to create a plastic with specific qualities. In a move that has been described as “comparable to cracking a plastics DNA,” however, scientists at the University of Leeds and Durham University have created a mathematical model that should allow specialty plastics to be created much more quickly and efficiently. Read More

The team at Floxx Media Group are attempting the unenviable task of trying to crack into the social media market. Recently named in the Real Business Future 50, the young and ambitious company from London's Silicon Roundabout have two apps in the market, its namesake application - Floxx (aka the new FitFinder) and the more recently released MapChat. Does Floxx Media Group have what it takes to crack the seeming impervious social media market held so dominantly by Facebook and the fresh competition of heavyweight Google? Here's a look at what the Group has to offer. Read More

Thousands of people were left homeless this May, when over 40 percent of the town of Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada was destroyed by a wildfire that started in the adjacent forest. This is just one example of the devastation that can result when fires occur in what is known as the wildland-urban interface. While some buildings are destroyed when the wildfire itself reaches them, others can catch fire due to wind-borne embers from that fire. In an effort to test how well wooden decks are able to resist such embers, America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created something known as the Dragon - it's a device that sucks in tree mulch, and "breathes" it out as firebrands. Read More

Homer Simpson's advice when his brother Herb shows him the baby translator he has invented is that Herb "should have just taken an existing product and put a clock in it or something." These days the "or something" could easily be a light or, more specifically, an LED as their tiny size, low cost and low power needs has seen them wedged inside a plethora of devices ... and not because it necessarily provides any real benefit. However, in the world of LED-embedded devices, this wrench set is far from the worst idea we've seen and could actually come in very handy. Read More

Hoo boy, you just know Hunter S. Thompson would have loved this. A Russian tinkerer going by the name of morskoiboy has created a typewriter (?) that squirts a different type of syrup or liqueur into a glass with every keystroke. That same liquid is used in a big single-character LCD-like display, that shows users what letter they’re typing. This means that different cocktails can be created, simply by typing in different words. Read More