Good Thinking

While it’s definitely important to keep the heavy metals in discarded batteries out of the environment, the sorting of all of the different types of batteries that arrive at a recycling depot could no doubt get extremely tedious. It’s the type of job that often goes to a machine. Well, such a machine has been invented. Called the Optisort, it can recognize about 2,000 types of batteries, and is currently being used to sort one third of those recycled in the UK.  Read More

Mention counterfeit goods and most people will probably think of knock-off watches or pirated DVDs, but counterfeiting is a much wider problem. Everything from aircraft components to groceries are faked on a regular basis, with a third of industries affected at an estimated worldwide cost of US$650 billion dollars. German machine tools are a favorite target and to help combat this the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) in Garching, Germany, is developing new technologies and techniques to make counterfeiting of these items more difficult.  Read More

As the year nears its close, IBM, as it has every year since 2006, has pulled out the crystal ball and given us its predictions of five innovations that it believes will impact our lives in the next five years. For this year’s “5-in-5” list, IBM has taken a slightly different approach, with each entry on the list relating to our senses. The company believes cognitive computing whereby computers learn rather than passively relying on programming will be at the core of these innovations, enabling systems that will enhance and augment each of our five senses.  Read More

Having dealt with all the things you are not getting for Christmas this year, it's time to turn our attention to what Santa's elves have really been hammering away at. So from consumer favorites to clever innovations to quirky surprises, here's our selection of the top 10 things you CAN have for Christmas 2012.  Read More

One of the more civilized moments of air travel is enjoying a drink at cruising altitude. Unfortunately, this amenity requires airliners to ship hundreds of soda cans and spirit bottles that are costly to fly, and make the drink service maddeningly slow. To speed things up a bit while cutting costs, the German firms SkyMax and Air Eltec have developed the Skytender trolley – a rolling automated drinks machine that promises to make conventional airline bottles and cans obsolete.  Read More

Today, handcuffs are just steel restraints. Tomorrow, they could be delivering shocks to prisoners or injecting them with drugs. According to U.S. Patent Application 20120298119, Scottsdale Inventions, LLC of Paradise Valley, Arizona has invented a pair of high-tech handcuffs that could deliver electric shocks to prisoners by means of an incorporated Taser-like system hooked to wireless controls and sophisticated sensors.  Read More

The end of the world might not be nigh, but the end of the year is, which means it's time once again for our annual look back at some of the most outrageous examples of new technology to have crossed our desk during 2012. So be as naughty or nice as you like, because even the most eloquent of letters written to Santa Claus won't elicit a response if any of these items appear in the fine print.  Read More

Odorless, colorless, and tasteless, so-called “date rape” drugs are nasty, sneaky things. When surreptitiously added to someone’s drink, they cause that person to become disoriented, sleepy, slow-to-react, and otherwise easier to sexually assault. Making things worse, the victim usually can’t remember what happened while they were drugged, making prosecution or even identification of the assailant difficult. Now, however, a new invention known as DrinkSavvy may allow people to know if such drugs have been put in their drink.  Read More

As highlighted by the cardboard bicycle, cardboard can be a surprisingly versatile manufacturing material in the right hands. Further proof of this comes via the Kranium: a bicycle helmet constructed from cardboard and designed by Royal College of Art student Anirudha Surabhi, which promises to be 15 percent lighter than standard helmets, while absorbing up to three times the impact energy during a collision.  Read More