Good Thinking

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

With most of us in the developed world more concerned about the flow of electricity to power our computers, TVs and all manner of other wonders of the modern age, it’s easy to forget the massive impact resulting from one of the first widespread public uses of electricity – the humble incandescent light bulb. With a large proportion of the world’s population still lacking reliable access to electricity, the GravityLamp hopes to bring the benefits of environmentally friendly artificial light to the developing world.  Read More

If you don’t camp or have a fireplace, then you probably don’t know this, but ... making kindling can be darn difficult. A simple-but-clever new device known as Mr. Quicksplit, however, looks like it makes the process a lot easier.  Read More

Bread may be the staff of life, but it doesn't keep very well. Left to its own devices, a loaf will start to go moldy in a week – a fact that costs consumers and the food industry millions of dollars each year. Now, according to the BBC, a Texas-based company have developed a process that kills spores so that a loaf of bread can stay mold-free for up to 60 days.  Read More