Less than two years ago the Yamaha M1 factory prototype racing machine was not considered competitive – indeed, it was considered by most to be a dog. It struggled throughout the 2003 Moto Grand Prix racing year, and in the hands of two of the finest professional motorcycle racers in the world, Spaniard Carlos Checa and Brazilian Alex Barros, it finished an entire season with just one third place as its sole podium from 32 starts. In 2004, Yamaha was fortunate to be able to obtain a rare and frightfully expensive throttle controller for one of its machines (also known as Valentino Rossi), making the machine far more competitive – from 16 starts in 2004, the Rossi-fitted machine won nine times and placed second twice and won the world championship. It’s win, with Rossi aboard this afternoon, is its fifth win from six starts this season and Rossi is now 58 points clear of his nearest rival. A look back at the results makes interesting reading – though the bike is reportedly far better than it was, no-one else is making it go fast enough to be competitive.  Read More

A couple of months back we wrote up the boyfriend arm pillow and it became one of Gizmag’s all-time most-read stories (in excess of 250,000 page views at last count) because, well … people are weird. Now we have further irrefutable proof of that. The incredible success of the boyfriend arm pillow has spawned what the Japanese manufacturers are hoping will be the male equivalent – the girlfriend lap pillow. Unlike the boyfriend arm pillow which has a heartbeat and is soft and snugly, the girlfriend lap pillow comes with realistic-to-the-touch legs and a tight short polyester skirt in your choice of black or red.  Read More

Brother Industries is demonstrating the world’s fastest inkjet printer at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan –a prototype designed to demonstrate on-demand printing capabilities. The new technology is a variation on inkjet technology that reorients the printhead with the paper and removes the need for it to move laterally, making the process more efficient , much smaller and blazingly fast – at a journalist demonstration last week the printer produced around 170 pages per minute. Brother sees the technology being used in on-demand printing – as the world goes completely electronic, this type of technology will enable personalised printed newspapers e.g. your hotel might have such a machine hooked to a system that can have your local newspaper from Bogota printed and delivered to your room overnight when you’re at the conference in New Orleans. The paper would be printed according to your interests in a personal profile and combine, for example, the main news and the full local finance, business and sports section but not the womens, real estate, home improvement ad infinitum sections.  Read More

The great architect Louis Kahn once said, "A room is not a room without natural light. Natural light gives mood to space by the nuances of light in the time of the day and the seasons of the year as it enters and modifies the space." The ambience of a sunlight-deprived room can now be significantly enhanced thanks to an ingenious new sunlight-transportation technology developed by Swedish company Parans. The novel approach overcomes the provision of natural light to rooms in a building that would otherwise be deprived by collecting sunlight with outdoor light-collecting SkyPort panels, transporting the light by fibre-optic cable known as SunWire and delivered to the required spaces via light emitting luminaries known as Bjork.  Read More

Scientists at the United States Sandia National Nuclear Security Administration Labs have accelerated a small plate from zero to 76,000 mph in less than a second. Sandia’s Z Machine is sometimes referred to as the fastest gun in the West but is actually the fastest in the world, and it is now able to propel small plates at 34 kilometers a second, faster than the 30 km/sec that Earth travels through space in its orbit about the sun, 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth’s gravitational field. The immediate purpose of these very rapid flights is to help understand the extreme conditions found within the interiors of the giant planets Saturn and Jupiter, hasten the achievement of virtually unlimited energy through peacetime atomic fusion, and provide more information about the condition of the U.S. nuclear stockpile without having to explode a nuclear weapon.  Read More

In keeping with Gizmag’s quest to keep readers informed on how to make technology ubiquitous and invisible, meet the ELAC Imago picture panels with DML technology (Distributed Mode Loudspeaker Technology). They hang on the wall and look like normal pictures but they are hi-fi loudspeakers and the bonus is that you decide what they will look like – a Monet, a Duret, a Lombarte, or a Van Gogh. For stereo listening, all you have to do is connect two ELAC flat panel speakers and the matching subwoofer to your hi-fi. For home theatre systems, two, three or four of the five speakers can be easily integrated into every living-room environment.  Read More

Czech scientists have made significant new breakthroughs in stem cell research. Dr. Petr Dvorak, scientist with the Institute of Experimental Medicine at the Czech Academy of Sciences, says his research suggests embryonic stem cells maintained in a universal or 'totipotent' status can, under certain conditions, be used to develop any type of cells in the human body, a key component to realising the full potential of stem cell therapies. The Institute has also seen several other stem cell research breakthroughs, most notably developing a procedure that uses stem cells to repair the brain and spinal cord employing nanotechnologies as a labeling-and-delivery mechanism.  Read More

Tests of the U.S. Navy's latest guided bomb variant the Dual Mode Guided Bomb (DMGB) are going particularly well. The public first became acquainted with guided bombs during the first gulf war through TV imagery of bombs so accurate they could enter specific windows of a building. Of course, the less accurate bombs weren’t shown, though the accuracy improved more than tenfold before the second gulf war. Now the DMGB takes that basic guided munition form factor and makes it even more versatile. When using dual-mode guidance, the Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation System (GPS/INS) data is used to bring the weapon close to the target, with laser guidance used in the terminal phase for improved end-game performance. Though this capability was previously available on very expensive precision guided weapons, the DMGB offers high accuracy and versatility at an unprecedented low price.  Read More

The global love affair with the portable digital music (aka MP3) player continues to flourish with more players, larger capacities and cheaper prices, all the while fueled by more of the population exploring digital music and podcasts, and encouraging and showing their friends to try them. If you’ve noticed a proliferation of smaller, cheaper flash memory-based MP3 player siblings of larger Hard Disk Drive (HDD) MP3 players (usually with a mini or junior added to the name), it’s because flash memory has in recent times got MUCH cheaper. But while HDD MP3 players are now approaching 100GB, it’s the flash players that are emerging as the stronger growth segment.  Read More