Sports

If there's a new way to apply manual power toward motivating a set of scooter or bicycle wheels, someone will think of it. We've seen stair stepper-style scooters, dog-drawn scooters, elliptical machine scooters, gravity-fired hike-a-bikes and countless other designs. The SkiMotion uses a butterfly leg motion, among others, and gets your upper body involved.  Read More

Flashlight manufacturer Fenix is bringing its lighting expertise to the bike market with plans to launch a pair of bike lights that combine powerful output, low pricing and an established brand name. Some bikers already mount Fenix torches to their handlebars in place of more purpose-built lighting systems but its new bike light line will just give users a more integrated package for lighting up the road or trail with Fenix power.  Read More

With the swimming program of the London Olympics now completed and medals awarded, many will now be casting their attention to Rio in 2016 and how competitors can be helped to swim faster, how they can be made stronger, and what swimwear can be developed to improve their performance. Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology are hoping to answer these questions by developing a humanoid robot able to reproduce realistic swimming strokes.  Read More

The wonderfully named Black Sparrow Industries has cooked up an electric vehicle with a difference: a tricycle that's ridden standing up. Robert Worobey designed the Tribey to appeal to surfers and snowboarders among others, and the designer claims that the vehicle is built to withstand serious abuse, including traversing 3-inch deep potholes. With the addition of a bolt-on kit, The Tribey can also be ridden from a recumbent position, making the Tribey a curious hybrid of recumbent trike and a motorized skateboard.  Read More

Before competing, professional cyclists jump on a trainer and ride to warm-up, but muscles can lose this heat if there's a time delay between the warm-up and the start of the race. In an effort to plug this gap and gain the tiny advantage that's so critical in top-level sport, adidas has created ADIPOWER muscle warming garments - a pair of track pants with a battery-powered heater, helps keep muscles at the right temperature.  Read More

Velocomp has updated its iBike Dash CC with the release of the iBike POWERHOUSE iPhone app and bike mount case - an "intelligent cycling fitness system" designed to adjust automatically to your exercise goals.  Read More

While an increasing number of mountain bikers are shooting first-person cycling videos using helmet-mounted actioncams, attaching such a camera to one’s helmet can still be a rather tricky, inexact process. That’s why gear company Kali Protectives created the AMARA CAM helmet – it features a built-in mounting point, that accepts a number of popular actioncams and headlamps.  Read More

Indoor climbing gyms have brought the sport of rock climbing into the indoor spaces of dense, boulder-less cities, where traditional rock climbing would be impossible. The next generation of indoor climbing seems to be focused on cramming climbing equipment into even smaller spaces. The case in point is the Rotor dynamic wall from Climblock, which replaces the vertical wall with a rotating drum.  Read More

A controversy during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics was Speedo's introduction of its drag reducing LZR Racer swimming outfit. The suit worked so well that it was subsequently outlawed by the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA) as the technological equivalent of doping - it gave too large an advantage. Now, with the help of ANSYS simulation software, and just in time for the 2012 London Summer Olympics, Speedo has introduced the Fastskin3 racing system, which offers a new and apparently legal approach to drag reduction during competitive swimming.  Read More