GadgetReview

The Punjab police, ladies and gentlemen, have stepped boldly into twenty-first century law enforcement technology by receiving a consignment of Tasers, the first of their kind in India.

They’ve become both ubiquitous and infamous in the United States, the devices fire a pair of darts connected to the base unit by thin cables with transmit an electrical current into the subject, thus incapacitating him.

The Punjab police have apparently ordered enough Tasers to outfit two entire battalions.

Tales of gross misuse of Tasers follow them literally everywhere, with the classic cry of “Don’t tase me, bro!” intermingling with stories of the devices being used for torture as they don’t leave marks on the body.  Considering the sheer amount of bad press these things have taken over the years, it’s a wonder any police department is actually looking at them.

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The ADE 651 is a device with an impressive marketing angle.  Over in Iraq, it’s being used to sniff out everything from bombs to guns to drugs and beyond, and detect them all from a distance of up to half a mile.  It’s a handheld device, easy to carry, the Iraqi military swears by it…there’s just one problem.

It doesn’t actually work.

ATSC, the company that makes the ADE 651, claims that they work via “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction”, which if I remember my collegiate physics courses correctly means “a bunch of sciencey terms strung together almost at random”.  Independent testing of many similar devices by the Department of Defense shows none of them work much better than pure chance.  And here’s the part that’ll kill you–they sold the Iraqi military fifteen hundred of these things at prices ranging from $16,500 to $60,000 dollars EACH.

And there you go.  The Iraqis bought at least $24 million worth of bomb detectors that don’t detect.

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So I was digging around when I found DARPArama, kind of a clearinghouse of prototypes and ideas and whatnot out of DARPA, or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

And I started reading about the Phraselator…and frankly, you’re not going to believe this.

The Phraselator is a voice recognition based translator device.  Basically, you speak it at the Phraselator and it tells you the equivalent of what you want to say in another language, much like the Universal Translator devices of Star Trek fame.  The Phraselator starts out with an onboard six languages, but this is only a starting point as the Phraselator can be taught many more.  In fact, the Los Angeles Police Department, which bought several of them, taught their Phraselators a whopping 224 languages.

It may well be only a matter of time before we can slip on a Bluetooth-style headset, go anywhere in the world, and be absolutely certain we speak the native language no matter what language we actually speak.

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So originally I was going to write about India’s newfound fascination with the road spike, but then I thought better of it and discovered that Boston Dynamics was actually well on its way to making Terminators.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t go with the road spike story?

Anyway, Boston Dynamics has developed a class of robot, the Petman, that “closely mirrors human physiology”.  It’s currently being used to test chemical warfare suits, and therefore controls movement, humidity, and even a kind of sweating to get the closest possible approximation of how the gear will work with humans.  Here’s word direct from Boston Dynamics:

“Natural, agile movement is essential for PETMAN to simulate how a soldier stresses protective clothing under realistic conditions. The robot will have the shape and size of a standard human, making it the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person.”

I don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified, so I’m going with both.  It MOVES…like a real PERSON.  I’m always a little squeamish when people talk about robots that look, act, or behave like people.  Too much bad science fiction growing up, I suppose, but it always seems like robot assassins are never too far behind that development.

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Well, here’s an interesting note to kick off the morning.

Attention Taser Owners: if you have one, don’t shoot someone in the chest with them.  You could kill them.

According to an October 12th training bulletin, Taser International–the company that makes the new must-have law enforcement gadget–says that firing one into a subject’s chest has an “extremely low” risk of causing–get this–an “adverse cardiac event”.

If you’re thinking “makes heart stop / explode / turn into a blackened lump in your chest”, you’re thinking about the same way I am.  This is the first time Taser International has ever suggested that there’s any risk of fatality with the Taser at all, and frankly, it’s downright terrifying.  The chest is a vastly bigger target than any limb–they call it the “center of mass” shot for a reason–so to claim that every time someone uses a Taser, the target just might DIE, is a reason to rethink the whole concept of issuing Tasers to cops.

Don’t tase me, bro…it takes on a whole new meaning when you know it might kill you.

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Well, that’s it for me, folks–my science fiction lobe has officially collapsed on me, because I was just reading about a new military project that’ll probably change the way war is fought forever.

I read about cyborg beetles.

It seems that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA, the guys who started the Internet in the first place) have been working on a kind of “cyborg beetle” that’s been surgically altered and given all sorts of awesome mechanical doodads to engage in fighting and surveillance of the enemy.  They can be controlled remotely by humans in the field, and are actually part of a much larger overall project called HI-MEMS, the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electric Mechanical Systems.  HI-MEMS, if I understood correctly, will yield history’s first-ever truly bionic organism.

The article went on from there about what all they could do, but my head started swimming about the time I pictured wasps jammed full of uranium so they gave poisoned radioactive stings to their targets.

They’re the perfect soldier.  Absolutely expendable.  Kill as many as you please, the colony will hatch a few million more.  Heaven help us when they start carrying explosives.

They’re the perfect assassin.  Can you lock yourself down so effectively that even a spider can’t reach you?  And a cybernetic black widow could definitely take out a target, probably without ever being noticed.

I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified, and right now, I’m trending toward horrified.

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Ladies of the interwebz, pay attention, because what I’ve got here today is a little something extra special.  I’ve got here the first ever piece of lung-erie, the Gas Mask Bra.  And after a pun like that, you may well be wanting a gas mask to get out from under the stink.

Anyway, this sucker was developed by a team of three–Dr. Elena Bodnar, Dr. Raphael Lee and Sandra Marijan–and it got a start after Dr. Bodnar’s time investigating the effects of Chernobyl.  She posited that a lot of fallout damage could have been prevented with access to proper gas masks and particulate filters; but how to get said devices to people in time?  Simple, she reasoned–have them worn on the body at all times.

Now, ladies, in the event of an ecological disaster like nuclear fallout or a dust storm, all you’ll have to do is go temporarily commando while you detach a bra cup and wear it over your face.  Plus, you’ll have a backup for the fella in your life who doesn’t exactly have the hardware to wear one himself.

Just in case you think this design is some kind of quackery, know this–it took an IgNoble Prize at the last ceremony.

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If you’re a camper, or you just hold a paranoiac’s distrust for your local water system, you may be interested in getting your hands on a CrystalPur water filter.

Invented to help starving families out in Africa from dying of thirst, this tiny unit can actually process six liters of water per unit per hour.  Most of a bag of charcoal into this thing and you wind up netting fully seven thousand gallons of purified water.

There’s no word on when or where these will be available for sale, or even if regular schmoes like us can get our hands on it.  But if you’ve ever wanted a fast and easy way to purify huge quantiites of water, then you may just have it after all.

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You know…sometimes velcro’s just entirely too weak sauce for my taste.  Little cloth hooks that hold things together, no thank you.  I need something with a bit more testosterone.  Something a bit more MANLY.

Heyyy…I know.  How about velcro…made out of METAL?

It already exists, folks–it’s called Metaklett, and it promises to indeed be Velcro 2.0.  Engineers at the Technical University of Munich developed the super-strong material which supports a maximum of thirty five tons, and yet can be pulled apart without tools.

Now, that’s got me a little taken aback.  It supports thirty five tons of weight but you can pull it apart with a single pull?  That seems like such a gross contradiction in terms that it’s not even funny.  But I do look forward to seeing Metaklett in action–this could be something interesting!

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What does $4,385 get you? Give up?  Your very own under water submersible.  Tao Xiangli, a 34-year old amateur inventor spent the last two years whipping together his very own submarine.  It’s powered by an electric motor and even includes a periscope, depth control tanks and manometer.  The body is crafted from two old oil barrels, so that might explain why it resembles a piece of floating trash.

[via Dvice]

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