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.
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!
September 7th, 2009 7:27 PM | by Christen da Costa
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.
Here we go into the twenty first century of warfare, folks, as the Airborne Boeing laser finally manages to hit a ground-based target for the first time ever!
The Air Force only a few short hours ago announced that, back on August 30th, a C-130 mounting a Boeing ATL (Advanced Tactical Laser) managed to hit a target on the ground. And, the best part? It only took Boeing thirty million dollars to pull it off! Hurray!
But frankly, thirty million is a small price to pay, as far as I’m concerned, as long as it hastens the day when I can strap a laser gun to my hip and go plinking rats at the junkyard.
When I hear the words “Pentagon” and “corpse eating robots” together in the same sentence, the first thing I do is check my medication.
And then I realize I don’t TAKE medication, and further realize that I’m watching Fox News, so that explains everything.
Anyway, as it turns out, they’re kind of right for once–the Pentagon is actively engaged in developing a kind of “scavenger robot” that can power itself by obtaining biomass from the environment. Biomass, in case you’re not familiar, can be stuff like field gleanings, grass clippings, rotten fruit, other garbage…and yes, it can also be human corpses.
The Pentagon’s contractor in this little vision–and if you said “Cyberdyne”, NO, but it’s still funny-Robotic Technology Inc., had this to say about its Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot–or EATR–robot:
“…an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling.”
Remember the Ray Gun that 60 minutes reporter David Martin went face to face with earlier this year (see below video)? Well, now it’s taking to the skies. Previously the gun was limited to ground vehicles due to its size, but now thanks to a funding bump Raytheon has managed to shrink the nonlethal weapon to a size suitable for aircrafts. They’ve also managed to update the targeting system and enabled it to fire at multiple targets at once.
So next time you decide to protest and you hear the churn of a military helicopter, just remember that you might be minutes away from having your heart boiled.
Now this is pretty fly for a white guy. Until recent most iPhone translation apps were limited to text input or a phrase dictionary. Select the phrase and an audio bite would play. But what about speech-to-speech translations? Well, it’s coming, albeit to the military.
Created by a company called Sakhr, their speech-to-speech translator iPhone app can translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English in real time. The accuracy of the app, for lack of better words is remarkable and appears to have a very high accuracy rate, although I shouldn’t take the below video as a true testament since it isn’t real world testing.
As previously mentioned this app is intended for military use only, but it clearly demonstrates the power of the iPhone. Too bad I didn’t have one of these in 9th grade French class.
Now this might not be as ridiculous as it first sounds. This human washing machine could actually have some benficial uses. From homeless shelters to military outposts, showers and clean flesh are always hot topics of discussion when they are unavailable. Aptly titled, the Avant Santelubain 999 is sort of like a contained carwash that cleans the human with spraying soap and water and uses infrared lights for steam heat. Other features include audio and aroma therapy and seaweed wrap options. Say what now? That is yet to be explained but could it actually save water if the operation times were short? Sterilizing itself after each use, it still seems too expensive and bulky at this point to be incorporated at the places where it would be needed the most.
Not that I’m head over heals about Samsung’s SGH-A657 candy bar phone, but for those who jump from planes or climb walls made of rock they’ll surely enjoy its military rated specs. In other words this handset can be dropped, blasted with water and rolled in the sand and it will keep on ticking. Under the hood is quad-band and HDSPA connectivity, Bluetooth with A2DP, music player, push to talk, AT&T Navigator, microSD card slot and a built-in flash light for telling ghost stories.
No word on when it will arrive at AT&T, but we think it’s just a matter of days.
Hmmm…Dell’s latest rugged laptop includes Ballistic Armor in its moniker. With that said I wonder if they’ll let us shoot it with a 9mm (not a .22), like we did with the Sonim XP1? Rated for falls up to 4 feet and all sorts of extreme elements, such as blowing liquid and dirt, the Latitude E6400 XFR exceeds real world and military spec (MIL-STD-810F). On the inside of the 8.5lb box is an Intel Core2 Duo Processor, 14.1-inch 1280×800 LCD (available in touch), up to 8GB of RAM, 120GB HDD or 128GB SSD, DVD burner, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M 256MB DDR2 Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, optional fingerprint reader, and 5-in-1 media card reader. Video and pics after the ‘leap’. …Continue reading: Dell Outs Ballistic Armored Laptop, The Latitude E6400 XFR (videos)
When I hear the words “Pentagon” and “corpse eating robots” together in the same sentence, the first thing I do is check my medication.
