innovation – Page 9 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Lamborghini Succeeds in Creating World’s Most-Difficult-to-Wax Car

They said it couldn’t be done, but Lamborghini has pulled a design coup and successfully created the world’s most-difficult-to-wax car. A cleverly arranged array of fins, vents, humps, angles, and even dangerously sharp edges have been designed to stymie even the most dedicated lackey, who simply will not be able to apply Meguiar’s and wipe it back off in a reasonable amount of time. Mr. Miyagi’s car, this isn’t. That isn’t the only benefit conferred by the contorted shape: Should a cinderblock fall onto the car from above and damage the sheet metal, onlookers will likely not be able to tell where the damage occurred, saving the driver money on bodywork. Early chatter indicated these drawings were fake, but Jalopnik’s now fairly certain that the Lamborghini Veneno will debut at this week’s Geneva Motor Show. Priced at a reasonable $4.6 million, the Veneno should prove irresistible to young families who need to get around town in a safe, roomy way. And the exterior styling belies a sensible 6.5-liter V12 powerplant, whose 750 horsepower and 220 m.p.h. top speed should be more than enough to get you over to the inlaws in a comfortable manner. The Veneno will reportedly not come with a glovebox, but instead, a handbasket. Then you can take that handbasket, place the car inside of it, and you can bring it straight with you to Hell. (more…)

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Lamborghini Succeeds in Creating World’s Most-Difficult-to-Wax Car

The U.S. Army’s Mobile Digital Fabrication Lab

Politically speaking, the war in Afghanistan may be winding down; but technologically speaking, things are ramping up. Earlier this month a shipping container was quietly deployed to a remote outpost in Afghanistan. Kitted out by the U.S. Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, this particular shipping container is essentially a digital manufacturing lab in a box. Known as the ELM or Expeditionary Lab – Mobile, the unit contains a 3D printer and a CNC mill (as well as more conventional tools like a plasma cutter, welding gear, a circular saw, a router, a jigsaw and a reciprocating saw). Unsurprisingly, troops on the ground are not using the ELMs to print out heart-shaped gears ; rather, the point of the ELMs is to allow last-minute rapid prototyping upgrades to crucial pieces of equipment. As one example, soldiers discovered that the on-button for one standard-issue tactical flashlight had a raised button that could accidentally be pressed, unintentionally turning the flashlight on while the soldier was moving around. Best case scenario, the thing’s in a pocket, you don’t realize it’s on and the batteries drain down. Worst case scenario, the sudden illumination advertises your position to the enemy while you’re sneaking around in the dark. Under normal Army procurement procedures, designing, commissioning, manufacturing and distributing an updated design would take months or years. But with the ELMs, which come with two digital manufacturing technicians, a solution like this clip-on guard to shield the button can be quickly designed and printed. The ELM shipped earlier this month was actually the second; the first was sent to Afghanistan last summer. Following the concept’s success, a third ELM is in the works and will reportedly be deployed later this year. The following video on the ELMs isn’t terribly detailed, and features CG footage that doesn’t quite track with the narrative, but it’s all we’ve got: via 3ders (more…)

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The U.S. Army’s Mobile Digital Fabrication Lab

Ani Surabhi’s Biomimetic ‘Kranium’ Corrugated Bicycle Helmet Is Stronger, Lighter Than Traditional EPS

We first saw Anirudha Surabhi ‘s “Kranium” bicycle helmet shortly after he presented his graduation project at the Royal College of Art. Two years and £20,000 (courtesy of a James Dyson grant) later, the “Kranium” will finally be available to savvy cyclists in Europe. Surabhi, who goes by Ani for short, essentially designed the helmet from scratch: “the revolutionary Kranium liner is based on the corrugated structure found in the woodpecker and it is this structure, which provides the right amount of crumple zone to absorb impact energy.” Expanded polystyrene (EPS) helmets are proven to protect your head only 20% of the time. The Kranium liner has proven to absorb 3 times the amount of impact energy during collision. At the same time, it is 15% lighter than Polystyrene helmets. EPS helmets are made from petroleum based products where are the Kranium liner is made from recycled paper. They have been tested at several test labs across the globe, including TUV in Germany and HPE in the UK. They have been developed for mass production and will be available in the market in December 2012. As Ani explains in the must-see video (below), the project originated in his final year at the Royal College of Art, when he had the misfortune of falling off his bike and cracking the helmet which he was wearing at the time. The rest, as they say, is history: Having suffered minor concussions, I decided to take this as a design challenge and create the safest helmet on the planet. Looking into nature, the woodpecker is one of the only animal which experiences the same kind of impact on a regular basis. In fact, it strikes the tree ten times a second and closes its eyes every time so that they don’t pop out, which means a monumental amount of energy that goes through its head. (more…)

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Ani Surabhi’s Biomimetic ‘Kranium’ Corrugated Bicycle Helmet Is Stronger, Lighter Than Traditional EPS

Auto-threading Compiler Could Restore Moore’s Law Gains

New submitter Nemo the Magnificent writes “Develop in the Cloud has news about what might be a breakthrough out of Microsoft Research. A team there wrote a paper (PDF), now accepted for publication at OOPSLA, that describes how to teach a compiler to auto-thread a program that was written single-threaded in a conventional language like C#. This is the holy grail to take advantage of multiple cores — to get Moore’s Law improvements back on track, after they essentially ran aground in the last decade. (Functional programming, the other great white hope, just isn’t happening.) About 2004 was when Intel et al. ran into a wall and started packing multiple cores into chips instead of cranking the clock speed. The Microsoft team modified a C# compiler to use the new technique, and claim a ‘large project at Microsoft’ have written ‘several million lines of code’ testing out the resulting ‘safe parallelism.'” The paper is a good read if you’re into compilers and functional programming. The key to operation is adding permissions to reference types allowing you to declare normal references, read-only references to mutable objects, references to globally immutable objects, and references to isolated clusters of objects. With that information, the compiler is able to prove that chunks of code can safely be run in parallel. Unlike many other approaches, it doesn’t require that your program be purely functional either. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Surprising News About Bicycle-Powered Electricity Generators

That hourglass-shaped device is the PowerPac, an energy storage device meant to be powered by a human on a stationary bicycle. Conceived of by South African design firm Ideso , the PowerPac won a Red Dot Design Award in the “Best of the Best” category. “Our aim was to create an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly and functional design that marries the fluidity of cycling with dynamic power generation,” says Ideso MD, Marc Ruwiel. “It can be used by avid cyclists who can reduce CO2 emissions and generate their own electrical power, while enjoying a good workout at home.” I’m all for people-powered electricity generators, and I would’ve loved to have one of these during the recent blackout, but something struck me in the copy: “…An average cyclist could fully charge the battery from empty with 80 minutes of cycling and 132Wh of charge/potential energy can be stored in the battery.” The “Wh” designation stands for watt-hour , and “132Wh” means you could power a 132-watt device for 1 hour. For 80 minutes of cycling to yield, say, just over two hours of light from a 60-watt bulb sounds like a low yield, doesn’t it? My first thought was, can that be right? I did a little digging, and here’s what I found. It turns out hooking a bicycle up to something that directly powers a mechanical device is a fairly efficient way to generate energy. Rig a bicycle up to drive a sewing machine or a hand mixer and you get decent bang for your buck. But the second you get batteries and electricity involved, the efficiency drops way, way off. An article in Low-tech Magazine called ” Bike powered electricity generators are not sustainable ” explains why: …Generating electricity is far from the most efficient way to apply pedal power, due to the internal energy losses in the battery, the battery management system, other electronic parts, and the motor/generator. These energy losses add up quickly: 10 to 35 percent in the battery, 10 to 20 percent in the motor/generator and 5 to 15 percent in the converter (which converts direct current to alternate current). The energy loss in the voltage regulator (or DC to DC converter, which prevents you from blowing up the battery) is about 25 percent. This means that the total energy loss in a pedal powered generator will be 42 to 67.5 percent…. And it even turns out that the bicycle itself has mechanical inefficiencies that suck up more energy: (more…)

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Surprising News About Bicycle-Powered Electricity Generators

U.S. Soldiers’ Combat Invention Inspired by “Predator” Movie

Medium and heavy machine guns are “crew-served” weapons, requiring two and even three soldiers working together to operate it at maximum efficiency. While it’s one guy pulling the trigger, the other two carry and feed the bulky ammunition belts into the weapon. Having to rapidly re-position the weapon therefore brings challenges. According to an article in Soldiers magazine , after a 2.5-hour firefight in Afghanistan, an American infantry combat team started discussing “how three-man teams manning crew-served weapons struggled to stay together over difficult terrain in fluid battles.” It goes without saying that a machine gunner separated from his ammo is not good. It would be better if the gunner were self-contained, but that gun’s not gonna feed itself. Or could it? As a joke, one of the soldiers brought up Jesse Ventura’s character in Predator , who runs around with a minigun fed by a box on his back. A simple one-person solution, as envisioned by some Hollywood propmaster. What Ventura’s character had was one long, continuous belt feeding uninterruptedly from the pack into his gun. But without that arrangement, the best a lone machine gunner could manage would be to carry individual 50-round belts to load himself—and stopping to reload every 50 rounds. That leads to lulls in fire, and the more times you reload, the more you increase the chances of the gun jamming. This is a design flaw with potentially life-or-death consequences. And so, following the “Predator” discussion, Staff Sergeant Vincent Winkowski thought about it and figured a back-mounted ammo rig might actually be doable. So Winkowski grabbed an old ALICE (all-purpose lightweight individual carrying equipment) frame, welded two ammunition cans together—one atop the other after cutting the bottom out of the top can—and strapped the fused cans to the frame. To that he added a MOLLE (modular, lightweight load-carrying equipment) pouch to carry other equipment. “We wondered why there wasn’t some type of [system] that fed our machine guns [like the] mini-gun as portrayed in the movie,” Winkowski said. “So, I decided to try it using the feed chute assembly off of [a vehicle-mounted weapons system]. We glued a piece of wood from an ammo crate inside the ammo cans to create the decreased space necessary so the rounds would not fall in on each other. “My Mark 48 gunners, Spc. Derick Morgan and Spc. Aaron McNew, who also had input to the design and evaluation, took it to the range and tested it, and even with its initial shortcomings, it was much better than the current TTP (tactics, techniques and procedures) we employed. On Feb. 26, 2011, our prototype ‘Ironman’ pack even saw its first combat use by Spc. McNew when our squad was ambushed by up to 50 fighters in a river valley, and it worked great!” “I’m not impressed!” (more…)

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U.S. Soldiers’ Combat Invention Inspired by “Predator” Movie