[Image via Podcars ] Milton Keynes sounds like the name of someone your cousin married for his money, but in fact it’s a large town in Buckinghamshire, 50 miles northwest of London. With a population of over 200, 000, it can be considered urban, and the area is about to become more well-known, perhaps even famous. Because in 2015 it will start deploying driverless taxis, also called PRTs, for Personal Rapid Transit. In actuality the electricity-operated PRTs are less like taxis and more like surface-going, two-person subway cars that travel directly from point A to point B, without making undesired stops. Routes, it seems, will be fixed, with the town’s central train station serving as a hub, and areas of service expected to include the local shopping mall and particular office buildings. PRTs are not without precedent in the UK; London Heathrow has been running them since 2011 to ferry passengers between terminals, and the things recharge themselves. Check out how they operate, and don’t be put off by this video’s silly beginning, as the entire thing is pretty informative: (more…)
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UK to Get Driverless Taxis. Heathrow Already Has Them. Man, NYC/JFK Sucks
David M. Patrick has accidentally re-invented the wheel. The California-based inventor was toying around with six short, curved lengths of cable that he had connected into a sort of helical loop–and then he accidentally dropped it. What he observed next was surprising: The loop began to roll… and roll… and roll. It was a self-balancing wheel. Even stranger was that no one expected it to roll; Patrick’s loop actually looks square when it is rolling. A lifelong skater, Patrick then prototyped a skateboard wheel based on his design, this one comprised of side-by-side helical coils. He call it the Shark Wheel : (more…) 
We were pretty impressed with Amanda Ghassaei’s 3D-printed records , but apparently the Tech Editor at Instructables isn’t content to blow our minds with her digital fabrication prowess just once. As of this weekend, she’s back with a veritable encore: a Laser Cut Record . Although all the documentation for that project is available here, and the 3D models can be printed through an online fabrication service, I felt like the barrier to entry was still way too high. With this project I wanted to try to extend the idea of digitally fabricated records to use relatively common and affordable machines and materials so that (hopefully) more people can participate and actually find some value in all this documentation I’ve been writing. As with the 3D-printed vinyl, the laser cut record is hardly high-fidelity… but that’s not the point. The point is, it’s really f’in cool. (more…)