technology

Well, it seems less threatening than the ED-209.

Via Laughing Squid

The Knightscope K5 Autonomous Data Machine is an mobile robotic security guard with a slew of built-in sensors designed to patrol and monitor an area. The egg-shaped rolling robot has GPS and laser scanning built-in and utilizes prediction algorithms and social analytics to identify and assess potential concerns. Data collected by the robot is also made public to help crowdsource those predictions. Knightscope's creators plan to charge an hourly fee to rent the robot that will likely significantly undercut the going price of their human counterparts.

Hendo is introducing the world's first real working hoverboard.

So where does the HENDO hoverboard stand today? Well, about 1 inch off the ground. As you can see from the video above, the prototype is real and it works! But to see it hover in person, and better yet, to defy gravity by riding it, is something you need to experience as well.

With the support of the Kickstarter community, we all can. We need your help to put the finishing touches on the Hendo Hoverboard, to help us produce them, and to create places to ride them.

Hendo is looking for $250,000 in funding to refine the working technology from the prototype and start production. Pledges start at $5, but if you want your childhood dream to come true $10,000 will get you a real working Hendo Hoverboard.

The Scanadu Scout reads out your heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen level, respiratory rate, blood pressure, stress and electrocardiography in 10 seconds.

You scream, I scream, we all transform an off-the-shelf Cuisinart soft-serve maker to extrude super-cooled and 3D-printed shells of ice cream! Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate.

"There are two types of communication technologies," says Alper Bozkurt, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-lead author of a paper on the work. "One that allows us to communicate with the dogs, and one that allows them to communicate with us."

"Dogs communicate primarily through body language, and one of our challenges was to develop sensors that tell us about their behavior by observing their posture remotely," Roberts says. "So we can determine when they're sitting, standing, running, etc., even when they're out of sight – a harness-mounted computer the size of a deck of cards transmits those data wirelessly. At the same time, we've incorporated speakers and vibrating motors, called haptics, into the harness, which enable us to communicate with the dogs."

In 2015, American consumers will finally be able to purchase fuel cell cars from Toyota and other manufacturers. Although touted as zero-emissions vehicles, most of the cars will run on hydrogen made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming.

Now, scientists at Stanford Univ. have developed a low-cost, emissions-free device that uses an ordinary AAA battery to produce hydrogen by water electrolysis. The battery sends an electric current through two electrodes that split liquid water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Unlike other water splitters that use precious-metal catalysts, the electrodes in the Stanford device are made of inexpensive and abundant nickel and iron.

Which leads us neatly onto the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, which has devised a "mini magnetosphere" that essentially recreates the protection provided by the Earth's magnetic field. The scientists have so far used the magnetosphere to protect a scale spacecraft from radiation, and they're now working on a concept spacecraft, called Discovery, with a full-scale magnetosphere that could theoretically take humans to Mars.