Takepart. Letting an engineer design a bathing suit may seem like some sort of fashion nightmare. But when scientists and designers teamed up to create the Sponge Suit, they came up with beachwear that cleans the water as you swim. The swimsuit is padded with a sucrose-based material that repels water but sucks up harmful contaminants. The husband-and-wife engineering team that invented the material won an international wearable technology competition and will be recognized this week in Rome at the Maker Faire.
The material could also be sewn into wet suits, letting surfers help clean the ocean as they catch waves, said Mihri Ozkan, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Riverside. Ozkan said she and her husband, materials engineer Cengiz Ozkan, have been working on the material for about four years and were originally inspired to devise a new way to clean up ocean oil spills. RELATED: 5 Shocking Photos of What It’s Like to Swim in Ocean Plastic Pollution.
ANNEXE_3_-_se_quence_design_your_baby.pdf. Cell Phone Addiction May Lead to Sleep Texting. The Ultimate lost & found community on mobile. Science and Technology. Cities of the future. Will Google's self-driving pods spell the end of the road for car ownership? | Technology | The Observer. Look, no hands: an artist’s sketch, released by Google last week, of the new driverless pods. Photograph: EPA You will have heard, I am sure, of the Google driverless car. In fact, if you're a regular reader you will be thoroughly familiar with the vehicle if only because this columnist seems to be always going on about it. The justification for this obsession is that the success of the autonomous vehicle project should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who is complacent about the superiority of humans to machines.
That said, there was something oddly reassuring about the original driverless cars. For one thing, they were regular Toyota and Lexus saloons equipped with $250,000 worth of computers, sensors, lasers and associated kit. Secondly, they had steering wheels, gear shifts, brake pedals, rear-view mirrors and all the other appurtenances of a standard-issue car. There was, however, one slightly unsettling fly in the ointment. Here's one way of looking at it. How does Google's self-driving car work – and when can we drive one? | Technology. Google unveiled a brand new self-driving car prototype on Tuesday; the first company to build a car with no a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedal. The car's arrival marks the next stage in Google’s self-driving car project, which was born from the Darpa Grand Challenges for robotic vehicles in the early 2000s. Google kickstarted its own self-driving car project in 2008, and it has been rumbling on ever since, first with modified Toyota Prius and then with customised Lexus SUVs, which took the car’s existing sensors, such as the cruise-control cameras, and added a spinning laser scanner on the top.
What is it? It is the first truly driverless electric car prototype built by Google to test the next stage of its five-year-old self-driving car project. It looks like a cross between a Smart car and a Nissan Micra, with two seats and room enough for a small amount of luggage. Where is it? What does it do? It ferries two people from one place to another without any user interaction. Why now?