Concussions are a common sports injury with the potential to cause long-term brain damage, especially if left untreated. Unfortunately, they often go undetected due to the inherently subjective methods for reporting and evaluating head injuries. Prevent Biometrics is aiming to change that with its sensor-equipped mouthguard, which is designed to detect head impacts in real-time and issue an immediate alert when a concussion assessment is in order.

Read More → "Impact-monitoring mouthguard detects concussion in real-time"

If you’re willing to shell out nearly $31,000 for a bespoke brew, The Drinks Business reports that Meantime Brewing Company, a London-based craft beer company, is now offering customers the chance to create a beer that appeals specifically to their individual flavor profiles by using DNA testing.

Meantime Brewing Company has joined forces with … Read More → "London craft brewery uses DNA testing to create bespoke beer"

Alarm has developed a machine learning algorithm, called the Insights Engine, that continually monitors sensors placed around your property to learn how things are normally run and to quickly identify unexpected events — say, a break-in or a water leak — when they occur. If the system does spot something out of the ordinary, it will deploy a swarm of autonomous UAVs built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight drone platform to investigate. These little fliers … Read More → "Your next home security system could deploy patrol drones"

Mad scientists at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at The University of Tokyo have built a scent-controlled car driven by a silkworm moth. As you can see in the video, the moth walks over an air-supported ball toward an attractive scent (female silkworm sex pheromones, nice). The robot-car thing tracks the ball’s movement using optical sensors, and … Read More → "Watch this moth drive a scent-controlled robot car"

Gavin Munroe has a furniture orchard, where he grows chairs and tables, in Derbyshire, UK. While it takes years  to harvest one, that’s nothing compared to how long we wait for a tree to produce wood the old-fashioned way.
via Neatorama

… Read More → "Furniture orchard that grows willow chairs and tables directly from the ground"

Two employees at the East Lake County Library created a fictional patron called Chuck Finley — entering fake driver’s license and address details into the library system — and then used the account to check out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the library’s patrons, thus rescuing the … Read More → "Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons to “check out” endangered titles"

Named after former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger* who rained bombs on millions of people from half a world away, the device is simple. It’s a little larger than a protective case and has an oval silicon “lip” at the bottom. High precision force sensors register a user’s lip movements and miniature linear actuators replicate those movements on the device of … Read More → "Robot phone device transmits kisses to your loved ones when you’re away"

2016 may be remembered as the year humans realized giving up the steering wheel is an OK idea after all: In the past 12 months, Uber launched a fleet of robo-taxis in Pittsburgh, Google finally started talking about how to commercialize its autonomous tech, and an Otto truck hauled 50,000 cans of Budweiser across Colorado … Read More → "2016’s top 5 moments in the world of transportation"

Snotbots are custom-built drones created in partnership between Ocean Alliance and Olin College of Engineering. They hover in the air above a surfacing whale and collect the blow (or snot) exhaled from its lungs. Snotbot then returns that sample back to researchers a significant distance away.
via Read More → "“Snotbot” drones follow whales and collect their snot for researchers"

Cynthia Delaney Suwito, a multi-media artist in Singapore, has a true talent for knitting and crocheting as demonstrated in her “Knitting Noodles” exhibition. The project entails a looped video that shows Suwito knitting with instant ramen noodles, a very delicate procedure and … Read More → "Multi-Media artist knits with instant ramen noodles"