The push to leave the car at home in favor of commuting by bicycle now weighs on urban communities more than ever, and with a shortage of urban-minded bicycle design on the market the choice isn’t an easy one to make. To help find a solution, the Oregon Manifest Constructor’s Design Challenge has brought together some of the most talented designers and custom bike builders in the country tasked with creating the ideal modern utility … Read More → "Thirty-four teams of top designers and custom bike builders compete to create the ultimate urban bike"

The optical table in Ken Crozier’s lab at Harvard.
(Credit: Eliza Grinnell/Harvard)

Optical tweezers have been used by biophysicists since their invention at Bell Labs in the 1980s, and are typically used to study cellular components. But they have a few drawbacks, not least of which are overheating and inefficiency.

So engineers at Harvard have been working on a next-gen model they call plasmonic nanotweezers& … Read More → "Optical nanotweezers can isolate, manipulate viruses"

Just because we’ve been cooking delicious food for centuries doesn’t mean we should stop innovating. Technology and science are driving cooking’s latest wave, yielding delicious results in the process. Here are seven tools that will make you a master chef.

Check ’em out here at Gizmodo

my new apple laptop, and its time machine backup/wifi support system…just worked…just saying

… Read More → "Swarms of flying robots, flocking autonomously like birds, have taken to the air over Geneva, Switzerland"

From Tom Pappalardo’s blog:

Cartooning is, to me, an art form of simplification. The artist uses a minimal amount of lines to communicate characters and place to a reader. Mouths are often oddly-shaped black holes. Cartoon evolution often does away with lips, body hair, elbows. Eyebrows are reduced to lines. Eyes become dots. A background might be a line indicating where the floor and wall meet. Maybe a squiggle of distant trees, or a cloud. Maybe just a flat field of color. Cartooning is also … Read More → "Cartooning vs. Technology: How Steve Jobs Ruined Comics"

VisionTech Components sold a large amount of semiconductor chips to more than 1,100 customers from its office in Clearwater, Fla. Unfortunately, federal prosecutors allege, the chips were counterfeits. In this case, the perpetrators were brought to justice when authorities uncovered the $16 million counterfeiting operation. A sentencing in the case will happen at the end of this month.

Continue reading at Venture Beat

Parallax is introducing a new robotics platform based on the Propeller microcontroller. Known as Eddie, which stands for Expandable Development Discs for Innovation and Experimentation, the platform consists of dual 18 inch round bases positioned one above the other. The upper is designed with mounts for a Kinect and a laptop (used for what Parallax terms “on the go programming.”) The lower level is outfitted with the Propeller board, … Read More → "Parallax introduces Eddie robotics platform"

Hardware Engineers. Ooops! Did I say that in public?