engineering on Technabob...

While to many people, bike tech doesn’t seem to evolve much, there are refinements every year making bikes somewhat more efficient than just a decade ago. But that doesn’t stop some people from wanting a quantum leap in tech advances. A team of University of Pennsylvania mechanical engineering students have…

Whether walking, crawling, climbing or rolling, most robots have a single form-factor. Not so with the iMobot, a robotic platform capable of taking on different forms based on the appropriate mode of movement for traversing its environment.…

In a development that no doubt has printer manufacturers drooling, scientists at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory are looking into leveraging the capabilities of 3D printing – which they call Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) – to make food. They’d like to think that someday syringe-based food printers will be as…

The one concept of Cyberpunk …that I’ve always enjoyed is bionic limbs. In that near future universe, people could have cybernetic limbs. For years, this concept was relegated to science-fiction. However, there has been progress to make these sort of replacement limbs a reality.

A lot of people lose limbs

Researchers at North Carolina State University have invented a machine that can keep an animal heart functional even after it has been removed from its body. Freaky. Andrew Richards, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering, designed the “dynamic heart system”, which “pumps fluid through a pig heart so that it…

This unique electromechanical clock is like a cross between a Magna Doodle and an Etch-a-Sketch.

Using a modified Magna Doodle as the basis for their display, the Clock-a-Doodle-Doo is the brainchild of a recent UCLA mechanical engineering class.
The clock uses a XY plotter-like mechanism to “draw” the current time…