Made by Gavio, the avian-inspired Wrenz is a compact speaker that can plug into your smartphone. Each Wrenz speaker is wrapped in a mirrored finish, and conceals its audio and USB charging connections behind its tail feathers.

While it’s not going to blow any eardrums with its 2 watts of power, 32mm speaker driver, and 180Hz to 20KHz frequency response, it’ll definitely sing a sweet song at higher frequencies. The speaker is powered by a built-in Lithium-Ion battery which should give you about 9 hours on a charge.

The Wrenz sells for $89.90 Singapore Dollars (~$71 USD) over at Gavio, so it’s not exactly cheep (typo intended), but I still love the way it looks.

[via iPhone Savior]

This is a stomach crab gnawing away at your cancer. Inside of you. The future is (almost) here people. It will be at least three years until it is commercially in use.

[via medgadget]

This latest idea gets rid of those random clumps and decides to instead make larger grains (ten nanometers, up from seven to eight nanometers), in regular patterns, which each store one bit. A spokesperson from Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering likens it to packing your clothes in a suitcase. The neater you pack it all in, the more it can carry.

They use an e-beam lithography process that produces fine nano-scale structures for the discs and when sodium chloride is added to the developer solution, they found that they could create nanostructures with a higher resolution: down to 4.5 nanometers half pitch, without overly expensive equipment. In the end, this salty process could allow for anywhere from 1.9TB to 3.3TB per square-inch, a substantial increase from today’s capacities.

[via Wired]

Even the set-up is a bit DS-like. Users write on a whiteboard, using ordinary markers; a webcam then takes an image of the written word or phrase. The real magic is done by the software, which “analyzes the image and interprets the handwritten words into different output modalities.” In other words, what you write is what you get.

Unfortunately, the demo video doesn’t go into detail about the capabilities and the limitations of the software, like the number or kinds of languages it can interpret, the types of words (adjectives, proper nouns, adverbs, verbs) it can interpret, the number of words it can recognize, or if the virtual objects can be made to interact like in Scribblenauts.

Nevertheless, this is an awesome project, and preschool and elementary teachers will no doubt fall on their knees and cry buckets of joyous tears if and when WYWIWYG comes out, because it’s a clever way of capturing the attention of kids and motivating them to learn. After all, you can’t make green poop appear if you don’t know how to spell “green” and “poop”. You can watch the demo video at the Interactive Multimedia Lab’s website; be sure to check out their other projects as well.

The idea is that people who want to board the train get into a smaller car that piggybacks onto the moving train as it passes through the station. To get off, you get into the smaller upper car while on the train and it unhitches at the station. If what I just said was totally confusing to you, then you should watch this video clip to clarify. The clip is in Chinese (I think) but the graphics are self-explanatory and show how this concept would work.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Not only would this make overall train speed faster, since you don’t have to average in stopping times, but it would also be more energy efficient. Also, it’s super cool and futuristic.

You can read more about this concept, and its inventor Peng Yu-Lun, in this Taiwan Headlines article.

[via deputydog]

Singapore designer Hans Tan created the Idea of a Clock II using a green LED bulletin board to display the current time using a lengthy textual description. For instance, at 12:29, the clock reads “This is the idea of a clock that tells you the time using words at exactly twenty-nine minutes past twelve”.

Now that’s just a bit too wordy to offer at-a-glance time checking, isn’t it? By the time you’re done reading the entire message, the time probably will have changed.

Idea of a Clock II is a limited edition timepiece, with pricing available upon request of the artist.

[via Dustbowl]

Creative’s SE2300 Bluetooth Wireless Headphones can work from up to 10 meters away from the transmitter. They feature high-fidelity neodymium drivers, with a frequency response range of 20 Hz ~ 20 kHz. The headphones come with a small transmitter which plugs into your media player, laptop or other audio source via a 1.5mm mini stereo plug, but you can also use them to pair directly with other Bluetooth enabled devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. The headphones have a rechargeable battery quoted to run for appx. 6 to 8 hours (YMMV), on a 3 hour charge. If you don’t want to carry a charger, you can also charge them using a USB port.

The headphones are listed at $129.99 USD on Creative’s North American website, but just $99.99 USD on their Singapore site, so hopefully the price will come down in the US to match that.