When I first saw these in the store, I was amazed to say the least. You can share photos with people from your phone at any time, it seemed so obviously needed in today’s on-the-go society. Since then, I’ve seen this gadget used in a variety of creative ways: at parties, at family gatherings, in art displays.. I even saw a guy selling prints of photos he took on the spot of tourists in Central Park!
We finally reached the point in time where movie glasses are not only a reality but affordable and plentiful. Watch movies and TV in your own little private theater right on your face! What’s more is this is used with your smartphone. How cool is that?!
I first saw this almost a year ago and thought it was the greatest thing ever. These lights are pre-programmable to your liking. With the phone app, you can dim the lights, change the colors, create automation and schedules. The possibilities really open up once you think about hacking the app and the hardware itself!
From audio activated light-up t-shirts to smartphone wifi activated light bulbs, some of the most interesting tech gadgets of the past year have been more than awe-inspiring.
If you’re a gadget freak like me, you’ll be happy to find some of the greatest new inventions below, things that make you wonder what they’ll think of next. Some of the following gadgets are mezemerizing, some are practical, but all are down-right cool.
While 2015 is coming to a close, there are sure to be some new gadgets around the corner and before the end of the year, too! In the meantime, check out these new electronics that make it exciting to live in 2015.
1. Siva Atom – Bicycle-powered USB Battery Charger!
A gadget fully funded by Kickstarter, this is great for busy, on-the-go people who bike a lot or even for people who use exercise bikes. Make the best use of your time and energy by charging a battery with your bike! It converts the momentum of your bike ride into energy to power your favorite electronics such as Android and iPhone smartphones, GoPro cameras, lights, gps, bluetooth speakers and other devices that can be powered by USB alone.
Ever wanted to ride to work in a screaming roller-coaster gun? If your answer was yes: good news!
Elon Musk – of SpaceX and Tesla Motors fame – recently proposed the “Hyperloop,” a high-speed floating train that’s accelerated by magnets and coasts between destinations. Hailed as the train of the future, the concept is indeed pretty fancy. Described by Musk himself as “the fifth mode of transport,” it’s intended to provide fast and safe transit, largely self-powered with electricity generated by its own solar panels.
Musk recently announced his company would build a test track in California. But I don’t think the Hyperloop is going to work well in California – or in fact anywhere else on Earth. It could, however, work quite well on a different planet. Mars, for instance. But to appreciate why, we need to take a closer look at the train in more detail.
The Hyperloop train concept is based on the idea of a “vactrain.” That’s a high-speed train run in a tube that has had all the air removed, making it a vacuum – hence the name. Having no air in the tube means (almost) no drag, the aerodynamic force that pushes in the opposite direction from which a train is traveling. So a vactrain could potentially travel really fast – think thousands of miles an hour.
This idea is not new; it has existed for decades. But while a vactrain sounds like a good concept, it’s relatively unfeasible to actually build. In this sense, Musk’s Hyperloop project is not a novel application of science but a novel application of engineering – using existing technology in new ways to get around the inherent challenges of a vactrain.
The Hyperloop concept uses small pods that hold passengers or freight as they travel through vacuum tubes, floating on a cushion of air. It’s a bit like a hovercraft in a tube. This configuration allows the train to travel very fast with minimal drag. Without going into too much detail, this setup overcomes many of the problems usually encountered when trying to build a vactrain. The user experience of the Hyperloop is likely to be akin to sitting in a rattling rocket.
Normal high-speed trains already exist that can travel at about 300-400 mph. The Hyperloop train concept would travel faster than this because it runs within a low-pressure vacuum tube that’s had 99.9% of the air inside removed; with most of the air gone, most of the drag is gone too. The Hyperloop is predicted to have top speeds of about 760 mph.
An expensive advance
But here’s the catch. Conservative cost estimates for building a single Hyperloop track from Los Angeles to San Francisco come in at US$6 billion. Taking the technology nationwide would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more. When you consider that normal, boring airplanes already travel at about 500-600 mph – about two-thirds as fast as the Hyperloop’s predicted speed – you might begin to wonder if an extra 200 mph is enough of a payoff for those hundreds of billions of dollars.
There’s certainly a niche market for faster travel between certain locations. For instance, the Concorde supersonic airliner would cruise at 1,354 mph, almost twice the speed of the proposed Hyperloop train. Passengers could make it from New York to London in under three hours. But the Concorde project was retired in 2003 because there wasn’t enough of a market to sustain it – and it didn’t have a $6 billion price tag.
In short, it would be tough to get the hyperloop project to work on a national scale. Maybe there’s enough of a market to build it between a few select cities. Some riders might appreciate the environmental advantages of a self-powering mode of transport. But if you want fast and safe travel with minimal carbon footprint, investing hundreds of billions of dollars into developing biofuels for aircraft makes much more sense to me. Planes are already fast and relatively safe. They can go anywhere with ease, including over oceans. The only real hurdle is making them more renewable, an avenue toward which many are working.
The solar panels that power the Hyperloop would be useful on a planet with few other fuel options. SpaceX, CC BY
Hyperloop goals further afield?
So why bother with the Hyperloop?
Well, Elon Musk is no idiot, and he certainly has the money to hire some of the best and the brightest. Either he really thinks he can drive the costs down on the Hyperloop project… or perhaps he has a different plan?
The Hyperloop project has its challenges in places that have air. But in places with little air and no fossil fuels, where you can’t fly and there’s little drag, it makes a lot more sense.
Places like Mars.
Elon Musk has a habit (SpaceX/SolarCity/Tesla Motors) of trying to use his money to start private ventures that he, and many others, believe are also important to humanity. Musk has spoken about his own commercial venture to put people on Mars, and SpaceX was listed as a potential launch vehicle for Mars One, another private outfit aiming to travel to the red planet.
While the Mars One project currently doesn’t seem to be going that well, such an elaborate venture is bound to have hurdles. Consider that it took the combined effort of almost every country interested in launching a rocket to get a habitat into our planet’s orbit, in the form of the International Space Station. Whatever its current status, Mars One has certainly helped rekindle a public fascination with what lies beyond our tiny blue dot. For this reason alone, I think the venture was a success.
Given the apparent setbacks for Mars One, Musk might have realized he can’t fund the mission to Mars alone. But he can certainly help develop and nurture the technology we will need when we finally arrive. A high-speed, safe, self-powered transportation system will be vital to connect Martian settlements – likely to be few in number and separated by large distances.
Perhaps Mars is where this technology is really headed.
This article has been updated to correct the location of the test track Hyperloop will be building.
Verizon and NASA are investing in technology that would utilize the network of cell phone towers throughout the U.S. to track civilian and commercial drones, according to records obtained by the Guardian. The project is currently undergoing testing in Silicon Valley and appears to be the first government effort to monitor private drone flights before they’re… Continue reading →
WASHINGTON, June 1, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Bug guts create drag, and drag increases fuel consumption. But aircraft of the future could be made more fuel-efficient with non-stick coatings NASA recently tested on Boeing’s ecoDemonstrator 757. NASA and Boeing engineers spent about two weeks in Shreveport, Louisiana, testing non-stick wing coatings designed to shed insect residue and… Continue reading →
Science Watch: EMDrive Today is Star Wars Day. In light of that, including the fact that Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes out this December, I wanted to share with you information about a new way to travel. It seems that we may soon be close to warp drive or hyperdrive technology. There has been lots… Continue reading →
It makes for a sensational headline but NASA didn’t even come close to discovering warp technology.
The mechanism behind their fuel-free propulsion has no clear link to warping space-time. In fact, space-time is not proven or understood to exist as a material substance able to warp. It’s all nonsense. So what really happened?
Richard Feynman once said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
You should have been suspicious when the story made the rounds on social media. The headlines were claiming NASA successfully tested something called the EM Drive. The EM drive is awesome, and it’s real science. It’s a propulsion engine doesn’t use propellant, which seems to violate the laws of physics by creating a reaction with no initial action.
First, let’s examine the actual finding. NASA has developed a hollow device that can be pumped full of electromagnetic radiation which reflects back-and-forth, tapped inside the chamber, generates thrust, causing the device to accelerate in a direction based onthe shape of the chamber. You might ahve seen the story or similar reports over the last year because iterations of it have been built by Roger Shawyer (the EM Drive), one from a Chinese group led by Juan Yang, and one from Guido Fetta (the Cannae Drive), all claiming successful thrust. The stories on science news sites claim the acceleration created is caused by warped space of an Alcubierre Drive, the completely fictional “Star Trek” design.
Here are some problems. First off, none of the tests showed results from gadations in power. If this is a viable prototype for an engine, the science behind it hasn’t proven why a tiny acceleration in relation to a huge amount of relative power is worth any sort of real consideration for space travel. It’s a weak engine with no sign of how it can be scaled.
Secondly, the thrust they created is so small it might just be a mistake in mathematics or caused by an unknown factor, unrelated to warp tech. A true test requires an isolated environment, with atmospheric, gravitational and electromagnetic effects removed from the equation.
Thirdly, good science is reproducible. These tests lack a transparent design so no one else can verify that this actually works.
Finally, a real report has to be created that can be peer-reviewed and understood before irresponsibly publishing the claims.
Optimism of this sort, claiming to be able to put people on mars with a warp engine, is not scientifically valid. This latest group declared they have broken the previously-held laws of physics. They assume we can scale up and implement this engine for space propulsion just because of some questionably positive results. They claim to be distorting space, they claim they might be causing light to go faster by approximately 10^-18 m/s. They made these claims without actually proving them, and told the general public, spreading misinfo.
Harold “Sonny” White at NASA, has made extraordinary claims about warp drive in the past. He is totally the kind of guy who would jump to warp drive as a conclusion. There is nothing in NASA’s report that shows they’ve created a warp drive. Sorry, Star Trek and Star Wars fans. Most likely this is a public relations move to get America and the world science communities more excited about space travel and science education.
Jonathan Howard
Jonathan is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, NY
TURIN, Italy, May 3, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — ISSpresso, the first capsule espresso coffee machine for use in space, produced by Argotec and Lavazza in partnership with the Italian Space Agency, is now in operation on the International Space Station Coffee calling Earth: at 12.44 GMT, the first espresso coffee was drunk in space. An espresso wish… Continue reading →
