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Gamera, a 12-year-old African spur-thighed tortoise, recently underwent an amputation of his front left leg after suffering a life-threatening “severe thermal injury and tissue damage from an unknown source.” The team at Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine hooked Gamera up with an office-chair caster (attached with epoxy) and a feeding tube to help him recover. The tortoise has gained about three pounds in three months and can get around just fine on most surfaces with his new limb. (Insert “that’s how he rolls” joke here.) Link
via Gizmodo
The wheel from the comic strip B.C. is now a real product! The Solowheel is sort of a minimalist Segway, consisting of only a powered, gyroscopic wheel and foot platforms. It should be available sometime this month for $1,500. See more pictures and a video at Gizmodo. Link -via the Presurfer
For our fellow Neatoramanauts still digging themselves out of the epic snowstorm in part of the United States, we present: Snowshoes for Cars. From the 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics:
As shown in the photo at the right, these snowshoes consist of box-like steel frames attached firmly to the spokes of the wheels. The frames are then covered with wire netting, canvas, or hide. When the photograph was taken, the inventor was using a wire netting covering on the left wheel and a canvas covering on the right in an effort to determine which was the most efficient. The wire netting snowshoe proved to be most satisfactory.
The width of the snowshoes is ample to prevent the rear wheels from digging through the snow, and ample traction is secured by the broad surfaces. Heavy ski runners are placed on the front wheels, from which the tires are removed in order to secure better bracing. Naturally this contraption does not enable high speeds to be developed, but it proves successful in deep show and is faster than a dog team. Ordinary tire chains on the rear wheels prove useful on hard-packed stretches of ice on city streets.
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No motor? No problem! In India, this ferris wheel is powered by men climbing up and using their body weight to rotate the wheel.
I guess you’d want to try this ride early, since the operators must be exhausted at the end of the day!
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
