'Upcycling' is the act of directly reusing waste materials as marketable goods. At the link, you can view a Reuters News video (embed disabled) about how various upcycled products are now available to consumers, as featured at the recent London Design Festival. Among the festival's participants was the Elvis & Kresse Organization -- a UK-based company which upcycles worn-out firehoses as luggage and other products usually made with leather.

YouTube Link via Scientific American | Company Website | London Design Festival | Image: Elvis & Kresse

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This video by ABB Robotics demonstrates a sorting robot used in a pancake factory. The action starts at about 1:15, when the robot begins sorting 400 pancakes per minute, switching off so that specific sizes are in a specific order. Just imagine how we could benefit if this machine was applied to soylent green production.

Via Make | Company Website

Photo: Simon Måssebäck

Leif Garvin of Sweden spent about $1 million building his own Batmobile. It's built onto the chassis of a 1973 Lincoln Continental and has a 700 hp engine. Like the, uh, real Batmobile, it's loaded with all sorts of gadgetry:

There's sat-nav to help you find the scene of the crime (and other helpful POIs), a plasma TV for video calls to Albert (and for distraction during Stockholm traffic jams), voice recognition to keep your fighting hands free (and avoid nasty fines), height-adjustable suspension for navigating dramatic obstacles in your path (and speed bumps), a rear-view camera to watch your back (and help with tight parking squeezes), and machine guns for, er, shooting stuff. Worryingly, there is no word on whether said firearms are real...

UPDATE 10/4/09: Simon Måssebäck emailed to correct a mistake. He didn't make the Batmobile -- a man named Leif Garvin did. Thanks, Simon, especially for allowing us to use your photo!

Link via DVICE

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security developed a 'dazzler' -- a non-lethal weapon which uses flashing lights to distrupt a target's equilibrium. A person effected by lights for long enough, will temporarily lose visual acuity, balance, and become nauseous. The government spend about $1 million on the project. Limor Fried, a MIT-educated engineer, decided that she could build one for a lot less money. She's made her design schematics and source code available for free online. Below is a video of the results of her work.


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Link via io9 | Fried' s Bio | Image: AdaFruit Industries

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This spellbinding 1-minute animated video is a commercial for Central China Television. It shows drops of ink in water morphing into fish, dancers, airplanes, and other shapes. The video was created by the Paris-based graphics studio Troublemakers.tv and directed by Niko Tziopanos.

Via Gizmodo | Director's Website | Troublemakers.tv

The world's largest windfarm began operating today. The Roscoe Wind Complex is composed of 627 turbines over four counties in western Texas. According to E.On Climate and Renewables North America, the owner, it is already generating at full capacity -- that's 781.5 megawatts, or enough electricity to power 230,000 homes. John McFarland wrote for the Associated Press:

At the Roscoe wind farm, the turbines range in size from about 350 to 415 feet tall, and they're generally spaced about 900 feet apart, Woodson said. The land is leased, mostly from dryland cotton farmers who continue to work the fields around them, Woodson said. Texas is the nation's leading producer of cotton, most of it from West Texas.

"It's a use that appears to be quite complimentary," Woodson said. "This whole community was extremely welcoming to us."

E.ON has facilities around the state, but it could be awhile before the company builds more huge wind farms in West Texas because of the glut of wind companies and lack of transmission lines, Woodson said. The state is planning more lines from West Texas to more heavily populated areas, but they won't be completed for at least two more years.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ioaMTqBpfb3mR-M1Vew-FC32oyqQD9B2FK880 via TigerHawk | Image: Biggunben, used under Creative Commons license

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of The Twilight Zone. The first episode of Rod Serling's classic horror/suspense television show aired on October 2, 1959. William Kates wrote for the AP about the origin of the series:

In a time on television when suburbia was idealized in popular shows such as "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Make Room for Daddy," Serling offered a mixture of fantasy, science fiction, suspense, horror — and the show's trademark macabre or unexpected twist.

Serling had already earned acclaim for his television writing ("Requiem for a Heavyweight," "Patterns,") but found himself fighting CBS to get "The Twilight Zone" on the air. Serling would have repeated conflicts with network censors throughout his career.

My favorite episode is "The Shelter." What is yours?

Link via Alphecca | Image: CBS

UPDATE 10/2/09: Via GeekDad, free episodes online from CBS.

2nd UPDATE 10/2/09: io9 presents 6 Important Life Lessons from The Twilight Zone

Image: Sophie Blackall

Sophie Blackall is a Brooklyn-based artist who is fascinated by the Missed Connections postings on Craigslist. She finds them to be bite-sized insights into the human experience. Jenna Wortham writes in The New York Times:

Currently, Ms. Blackall is only putting her spin on listings from New York City, where she says “people are colliding with each other constantly, criss-crossing paths all day, every day and yet the interactions are so fleeting and transient. It’s really just an un-choreographed mess of colliding stories.” Eventually, she says, she might branch out to other cities. “It would be interesting to see how the listings differ in California, for example.”

Link via Fast Company | Artist's Etsy Shop | New York Times Post

Image: Lightning Packs

Lightning Packs is a company that is developing backpacks that generate electricity with the motion of their users. As the user walks, the spring-mounted backback bounces slightly, turning a gear on a generator. It is the brainchild of Lawrence C. Rome of the University of Pennsylvania, who hopes to market his idea to the U.S. military:

"Soldiers now carry GPS receivers, night vision goggles, headlamps, communication devices, and more. And with this technology, means of powering them becomes critical. Soldiers carry eighty pound backpacks, up to twenty pounds of which are spare batteries. Now, with the Suspended Load Backpack, electricity can be generated to power the equipment directly or to charge a lightweight rechargeable battery," Dr. Rome said.

When walking, the Suspended Load Backpack can generate up to 7.4 watts, more than enough power to simultaneously power an MP3 player, night vision goggles (or 3 LED headlamp), a PDA, a CMOS image decoder, a handheld GPS, Bluetooth, and a GSM terminal in talk mode.

Link via Gizmodo (where there's a video)

Ryan North of the webcomic Dinosaur Comics asked his friend Ben Tippett to write a formal paper explaining the coherency of Superman's amazing powers. It's a very math and physics-heavy article, so I won't try to understand, let alone summarize the whole thing. Here, however, is the conclusion:

We conjecture that all of Superman's powers come from His ability to alter the inertial mass of objects in His immediate vicinity or with which He is in personal contact; although the mechanism is unknown.

Link via io9

Image: flickr user chanchan222, used under Creative Commons license.

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Panasonic subsidiary Activelink is developing the "Dual Arm Amplification Robot" -- an exoskeleton that allows the user to lift heavy weights. It hopes to have to have a working model by 2015, which can then be used for disaster relief or industrial assembly. It is equipped with direct force feedback, which allows the user to feel the impact of its movements, and thus better control the machine.

Link via Popular Science

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Bicycle maker Gyrobike has invented the "Gyrowheel" -- a wheel with a motor-driven gyroscope inside that helps keep it upright. The manufacturer hopes to market it as a replacement for traditional training wheels on kids' bicycles. Nathan Barry of GeekDad writes:

It aims to replace traditional training wheels or stabilizers and to eradicate the bad habits that they teach kids when learning to ride a bike - leaning away from a turn and constantly putting a foot down at the first sign of a wobble when they’re eventually taken off. The Gyrowheel uses the “gyroscopic precession” of the independently spinning disk inside it to stabilize the bike. The force created when the disk is turned - via a rechargeable battery - is powerful enough to hold a wheel upright at very low speeds (i.e. virtually stopped), and can actually make a bike look like it has a “Ghost Rider” as the videos below show (and there are plenty more on the Gyrobike site).

Product Page via GeekDad (where there's an additional video)

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Zach Gage says that he created the free video game Lose/Lose to make people question their ethical assumptions. The game is similar to Space Invaders, but every time you kill an alien, the game deletes a randomly-selected file from your hard drive:

Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted. Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player's mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land? Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

Clicking on the link below will not download the game onto your computer and begin deleting your files. But it will give you the option to do so.

Link via Geekologie

After he "left for the great data bank in the sky," Alan was memorialized by his family in the most dignified manner possible: inside a 1990s-era SPARCstation CPU case inscribed with his name, the years of his life, and the phrase "Beam me up Scotty, I'm done here." Those who attended the funeral said goodbye to Alan in a way fitting for the cubicle lifestyle:

His friends and family were able to leave their final good-byes on post-notes. Anyone who wanted to keep their words private could just slip their note into the case through the floppy slot. All notes will be sealed in plastic and placed within the case. There has been one complication. His daughters like the look of it so much they aren't now sure if they want to bury him.

Link via Gizmodo | Image: flickr user sam 3.14

Photo: Design Boom

The Breakfast Machine is an art installation by Yuri Suzuki and Masa Kimura that makes a full breakfast for users through an elaborate series of Rube Goldberg-like devices. Pictured above is the section that prepares orange juice from scratch. It was featured at the Dutch Design Double design fair in Amsterdam. Video (in Dutch) at the link.

Link via GearFuse | Yuri Suzuki's Website