The South Korean company Primpo has developed an improved cane for the visually impaired. It vibrates with increasing intensity as its sensor approaches an object. It can also detect colors:

Unlike conventional white canes, with which a user can not detect obstacles above waist height, the "Isonic" model can detect obstacles within a range of 25 degrees horizontally and 50 degrees vertically with an integrated supersonic sensor.

The product can also detect obstacles within a distance of 2 meters, as well as very slim objects, narrower than 3cm. With decreasing distance to an object, the cane's vibrating indicator sends a stronger signal to the user, pinpointing the location of the obstacle.

A feature to inform a visually impaired user of an object's color draws special attention. With a color sensor attached, the user is informed by voice messages of 10 detectable colors and their brightness, including red, orange and blue.

Link via OhGizmo! | Photo: Aving.net

Sylvester Jiles violated his probation by trying to break into the Brevard County, Florida jail and has been sentenced to fifteen years in prison:

At the time, he begged jail officials to take him back into custody, saying he feared retaliation from the victim's family. But officials refused his request, advising him to file a police report instead.

Link | Image: FBI

Obesity experts at Cornell University say that depictions of the Last Supper, such as that of Leonardo da Vinci (above), have shown increasingly larger meal portions for the past thousand years:

They found the main courses, bread and plates put before Jesus and his disciples have progressively grown by up to two-thirds.

This, they say, is art imitating life.

Professor Brian Wansink, who, with his brother Craig, led the research, published in the International Journal of Obesity, said: "The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food.

Link | Image: Art Renewal Center

Researchers at Britain's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory are developing machines that can generate electrical fields that could repel projectile attacks:

When a threat from incoming fire is detected by the vehicle, the energy stored in the supercapacitor can be rapidly dumped onto the metal plating on the outside of the vehicle, producing a strong electromagnetic field.

Scientists behind the project claim this would produce a momentary "force field" capable of repelling the incoming rounds and projectiles.

Although it would last for only a fraction of a second, if timed correctly it could prevent rocket propelled grenades, which detonate on impact, from reaching their target. The supercapacitor could then be rapidly recharged ready for another attack.

Link via io9 | Image: Paramount

"Lights Off" is a short film created by the World Wildlife Fund to promote Earth Hour -- a time when people around the world turn off all of their electrical appliances for an hour. The film has separate light and dark modes, and will play either the light or dark version depending on whether your computer's webcam detects illumination or darkness. There's also a light switch that you can flip to view either version of the film, no matter how well your computer area is lighted.

Link via The Presurfer | Screenshot: The Presurfer

(YouTube Link)

Engineer Scott Amron has a clever invention. It's a heat sleeve for a cup that expands when hot liquid poured into is so that the drinker has additional protection from the heat.

Other Amron inventions that we've featured at Neatorama include a keyring/key, leather band-aids, and an art exhibit for which Amron plugged non-electrical objects into electrical appliances.

Link via Gizmodo

(YouTube Link)

This video shows a Soviet animated short from 1968, created in something similar to ASCII:

A group of russian physicists and mathematicians with N.Konstantinov in the head of it created mathematic model of the cat and its moving and realized this model in the program for the computer "BESM-4". Computer printed hundreds of frames on the paper using alphabet symbols and then they were converted to the cinefilm.

via Make

The Plastiki is a boat made from recycled plastic bottles. It was built by a team led by David de Rothschild in order to call attention to the value of recycling. It set sail on Saturday from Sausalito, California and is heading for Australia:

The Plastiki, named in honor of Norwegian explorer Thor Hyderdahl's raft Kon Tiki, is a boat like no other in the world. Besides the hull of recycled plastic water and soda bottles, the vessel is made of a hardened plastic called PET.

The boat is a twin-hulled catamaran rigged as a ketch. It will rely on the wind for propulsion and has only a small auxiliary engine. No such boat has ever made an ocean passage before.

The Plastiki was built on the San Francisco waterfront in 2009 and has been making trial voyages on the bay.

Link via The Presurfer | Official Website | Photo: Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle

Police sometimes use rubber bullets to subdue protesters or rioters without killing them. Unfortunately, rubber bullets can still kill people, especially at close range. In response to this problem, Lund Technologies has developed a rifle that will automatically determine the range of the target and slow down the velocity of the bullet (fired with compressed air) as needed in order to reduce the likelihood of killing the target:

“Less-lethal,” of course, is a term that replaced “non-lethal” because it turns out most rounds being billed as non-lethal – like rubber bullets for instance – are actually quite fatal at close range. Too keep less-lethal intentions from turning into lethal actions, the LVVWS is equipped with a range finder that locates the target and calculates distance; if the shooter is working in less-lethal mode, the rifle ratchets down the muzzle velocity of the round, maintaining its less-lethal status even in close quarters.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-03/variable-velocity-rifle-puts-less-less-lethal | Photo: Lund Technologies

Transportation is challenging for people living in the mountains around the Rio Negro in Colombia. For more than two hundred years, the only way in or out of this area has been by zip line. Even school-age children ride it a half-mile every day to attend classes:

More than 1,300ft above the roaring Rio Negro in Colombia, nine-year-old Daisy Mora prepares to throw herself over the abyss. Attaching herself to an old and rusted pulley system she drops over the edge before plummeting at 40mph along a zip wire to the opposite bank half a mile away - a vertigo-inducing journey she has to take every day to get to school.

Link via The Agitator

Next month, the Russian made Dnepr rocket will carry a European satellite into orbit. It's a very unique space vehicle. The rocket is an intercontinental ballistic missile launched from an underground silo. The first stage is a gunpowder charge:

Essentially, the rocket is packed inside a canister which is loaded into a silo.

At launch, a black powder charge underneath the vehicle produces rapidly expanding gases that pop the Dnepr up out of the ground like a champagne cork.

There is then this heart-stopping moment when the vehicle just hangs 20m above the ground before the first-stage motors kick in and the former war machine climbs skyward.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/jonathanamos/2010/03/riding-the-strangest-rocket-in.shtml via Knirirr's Wafflings | YouTube Video of a Dnepr Launch | Image: BBC

Vetutius Placidus' thermopolium (snack bar) in the ruins of Pompeii will reopen nearly 2,000 years after a volcanic eruption destroyed the city and Placidus' clientele:

The thermopolium, one of the best preserved sites in Pompeii, has been closed to the public for years in order to protect it from further damage. But following months of detailed excavation and preservation work, all visitors will soon be able to go inside and get an idea of a typical ancient Roman lunch establishment.

Inside, as in many modern cafés and bars, visitors are greeted with a large, L-shaped, decorated counter where customers stood to enjoy a quick lunch. Cylindrical holes in the bar contained glass dolia, or jars, displaying food.

Link via The Presurfer | Photo: flickr user lyng883, used under Creative Commons license

Double Falsehood or Distressed Lovers as it is also known is a play that Shakespeare scholar Lewis Theobald claimed to have discovered in 1727. He mounted a production of this allegedly lost script, though many of his contemporaries dismissed the play as a fraud. Now a modern Shakespeare scholar thinks that Theobald may have been correct:

The publication of the play, in fully annotated form, comes after a 10-year mission to crack a literary mystery by Professor Brean Hammond, of the University of Nottingham.

He is now convinced that the play originates from a collaboration between Britain's best-known playwright and Jacobean dramatist John Fletcher.

Fletcher went on to become of the most prolific and influential dramatists of his day. By the time of the early Restoration period in the late 1600s, his fame rivaled Shakespeare's.

Hammond argues that the language used in this play is highly indicative of Shakespeare's authorship. At the link you can read samples of the text.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Carol Highsmith, Library of Congress.

A negative pressure pump is a wound therapy device common to nations with advanced medical care. They normally cost $100 a day to rent, which is far too expensive for many patients and hospitals in developing nations. MIT student Danielle Zurovcik invented one that costs a total $3 and can be powered with only 14 microwatts:

But Zurovcik, inspired by a burn surgeon's plea, went a step further, designing a human-powered device that applies pressure via a simple bellows pump weighing less than half a pound. By improving the seal around the wound dressing to reduce air leaks, Zurovcik cut the pump's power requirements from about 14 watts to 80 microwatts, which comes from a hand pump.

"To basically take a toilet plunger and produce negative pressure over a prolonged period of time, that is really great," says Kristian Olson, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, who was not involved in the project. "Not only do I see it answering this need in developing countries, I think it could really enhance home therapy for chronic wounds in the U.S."

The device is now in use in Haiti.

Link via Popular Science | Photo: Danielle Zurovcik

The Vancouver-based sound studio Griffiths, Gibson and Ramsay Productions is using a clever advertising gimmick. The company's ad firm, Grey Canada, is mailing out cardboard boxes that can be used as record players. Just place the record on the peg, lower the needle, and spin the record with a pencil. The gadget then plays a recording of the children's story "A Town That Found Its Sound."

via Fast Company | Company Website | Photo: Ads of the World