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James Trussart has made a name for himself by designing custom guitars for rock icons that include Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. But I doubt any of them offered as unique a challenge as the Hard Rock Café.  In looking for a different way to introduce their new steak burgers and 20 total new menu items, the restaurant/bar/lounge commissioned Trussart to design the world's first P...

The Paris Air Show kicked off earlier this week, and the most awkward guest at the party appears to be Boeing, the airplane maker that’s been scrambling since March to fix a software glitch that’s being blamed for two fatal plane crashes. And the fix truly can’t come quick enough. The FAA has grounded the plane at the heart of the disasters – the 737 Max 8 – and Boeing’s biggest airline customers...

The Aska is a new eVTOL flying car design. The door-to-door, drive and fly, hybrid electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle comes from California-based NFT, which maintains an R&D center in Israel. The company is hopeful that, by 2025, their Aska will let you drive on the road and take to the skies, autonomously. According to an interview with CNET, the company wanted to build a flying ca...

Last week, exercise equipment inventor Douglas Brendle was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to multiple counts of tax and healthcare fraud. A resident of Cheyenne, Wyoming, Brendle is the inventor of the Fitwall, a stainless steel lattice structure that stands about seven feet tall and is 30 inches wide. It has footsteps and hand-holds as well as the ability to add various at...

Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland have created the Beekee Box, a standalone box that can generate a wireless network that enables users to log on to a learning platform without the internet or electricity. The standalone box was designed for people in remote areas with no connectivity, like people in refugee camps or war zones. It generates a local wireless network that anyone...

Last year, MIT researchers partnered with BMW to test ways for humans and robots to assemble car parts together in close proximity. The team created a robot on rails concept that delivered parts to workstations. However, human workers would often cross this railpath and the robot was designed to freeze whenever a worker passed by. The problem was that the robot was too safe, freezing too early and...

If you’re a James Bond fan, you’ve certainly seen the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me . You’d also know that there is literally no way that Bond could adequately investigate the disappearance of British and Russian submarines without at least a basic submarine car. So the movie incorporated an amphibious vehicle that could drive on both land and sea, played by a modified 1976 Lotus Esprit.  The Wet...

We hear a lot about the millions of dollars in research and development that’s being poured into autonomous vehicle projects but often, that’s it. Besides partnerships and funding announcements that drop into the news cycle here and there, we don’t usually get a look inside the testing programs in order to get a feel for where we’re really at with the driverless car. And when we do, maybe we learn...

One of the world’s foremost champions of engineers, inventors and at-home tinkerers appears to be on life support amid a desperate push by its supporters to keep it running. Maker Media, the organizer of the Maker Faire festivals and owner of Make: magazine, suspended operations last week and laid off its staff of 22 people. Dale Dougherty, the company’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that maint...

As an avid consumer of sparkling water, I can attest to the fact that brand loyalty is not often a consideration when making a purchase. And if you were to ask the brands within this increasingly crowded market, they might even admit that the fickle consumer is the typical one. Consider the ups and downs of LaCroix, the fruity fizzy water brand that’s been around for decades but rocketed to popula...

At last week’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, Apple dropped the jaws of those in attendance and throughout the tech world by announcing the availability of the Mac Pro Stand … starting at $999. Yes, you heard that right and yes, it’s a piece of metal that holds a monitor in place. And it costs $1,000. Just to be clear, it is not included in the price of the $5,000 Pro Display XDR monitor for wh...

Airless tires may finally be coming to passenger vehicles. Tires are just about the most important and underappreciated thing about your car. Nobody cares about the poor, lowly tire until there’s a nail in the road and then… look out. Just a string of curse words. That’s why the world is basically on fire about the latest announcement from GM and Michelin that they’re collaborating on tests of a n...

PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) are a problem. Also called "forever chemicals" PFAS are commonly used in non-stick coatings, lubricants and fire-fighting foams, but they are turning up everywhere. The chemical has been linked to everything from cancer, increased cholesterol and pregnancies problems. They have seeped into water systems across the nation and just...

A team of researchers believes that the birth defect that leads to extra fingers and toes could provide a blueprint for a way to control robotic limbs. The condition is known as polydactyly and it impacts one in every 500 babies. The extra digits are typically removed after birth, but the researchers found a few patients who  kept their sixth finger and are studying how their brains adapted to the...

Researchers from North Carolina State have created a new armor out of composite metal foam (CMF). During tests, the researchers fired a .50-caliber armor-piercing round 514 meters per second at the foam. It bounced off, didn't even leave an indentation on the back plate. They ran the same test with the bullet traveling 801 meters per second. It left a mark, but it was only 8 mm deep.   The fo...

At the end of the day, everyone just wants to make more money. That was the message at the Factory of the Future experience at the Bosch Rexroth Automation & Electrification facility in Hoffman Estates, IL.  According to Peter Fischbach, industry segment manager at Bosch Rexroth, 70 percent of machines on the factory floor are not connected at all. The situation provides a huge opportunity to...

If you were to visit DC Solar’s website , you’d see a professional-looking dot-com, tiled with images of the company’s solar generators in action. You’ll also notice the proud press releases focusing on DC Solar’s sponsorship of premier NASCAR brands, including Chip Ganassi Racing. What you won’t see is that the Ganassi sponsorship fizzled after the company was raided in December of 2018 – under s...

Elon Musk has always been one to make grand projections and, hey – if he can make good on even a handful of his brash promises then the future of the transportation industry – on earth, below ground and in out space – should be interesting. The latest comments from the visionary entrepreneur have to do with a pet project he’s been teasing for a while now – a Tesla pickup truck model. And in true E...

Teaching robots how to recognize and handle unknown items remains a key hurdle to enabling automation of a much wider range of routine tasks. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have come up with a relatively simple solution: they outfitted an ordinary glove with hundreds of tiny, inexpensive sensors, then used the way its wearers handled things to build a data set of...

Last Friday, 49-year-old Gregory Stanton was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for urinating on a conveyor belt that carried cereal at the Kellog's plant in Memphis Tennessee.  Charged with tampering with consumer products, Stanton was also ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution.  Stanton worked as a contract worker at the food manufacturing plant in 2014. During his tenure, he made a v...

Amazon has found itself at odds with the news outlet Bloomberg over a recent report that the wholesaling giant could be making some big changes. But if the report is to be taken at face value, then it’s not Amazon that’s the true victim – its small and medium sized manufacturers. That’s because Bloomberg is contending that Amazon is on the verge of a massive supplier purge. According to the report...

When scientists are able to develop a new treatment for a rare disease that severely impacts the lives of very young children, it’s generally considered good news. And in the case of the newest announcement from Novartis, it is. But it’s not that simple. The drugmaker, who is parent to the company AveXis, recently revealed a new treatment for a debilitating genetic disease called spinal muscular a...

Ford has partnered with Agility Robotics to put a humanoid robot, Digit, into self-driving vehicles to create what they call the "future of self-driving vehicle delivery." Digit is a bipedal robot that was designed and developed by Agility Robotics. As part of the collaboration, Digit would carry out the final step of delivery, from the car to the door.  Agility Robotics designed Digit t...

Researchers from South Korea have created a new graphene-based biosensor that sucks to your skin -- it was inspired by the suckers on an octopus. The researchers designed a cheap, scalable production process for graphene-coated fabric (GCF) sensors that stick to your skin. The fabric is a yarn-like substrate that is coated with graphene oxide and then soaked in L-ascorbic acid to help with conduct...

In 2016, researchers at the University of California - Berkeley created Salto (Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles). Salto is a tiny jumping robot that can leap off of the ground, hit a spot on the wall, and then jump off the wall. Cool, but limited. Since then, the team has added a host of capabilities. Salto can now run or jump for more than 10 minutes, taking as many as 100 jumps in tha...