| Blog - 2010's Most Innovative Tech Product Is Not a Damn Jetpack and What Happens When You Breathe In Nanoparticles |
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Despite what annual "Best Tech" roundups would have you believe, the world doesn't need flying cars. Here are three innovative products that have a good reason to exist.Ah, November: leaves are falling, Thanksgiving is coming, and magazines start rolling out their year-end "Best Tech" lists. Time.com published "The 50 Best Inventions of 2010" last week, and as one would expect, it's larded up with plenty of shiny flying things that no one on Earth needs.But hidden in the chaff are three genuinely innovative products that approach technology from a new angle. Drum roll...We all saw The Hurt Locker: defusing roadside bombs is scary business, even in that protective suit. Steve Todd, a retired Navy SEAL at Sandia National Laboratories, wanted to give explosive ordnance disposal teams a faster, safer way of neutralizing IEDs than their traditional tools. His idea: a blade of water that slices through the bomb instantly and precisely. [Read the full article] The secret behind the beautiful songs that birds sing has been decoded and reproduced for the first timeOne of the great challenges in neuroscience is to explain how collections of neural circuits produce the complex sequences of signals that result in behaviours such as animal communication, birdsong and human speech.Among the best studied models in this area are birds such as zebra finches. These enthusiastic singers produce songs that consist of long but relatively simple sequences of syllables. These sequences have been well studied and their statistical properties calculated.It turns out that these statistical properties can be accurately reproduced using a type of simulation called a Markov model in which each syllable is thought of as a state of the system and whose appearance in a song depends only on the statistical properties of the previous syllable. [Read the full article] Gestural computing: ever since a be-gloved Tom Cruise blew everyone's minds in Minority Report, interface dorks have been trying hard to bring it into the real world. But here's the problem: who actually wants to spend their whole workday wildly waving their arms around?Well, musicians and dancers just might. That's the idea behind Toscanini, a gestural computer interface named after the famously gesticulative Italian conductor.And here's the best part: unlike those room-sized setups you've seen on TED talks, Toscanini fits a ramen-noodle-sized budget. The free software runs on Texas Instruments' "Wireless Watch Development Tool" -- an accelerometer-equipped, programmable sports watch that costs just $50.So what the hell does it do? Basically, it provides a bridge between your movements and digital instruments like synthesizers and keyboards -- or anything else you can control from your computer through a MIDI connection. [Read the full article] 
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