A 127-year old steam-powered car, the 1884 De Dion Bouton Et Trepardoux Dos-A-Dos Steam Runabout, will be put up for sale next month in David Goodling’s auction house. Nicknamed “La Marquise”, the car is historically valuable because it was custom made for Count De Dion, and was built some 12 years before Henry Ford assembled his first car.
La Marquise weighs 2,100 pounds, is only nine feet long, and has a maximum speed of 38 miles per hour. It takes a full 45 minutes for it to generate enough steam to be driven. This steam-powered car uses wood, coal and bits of paper.
The car changed hands over the last 100 and so years and had been on the verge of being called junk until a member of the British Veteran Car Club got hold of the car in 1987. The car was then tuned up and La Marquise started functioning again.
The auction house expects La Marquise to fetch up to £1.6 million. Check out photos of the world’s oldest car below:
At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, handheld gamers rejoiced as the Sony had announced that the upcoming PS Vita will be unleashed on December 17 – in Japan, that is. The rest of the world (US and Europe) will get the new handheld in 2012.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, the PS Vita is Sony’s newest offering, featuring two analog controllers, a 5in OLED touch screen, a touchpad out back, and a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, among other things. It will come in two flavors, Wi-Fi only, and Wi-Fi + 3G. According to reports, the TGS announcement has boosted pre-orders of the PS Vita – rising to number 214 in Amazon’s Video Games department.
Well, it’s too bad North America won’t be the PS Vita for this year’s holidays, but those who’d like this to grace their Christmas trees this year, one can always import.
Why, you ask? Maybe because it’s made from solid gold. As mentioned in another wantnana article, the value of Gold (Au) has gone up over the past years. A cell phone made from gold is likely to be priced according to the current rate of gold which is $2,000 per ounce.
Created by Danish luxury designer Aesir, the limited edition AE+Y phone is an 18-carat solid gold handset that sells for $60,000. It has a 2-inch LCD screen, advanced LED backlighting, edge-to-edge key design with a keypad that’s laser-engraved, and Sapphire crystal lens with ARdur coating.
Now, here’s the catch: Compared to other lesser-priced smartphones, the AE+Y phone cannot use email, mobile internet or advanced applications. Its only features include voice calls, call forwarding, speed dial, conference calls, call screening, text functions, Bluetooth headset profile, and simple apps like notes, alarm, converter and calculator. Its battery life is absolutely mediocre: 5 hours.
Now, let’s remember it’s made almost entirely from gold, so maybe its price is justified. For those who can’t spare $60,000, they can just get its stainless steel version which sells for a much much lower price of $10,000. Unfortunately, Aeries didn’t mention if this version has apps.
With gas prices shooting off the roof, car makers are on the constant look out for alternative means of making cars go from point A to point B. Well, BMW has literally stuck a steam engine to a car and reported that fuel efficiency improved by 10%. The automotive giant has launched the Turbosteamer Project, which aims to fight inefficiency – with good old-fashioned steam engine technology.
Cars produce ridiculous amounts of heat, and BMW’s steam engine mod uses this to turn the heat into electricity.
A steam engine is one of the simplest forms of engines. Heat boils water into steam, and then the steam pushes on a piston or drives a turbine or whatever to do work. Since you can use any source of heat to boil water, in theory you can just duct tape a steam engine onto anything that warms up to a couple hundred degrees and harvest energy from it while cooling it down at the same time. This is all that BMW is doing: the company is adding a small, steam-powered electric generator to an automotive exhaust system that sucks heat out of exhaust gases, boils a fluid into steam, and uses the steam to run an electric generator.
According to BMW, we won’t see the steam mod roll out with cars any time soon, though it should give them more time to improve the technology.
Talking on the phone or having a video conversation is considered a much more personal approach than just sending an email or a text message to your partner. You can easily convey your emotions by using spoken words, and there’s not much room for misunderstanding since you can easily clear things up by talking some more.
However, what you can’t transmit over the phone or a video converstion is touch. A design researcher from Berlin University of the Arts has created prototypes of cell phones that can “send” and “receive” actions. The phones make use of your sensory abilities and can transmit breathing, grasping or even kissing.
Well, sort of.
Presented at the Mobile HCI conference in Sweden last week were three prototypes. The first one is the breathing prototype that uses a pressure sensor on one side and a jet on the other to transmit air movement. If the person on the other end of the phone sighs or whispers to you, it’s as if you feel that person breathing into your ear.
The second prototype is the gripping one. It consists of a strap which is placed over the caller’s hand and force sensors on the phone’s sides. When you grip the phone, it sends a signal to the other phone, telling the motor to pull the strap tighter. Hence, the gripping motion.
The third prototype is perhaps the weirdest of them all. The phone has a moisture sensor that sends out the signal when you “kiss” into the phone. To deliver the kiss to the person on the other end of the line, his phone should have a motorized wet sponge that pushes against a membrane on the receiver’s phone, planting a “kiss” on the cheek.
Check out the video of the designer Fabian Hemmert showing the prototypes.
It looks like candy – a large, yummy, and possibly irradiated jawbreaker – but that my friends, is actually the sixth from the sun and second largest planet in our solar system. The Cassini orbiter took this picture from the dark side of Saturn. With the sun acting as a backlight, the rings and the planet itself were illuminated to eye-candy proportions.
We know from our grade school science subjects that Saturn is the ringed planet, with the rings made primarily out of space gunk (i.e. water ice with a sprinkle of tholin impurities and amorphous carbon).
The Cassini orbiter was launch in 1997 and has been hanging around Saturn for a while, sending stunning images back to NASA. The orbiter itself has been snapping away photos of Saturn, though it took about 7 years for it to get from Earth to Saturn. Judging from the photos the Cassini has taken so far, including this one, it’s worth the wait.
Back when Nobody by the Wonder Girls was famous, we had dancing robots made by Taiwanese university students. We’ve also seen the robot made by Japanese scientists and engineers which mimics the physical movements of a person. Then there’s the (almost creepy) life-like androids that mimics the overall behavior of people (from accurate human-like facial expressions to chores like cooking and cleaning). We’ve even had robodogs which replace real dogs as pets. Now here’s another bunch of amazing (and cute) robots from Japan.
The Toko Toko Maru robot is the winner of this year’s Robot Japan 2 Dance competition. A creation by robot maker Azusa Amino, the robot is only 23 cm high and is an amazing entertainer.
Toko Toko Maru performs the kabuki dance perfectly, its movements slow and deliberate to keep in time with the music. It also has fans which unfolds, extends and waves as it dances. Here’s a clip of the robot performing the kabuki.
A replica of Batman’s Batmobile used in the 1989 movie is up on eBay. Its price tag is listed at $620,000. Built by Putsch Racing, this awesome replica is turbine-powered and – amazingly – is street legal.
The Batmobile has 365HP and can reach a top speed of 180 MPH. Because this is built out of a decommissioned military chopper, it reuquires kerosene, Jet A or diesel fuel. So this means you won’t only be worrying about the car’s price tag, but you’ll also have to worry about what you put into the car to run properly.
The Batmobile replica is still up on eBay, eagerly awaiting the best offer on it. Auction is open until September 15.
So you want your vegetables perfectly symmetrical? Do you want your carrots sliced at precisely the same angles? Well, here’s the perfect chopping board for you. Aptly called the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Chopping Board, the chopping board in question has ruled lines and a protractor to help keep those slices regular.
The OCD Chopping Board, from the manufacturer Fred & Friends, is made from beechwood and etched with lines that indicate “medium dice,” “small dice,” “julienne,” and “fine julienne.” With the use of the etched protractor, you can slice your sandwiches into perfect wedges.
Selfridges, the retailers of the OCD Chopping Board, have received some flak over chopping board from an OCD charity. The retailers maintain that the board is simply a tool for those who like their carrots in perfect cube sizes:
The OCD chopping board is for the person who likes perfectly sized portions and wants to cut their sandwich at a perfect 45 degree angle, providing a highly scientific way to chop your food.
What is it with Apple employees and losing unreleased iPhones in public places (specifically bars)? CNET reports that the consumer electronics giant may have lost another unreleased and advanced iPhone prototype in a bar. Just last year, an Apple employee lost an iPhone 4 prototype that ended up in the hands of gadget blog Gizmodo. This year, another iPhone was lost in a Mexican restaurant and bar.
The rumor mill has been busy churning out theories for this one: It may be an iPhone 5 (rumored to have an October launch date). If it is an iPhone 5, what does it look like? What iOS is it running on?
Well, there’s an ongoing investigation about the missing phone. Whether it turns up or not – or the better question may be, who gets the scoop (i. e. the phone) is anybody’s bet. Or anybody’s bid, for that matter. Stay tuned.
