Friday, February 20, 2009
Toys without batteries! Phone Sick Note.

For those who are looking for the latest and greatest construction toy, like Lego or K'nex, then you have found what you are looking for with the Topodo.

Topodo is designed by people at the MIT Media lab, and allows the user to create projects that can walk and do other actions of motion. That may sound like Lego's Mindstorms NXT, but in this case, the Topodo user does not need a computer, or even batteries.

That's right, no batteries are required to make these toys move, as the Topodo comes with a special set of kinetic memory motors. They work by having the user moving the limbs or body parts, and these special parts will reproduce the action, enabling creations to walk across the floor without power.

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Applied Nanodetectors Ltd. (AND) from the UK is currently parading a prototype cell phone at the International Nanotechnology Exhibition & Conference that is able to detect various diseases simply by analyzing the user's breath. The phone itself is made by Nokia, featuring AND's chip inside that features integrated sensors which are able to detect minute traces of different gases including CO2, NOx and ammonia (NH3). Once detected, the chip will get to work by analyzing the composition of the user's breath while tabulating the density of each gas. The results will be compared against characteristics of various diseases in order to detect whether one is possibly suffering from a certain type of disease or not. Sounds cool, but the phone is still a long way off from being commercially available.

So tell your boss that your phone told you to stay home sick. See how that one works for ya.

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A report in The Wall Street Journal is indicating that cable giants Time Warner Cable and Comcast are in talks with some of the companies that operate pay-cable channels, for a plan to make some of the networks' content available online to subscribers. It'd probably be on a streaming, ad-supported basis, and probably available for free to existing subscribers.

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  • Written by: Christy"
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