Brabus debuts pimped-out Tesla Roadster

Sure, whipping around the Hollywood Hills in your Tesla Roadster is going to be awesome when the supercar finally ships, but you want to stand out. That's why you hire a group like Brabus to pimp out your all-electric ride.

Its new Tesla package, rolled out at the Essen auto show in Germany, includes ground lights, new wheels and tires, a front-lip spoiler, and--our favorite part--sound effects. The Roadster, being all electric, is fairly quiet. The Bottrop, Germany-based Brabus seems to think we won't like that, so the package includes everything from a mimic of a race car engine to futuristic Star Trek-like settings referred to as "beam" and "warp."

The coolest high-tech car in the world just got that much cooler. No word on when Brabus will offer a commercial version of the package as an after-market treatment, but it can't be denied that the inclusion of audible as well as visual enhancements just raised the bar in the world of ride-pimpin'.

Via CNET Crave

Memory goes down the nanotubes

While computers continue to get smaller, they're constantly being pushed to do more. Whether they're doubling as a phone, a camera, or an MP3 player, there seems to be no end to the tasks we expect them to carry out. And as always, we say we want them to "do all that stuff and be smaller."

A limitation of the miniaturization process is that the more computers are asked to do, the more memory they require. One of the computer's basic elements, the transistor, could soon reach its miniaturization limit. The smaller we make transistors, the more susceptible they are to quantum phenomena like electrons tunneling through the barriers between wires. Which, while ticklish for the barrier, can just be really annoying.

This has apparently annoyed researchers at the UK's University of Nottingham, as well, albeit for different reasons. This transistor dilemma has led them to look into the viability of carbon nanotubes to help create fast, cheap, and compact memory that uses little power.


Read more »

A Nokia fat-bottomed phone?

I'm a little tired of the candybars and slider phones that seem to define today's mobile phone appearance. So anything that pushes the design envelope out of the rut without being ridiculously OTT gets my vote. Heikki Juvonen is one such designer who has gone for odd-looking in his Nokia concept phone outing, which, oddly enough, has an aesthetic energy that is both futuristic and ergonomic. The end result is a handset that somehow sits well in the hand without being awkward to handle. Now let's hope Nokia loves this fat-bottom effort just as much to consider it in an upcoming lineup.

Via Yanko Design

Contact with extraterrestrial life by 2025?

Shostak's talk was largely theoretical and was a quick recap of the history of the SETI project. He explained that it had originally been a NASA project, but that it had been canceled in the 1990s by a Nevada senator unhappy with its lack of success.

Now a private non-profit based in Mountain View, Calif., SETI is the primary organization looking for intelligent life in outer space.

And Shostak estimated that if the assumptions about computing power and the strength of forthcoming research instruments are correct, we should be able to search as far out as 500 light years into space by 2025, a distance he predicted would be enough--based on scientist Frank Drake's estimate of there being 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy alone capable of creating radio transmitters--to find evidence of life intelligent enough to broadcast its existence.
Read more »

World's first robot leg-powered chair

Japan has recently been making great strides with robotic harnesses that help the elderly and physically handicapped walk again. Now, robotic technology has been given another leg up--a robot leg, that is. Oki, applying its jumping Robot Leg technology, has teamed up with furniture maker Okamura to debut an "embrace and wrap" office chair.

The hot seat here is the Leopard, a Transformer-like recliner which follows the movement of the sitter's body, from seating to reclining, through to standing. When the user sits down, the chair will sink approximately 25 degrees to make the person feel as if the seat is wrapped around from the back.

The Leopard will go commercial in May 2009, though both Japanese companies are trying out stronger materials that can handle weight-challenged users. Let's hope by then, we won't have to pay an arm and a leg in exchange.

Via Tech-On

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