Inamo restaurant is the future of eating out

The CNET UK team recently went for dinner at Inamo restaurant in London, where interactive touch-sensitive tables take your order. Each table has an overhead projector and a mouse trackpad, so your dining surface is effectively a PC monitor. You can customize your "tablecloth", play a videogame against your companion and order a taxi to get you home.

When you're ready to order, you can browse the menu, with each dish projected on to your place setting. When you've chosen, you can even see a live Webcam feed of your chef at work. The restaurant's founders say the concept evolved from the simple idea of 'Wouldn't it be cool if you could just hit a button and a waiter brought you another beer?' Watch the video for more.
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3D images: A human way to create Captchas

If you have registered a new email account or tried to retrieve your, say, Gmail password, you'd be familiar with the use of Captchas, the challenge-response method to verify that the input is not generated by a computer.


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Scientists build mosquito laser zapper

With news that there's a new kind of dengue emerging in Singapore, even possibly in Asia, this sounds like a job for… a mosquito laser zapper! Punnily dubbed a "weapon of mosquito destruction" (WMD), scientists are finally declaring Cold War against malaria and all mosquito-related ailments.

This particular one appears to take a Death Star leaf out of Star Wars' book, with the laser designed to detect the audio frequency of beating wings, zero in on the culprit, and burn it on the spot. The good news is the WMD will be capable of sweeping an entire area or village and "toast(ing) millions of mosquitoes in a few minutes", project lead scientist Dr Jordin Kare told CNN.

Now all we need is a home version that we can set up to fry those miniscule terrorists before they can infect any loved ones around.

Via CNN.com

Terrafugia's flying car makes maiden voyage

The startup Terrafugia first popped up on our radar screens in early 2006 with a one-fifth scale model, US$30,000 in prize money, and an urge to build a car that could fly. Or is that an airplane you can take on the highway?

Some signs point strongly to the latter. Terrafugia describes its Transition vehicle as a "roadable aircraft" and is pitching it in part as giving private pilots an easy travel alternative when bad weather makes flying a bad idea, or simply to avoid having to take a separate car to the airport. Also, in the eyes of the Federal Aviation Administration, the vehicle falls into the light sport aircraft category.

On March 5, Terrafugia got to show that--whatever the eventual business prospects--the Transition can indeed fly. The maiden voyage (the duration wasn't specified) took place at the Plattsburgh International Airport in New York, with a retired US Air Force Reserve colonel in the pilot's seat. The flight followed six months of static, road, and taxi testing.
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Japan's latest supermodel--a robot

She doesn't have the grace of a Cindy Crawford or Elle MacPherson (yet), but a few struts on the catwalk may help HRP-4C loosen up and hit her stride. The walking, talking girlbot will be getting practice soon, as she's set to make her catwalk debut at a Tokyo fashion show next week.

Scientists from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology reportedly designed the 5-foot (ish), dark-haired creation to look like an average Japanese woman between the ages of 19 to 29. Unlike the average Japanese woman, however, HRP-4C has 30 motors in its body that allow it to walk and move its arms (loudly and awkwardly, if the video below is any indication) and eight facial motors for blinking, smiling, and expressing emotions akin to anger and surprise.
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