Inventions

Google Glass looks toward the future – for better or worse Like the interactive glass from Tom Cruise’s blockbuster “Minority Report,” the newest product from Google – Google Glass – offers customers information presented right before their eyes on a pair of glasses. The future is here. Or is it? Google Glass could be as …

With every new idea, every time-saving innovation and every life-changing invention, one idea remains in the shadows, as the gold standard for comparison. Today, the iPad, Google Glass or 3D TVs might seem like the greatest devices ever created, but they have constant competition from an invention from 1930, the invention of sliced bread. “Wonder …

Americans have been patiently waiting for personal jetpacks since the first Super Bowl — when in 1967 during half time two pilots astonished the crowd in attendance and millions more at home watching television, as they took to the skies over Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with their rocket belts, created by Bell Labs. It’s been …

April has an important place in space history since two seminal events happened in this month. First, on April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, traveling aboard the Soviet spacecraft Vostok I to an altitude of 187 miles above the earth. Then, exactly twenty years later, on April 12, …

As we all know, Leonardo da Vinci was an artist extraordinaire. His art is legendary; especially the “Mona Lisa”, “The Last Supper” and “The Vitruvian Man.” On top of his artistic ability, da Vinci was also a musician, mathematician, engineer, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other …

If you asked a person on the street who the “father of the motion picture” was, they would probably say Thomas Edison, and they would be somewhat right. Edison did invent a way of recording successive images in a single camera and paved the way for the modern film industry as we know it today. …

People have been dreaming about it since Princess Leia pleaded for Obi-Wan Kenobi’s help, “You’re my only hope.” The hologram is a part of science-fiction history that may be a lot closer to reality than you’d think! Dr. Roel Vertegaal of Queen’s University’s School of Computing in Kingston, Ontario, is on the cutting edge of …

Before people were irritated by digital albums crammed full of ill-prepared dinners and pre-club selfies on Facebook, people were irritated by celluloid-photo ambushes of Grand Canyon vacations and second cousins at dinner parties.   Stick it to FB friends and neighbors who over-share by soaking in some real photography, shot on real film, developed by …

Among other things, April is International Amateur Radio month. Amateur radio, often called “ham” radio, is where “hams” (ie, amateur radio enthusiasts) use different types of radio communications equipment to communicate with other radio amateurs for fun, but also for some public services like disasters (it’s said that a Welsh ham radio operator named Artie …

In the past, three dimensional design, rendering, and capture required powerful computers, training, expensive software, and equipment, and was generally inaccessible to the general public. Even three dimensional scanning and replication was considered something seen only in movies, or the subject of science fiction stories. Well, thanks to Autodesk, makers of AutoCad, Maya, and 3ds …