Living with the Buzz

Sustainable Honey Made at Home

Imaging what it would be like to get your honey fresh from the hive every morning? Yes you live in the city, but that will not be a problem because the hive will be right inside your house. Scared? Don't be. If the prototype created by Philips Design sees the light of day, you can enjoy all the benefits of bee farming, conveniently in your city apartment without the attendant risk.

This is what the Urban Beehive is all about. Urban Beehive is an innovative concept in sustainably produced food. “The beehive is designed to allow us a glimpse into the fascinating world of these industrious creatures”, so says the Netherlands based Philips Design. The structure consists of two parts: an early passage and flower pot, which is on the outside, and an egg shaped glass vessel. This glass vessel contains the honey comb and houses the bee colony. The glass is such that it filters light, allowing only the orange wavelength that the bees use for sight. Thus your interior lighting won't be disruptive to your co-occupants.

To have access to the honey when desired, all you do is release smoke into the hive to calm the bees before opening. Else you might risk unleashing the colonialists on your own territory.
Image source: Philips Design

So are you willing to live with the buzz? Share your thoughts in comments below.

A Clear Vision with a Dynamic Eye

Now You Can Tune Out the Glare

One of the great hazards while driving to a driver is glare. That spontaneous direct blinding sunlight can be irritating, and most times what we can do is just squint and bear it. Well maybe not anymore and it's all thanks to Chris Mullin of Dynamic Eye, a research engineer with a PhD in physics and a background in optics, electronics and plastics. His next generation sunglasses uses electronics to instantly reduce annoying glare.

Regular sunglasses reflect roughly 8% of light hitting the lens, so only 92% of available light enters the eye for vision. Thus most times they can't handle a glare, Mullin says. But Mullin's glasses using its proprietary Liquid Crystal Display Shield, SpotShield, immediately darkens the part of the lens where the user is experiencing a glare. This may be from bright sun or lights, and it does this without dimming the rest of the lens.

Well all you have to do now is remember to charge your glasses. According to Dynamic Eye, this shouldn't be too frequent as a single charge lasts hundreds of hours.
Image credits: Dynamic Eye

What do you think of this, are you getting one? Share your thoughts in the comment below. 

The Flying Car

The Long Wait for Sky Cars from the “Wrong Brothers”

It took just two men and their commitment to their belief to set the ball rolling in aviation. It is now one hundred and nine years long from those first steps by the Wright brothers. The sector over the years has seen wonderful innovations like the supersonic, vertical take off and landing jets among many others. All this not withstanding, it is yet to attain the availability and ease of ownership that the motor car has. Hence that long desire of most men to have a vehicle that can fly is yet to be met. Well maybe not for much longer, as companies like Terrafugia seem to be breaking new ground in that sphere.

The Woburn, Massachusetts based company having completed test flights for its prototype the Transition, is set to start making deliveries next year for the orders it has. A single craft goes for as much as $279,000, which still makes it way out of common reach.

In the Netherlands, other companies seem to be coming up with their own variations. One of note is the PAL-V One by Baileybrugweg based PAL-V Europe N.V. Its vehicle takes the gyrocopter approach, offering a two seat hybrid car.

While welcome adaptations in the quest for the flying car, the major handicap these vehicles seem to have is that they fall short of existing vehicles from which they make their hybrids.
Take for example, the Transition looks awkward for a car, and its speed of 110km/h is not exactly top notch for road vehicles. So the key at this stage according to its CEO is to tap into that special niche that doesn't fly too far afield and yet needs a means to get around when on the ground.
Image source: Terrafugia, Etsu, and Pal-V

What is your view of the future of flying vehicles? Share them in the comment box below.

Lifi: The Dawn of Visible Light Communication

In the “new world” your average neon sign, store front lighting or lamp post won’t just be there to illuminate. They will peddle digital information as well as offer high speed access to the Internet. This is the dawn of the “Lifi Age” and it is all being made possible by Visible Light Communications System.

 It is interesting to note that information transmission via visible light spectrum actually predates that over radio waves. Alexander bell in 1880 actually demonstrated the transmission of speech over modulated sunlight using what he called the Photophone. So far today, visible light communication has already achieved 500Mbits/s and this can only get better.The Visible Light Communications Consortium initiated in 2004, has a lot of role to play in the coming years to facilitate the growth of this promising alternative in data and information dissemination.

Smart Ammunition for Modern Warfare

A Bullet for You

Fighting techniques in warfare can save an outnumbered or under-equipped side from total annihilation. Take for instance the Taliban against the US army. The former makes use of concealment to have a fighting chance against the technologically superior US forces. The art of concealment has been at the heart of warfare for decades. Guerrillas apply it, small units up against mammoth troops apply it. Shooting from behind cover is bread and butter of concealment. Here a rock, concrete structure, a ditch or steel structure becomes very handy. Well that was then, not any more, thanks to ATK- an American company, and Heckler & Koch, their German collaborator.  

The two firms have launched field tests for their XM25, a new rifle which hopes to counter the advantages of shooting from a cover. The XM25 fires a 25mm round and weighs 6 kg. The gun borrows an idea from Henry Shrapnel's original artillery shells. You don't have aim directly at the target, aim just at a place in its proximity, fire and the bullet does the rest. A timed fuse tells the bullet when to explode, unleashing the fragments that do the job. Actually a small computer inside the bullet is the fuse.

The bullets are programmed by another computer in the rifle before they are fired. This feeds it with details like the distance to the target. The bullets own computer then takes over once fired. This gives the instruction to detonate the calculated distance has been reached. The shrapnel from the detonation has a kill radius of several meters (specifics are classified).

The rifle has had favorable field testing in Afghanistan, with the US army ordering 36 more units. A complete kit of rifle, thermal sight and a four-round magazine is said to cost $35,000. This according to the company is said to come down as automated bullet production begins at ATK.
In all, the era of the concealed gunman is set to come to an end. Hiding behind cover is no longer a guarantee of safety.
Image source: ATK

Tesla Crosses Over With Model X

Los Angels based Tesla Motors, eager to push electric vehicles ever further into the mainstream, unveiled a practical all-wheel-drive, seven-passenger crossover utility at a red-carpet affair befitting a movie premiere.

Company CEO Elon Musk, never given to understatement, all but called the Model X a revolutionary vehicle that delivers everything we love about automobiles while freeing us from the shackles of petroleum.

“We’ve created a car that has more functionality than a minivan, more style than an SUV and more performance than a Porsche 911 Carrera,” Musk said, making his obligatory comparison to a premium automaker during a small gathering for the press before the formal unveiling Thursday night.

It remains to be seen if Musk makes good on that last claim — there is but one Model X prototype, and he wasn’t about to let us drive it. But the X is an attractive enough automobile, with sleek lines, a curvaceous shape and striking “falcon wing” rear doors that open like wings.

The X is the second mainstream automobile from Tesla, and it builds upon much of the technology and tooling of the Model S sedan. We’re still waiting for the sedan — Tesla promises to begin deliveries within five months — but Musk says it’s time to look ahead.

“The reason for bringing the Model X out now,” Musk said, “is to show that we really can do more than one car, that we can leverage the investment in the Model S into another vehicle.”

As much as Musk loves to say his company is more Silicon Valley than Detroit, he’s once again following the auto industry playbook by maximizing the versatility of an existing platform.

David Choe’s Facebook Art

Having made a painting of Barack Obama (then a senator) by October 9, 2008 as part of a display for a New York art exhibition, which now by the way hangs on a wall in the White House, artist David Choe seems to have scored another hit. The graffiti artist is believed to have made a fortune following Facebook’s IPO. In 2005 he did a work for Facebook, painting the walls of their HQ with his artistic work. For this, he was paid with shares in the company instead of cash. This is now expected to be worth about $200 million once Facebook begins trading as a public company. Am sure this is going to inspire you artists out there to target tech startups and oh “ please pay me in shares not cash”. Good luck!

'Mona Lisa' copy done hand in hand with da Vinci

Mona Lisa


A "Mona Lisa" copy owned by Spain's Prado Museum was almost certainly painted by one of Leonardo da Vinci's apprentices alongside the master himself as he did the original, museum officials said Wednesday. The stunning find of what the Prado now says is probably the earliest known copy of La Gioconda will give art lovers and experts an idea of what the Mona Lisa looked like back in the 16th century, said Gabriele Finaldi, the museum's deputy director collections. "It is as if we were in the same studio, standing at the next easel," he told reporters.


The copy has been part of the Prado collection for years and displayed occasionally but no one paid much attention to it because around the woman in the Mona Lisa was a stark black background, not the pretty landscape seen in the original. Two years ago, to get the copy ready for a da Vinci exhibit later this year in Paris, where the original hangs in the Louvre, tests were done and this gave restorers a hint that something lie under the black coat, which was added in the 18th century for reasons not fully understood. When the black covering was removed, a Tuscan landscape very similar to the one in the original emerged. And X-ray tests which allow experts to peek under a painting's surface to see how it developed as it was composed showed that changes made in the copy were similar to changes made to the original as it evolved. Varnish has also been removed from the Mona Lisa's face, making it look brighter and younger than the face coated with cracked, darkish varnish at the Paris museum. "You can imagine that this is what the Mona Lisa looked like back in the 16th century," Finaldi said. Miguel Falomir, the Prado's director for Italian painting, said the copy gives art lovers and experts a chance "to admire the Mona Lisa with totally different eyes." He and Finaldi said the museum's best guess is that the copy was done by a da Vinci apprentice named Francesco Melzi, because of the style observed in it.


Besides the black background, one other difference from the original is the woman in the copy has eyebrows and the Mona Lisa in the real masterpiece does not. There are dozens of the surviving replicas of the masterpiece from the 16th and 17th centuries. The Louvre supports the Prado's new evaluation of the painting, Finaldi said. The Prado plans to put it on display later this month before it travels to France for the da Vinci show. 
By DANIEL WOOLLS - MADRID (AP)