The Charge Car Project at CMU is looking to make electric cars less expensive by using the cheapest hardware and the smartest software. One approach is to convert old cars to electrics using relatively inexpensive components . pull out the engine, fuel tank, exhaust system, etc and swap in a motor, unsophisticated battery and a supercapacitor which is charged by regenerative braking.
An issue is the standard models of driving - like the Americans Uraban Dynamometer Driving Schedule - fail to account for real driving patterns. The CMU guys are looking for real data and are appealing to the public to send GPS data from devices like iPhones. In return you'll get your commuting pattern examined and information on where an electric car might be practical.
Stanford has done well in DARPA Grand Challenge competitions aimed at developing autonomous vehicles. Recently VW is putting $5 million into an automotive innovation lab on the campus and the next generation vehicle is a heavily modified Audi TT-S aimed at the Pikes Peak Hill Climb.
Someone sent a link to Dyson's bladeless fan - a nice use of aerodynamics. There is a fan in the base to supply airflow over the airfoil ...
The idea isn't novel, but this is the first use I've seen in a home fan. Bladeless "air amplifiers" have been around for some time. One make is the RingJet...
Ever wondered about how the pylon distribution transformer on the pole near your home is made? (inareas with underground power they are mounted on slabs) They have to be robust - ten years or more in fifty below to one hundred and twenty degree weather living through storms and taking lighting strikes. They've been around for a long time, but just work.
Oh .. and the sizing may be wrong if you and some of your neighbors plug in your electric cars at the same time...
It uses a low cost IMU (not real details) and a vision system that probably does simple optical flow. If you have ever worked with drift from inertial guidance systems, you'll get interested. (I refrained from an "if you get my drift joke)
A brand new 24" iMac. I can start sketching again - that just didn't work on the laptop.
Very impressive piece of hardware btw. The only thing that didn't work (as far as I could tell) from the data transfer (just plug it into the old Mac with a firewire cable and select data transfer mode) was the Adobe Photoshop license. I went through an hour of phone hell with Adobe getting that sorted out -- FAIL.