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Segway Inventor Builds Bionic Arm Tuesday , December 09, 2008 FOX NEWS The man behind the Segway scooter has a new invention: bionic arms for wounded soldiers. Called the "Luke Arm" after the prosthetic hand sported by Luke Skywalker in the "Star Wars" movies, Dean Kamen's device is lightweight, self-contained and fully capable of picking up grapes, baby bottles, even electric drills. ... snip The Luke Arm has four fingers and an opposable thumb, and was designed to be controlled by muscular movement in the wearer's remaining limbs. But thanks to neurological advances in "targeted renervation" by Dr. Todd Kuiken...

Local man invents vibrating toilet seat By Eloria Newell James, community@leadercall.com  Jones County native Johnny Henry talks about his invention, the vibrating toilet seat.Photo/Eloria Newell James / A Jones County native has developed a new twist to a traditional item.Johnny Henry of Laurel has developed the vibrating toilet seat.“I believe in thinking out of the box,” Henry said. “I wanted to create something that is a little unusual.“This invention is designed to stimulate,” he said. “It’s to make you feel good while you are there.”Because of Henry’s invention, he recently attended the Invent Bay International Inventors Convention held at the...

To Timbuktu by flying car: it sounds the most unlikely journey on earth; a sci-fi voyage from the pages of Jules Verne. But this is no fantasy. The car really flies. And the journey will become reality early in the new year when two explorers set off from London in a propeller-powered dune buggy heading for the Sahara. The seed of this improbable adventure was sown four years ago when Gilo Cardozo, a paramotor manufacturer, had a eureka moment. For those not familiar with paramotors, picture a parachutist with a giant industrial fan strapped to his back, which provides...

This ya gotta see...One of those "Would be nice...if true". http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=efCelx7qe_M&feature=related

Al Gore has a new boat and even it is green. The boat is docked at Hurricane Marina on Center Hill Lake in Smithville, about 70 miles east of Nashville. While it doesn't have solar panels yet, a spokesperson at Gore's office told News 2 they are scheduled to be installed Wednesday. The boat is named Bio-Solar One and has been called the "Toyota Prius of boats"...

Bruce E. Ivins, the government biodefense scientist linked to the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001, stood to gain financially from the huge federal spending in the fear-filled aftermath of those killings, the Los Angeles Times has learned. Ivins is listed as a co-inventor on two patents for a genetically engineered anthrax vaccine, federal records show. Separately, Ivins is also listed as a co-inventor on an application to patent an additive for various biodefense vaccines. Ivins, 62, died Tuesday, apparently in a suicide. Federal authorities had informed his lawyer that criminal charges related to the mailings would be filed. As a...

FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas, June 13, 2008 – A new lifesaving standard of care has garnered the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research here a prestigious recognition: invention of the year. The innovation, called Damage Control Resuscitation of Severely Injured Soldiers, was named one of the Army’s “Top Ten Greatest Inventions of 2007.” “The American Association for Trauma Surgeons calls this one of the biggest improvements to trauma care in the last 10 years,” said Michael Dubick, senior research pharmacologist for the Institute of Surgical Research. The invention is aimed at saving severely injured soldiers with internal injuries that...

Bo (woof) In Product Review: Kong-every dog knows what it is. It’s the iPod for the canine set. But is it really all it’s cracked up to be? Well read this review and find out. How did the greatest invention in canine treat history, The Kong, come about? Well, it begins with a German Sheppard named Fritz, his owner and a Volkswagen Van. Fritz, a police dog, enjoyed chewing rocks to relieve the stress of the day. This activity wore Fritz’s teeth down, frustrating his owner Joe Markham as well as his dentist, Dr. Christian Szel One afternoon while working...

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003, was often depicted as hostile to the Scots (or 'Scotch', as he insisted on calling them). Yet, as he would sometimes remark, he had a long association with Scotland and its people. He was brought up in Northumberland, only 20 miles or so from the border. As a boy he had been cared for by a Scots nanny, before attending a preparatory school in Dunbar. After an interval, he married a Scots wife, and together they bought a home near Melrose, where he lived during the university vacations for almost 30 years....

The proposed Patent Reform Act of 2007 will be coming up for a vote in the Senate in a few months. A similar version of the bill has already passed in the House. The bill has certain relatively benign provisions, but let's ignore them since they just cloud the argument and are of little interest to either side in the debate. Let's instead just cut to the chase. In lay terms, the bill makes it easier to challenge issued patents and harder for patent holders to obtain compensation through the U.S. legal system. Regardless of how that sounds to you,...

In 1945, Robert Sherman invented the modern portable, in-window air conditioner (Patent # 2,433,960 granted January 6, 1948). It was subsequently "appropriated" by a large manufacturer who made hundreds of millions of dollars on it. Sherman did not have the resources to fight the big corporation in court (they reportedly promised to "break him" if he tried) and thus never received a dime. He died in 1962. Recognition of his contribution to heating/air conditioning is long overdue. Click

Take a look a this amazing news report on the local Fox Channel 26 in Clearwater, Florida on local inventor, Denny Klein and his water powered citting /welding torches and HHO/gas hybrid car. Video on the technology: http://www.freeenergynews.com/Directory/BrownsGas/WaterFuel.wmv Amazing stuff at first glance. I'd love to hear some of our Freeper energy experts weigh in on the potential of this.

Tim Fofonoff, a 31-year-old grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stands at the base of a 50-foot-tall, graffiti-covered rock wall just south of Boston. He´s clipped into the Atlas Powered Rope Ascender, a toaster-size battery-driven device that he and his three co-inventors built themselves. With it, he´s about to do something no one outside of a Hollywood script has done before: rappel up a wall at an astonishing 10 feet per second. He stares hesitantly for a moment at the craggy rock face, presses a small button, and darts off the ground as if he were wearing a...

George Stephen was fed up with the heat, flare-ups and smoke coming from the statuesque brick grill he built in his backyard. To quell the flames, he'd hover near the grill with a squirt gun and shoot it to keep food from burning each time oil dripped onto the coals. It was 1951. Like most barbecues, his was uncovered with a thick metal grill. It offered a cooking method dating to biblical times. Like his neighbors, he was smoking up the area and burning half of what he cooked. There had to be a better solution, he reasoned. As part...

A Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition focusing on his fascination with machines opens in the Museum of Industry in the German city of Saxony. The exhibition which opened on Sunday includes more than 40 wooden models of his inventions, including Archimedes screws, lifting devices, pulleys and flywheels. The exhibition will be open until June 15. One of the advantages of this particular exhibition is that the visitors are permitted to touch many of the exhibits and try them out for themselves, DPA reported. Da Vinci was a superb painter as well as designer of buildings and machinery and produced studies on...

Past wars have produced peacetime technology benefits. But the spin-offs from Iraq may be far more disturbing, writes VICTOR DAVIS HANSON. Militaries may begin wars confident in their existing weapons and technol­ogy, but they generally win only by radically changing designs or finding entirely new ones. The Union military started the Civil War with muskets and cannonballs, but ended it using bullet-firing repeating rifles and explo­sive artillery charges. Ironclads, observation balloons, rubberized ponchos, canned meats, and elaborate telegraphic communications followed—some of the inventions enriching peacetime America for decades. In 1940, a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber was considered an indestructible aerial...

Japanese Robot Eats Snow, Poops Out Bricks of Ice Wednesday, January 02, 2008 What's cute, yellow, eats snow and poops out bricks of ice? Meet Yuki-taro, a Japanese robot built to quickly clear roads after heavy snows. The cute little guy, about 5 feet long and 2 and a half feet high, simply plows into snowbanks, taking in the white stuff, compressing it and neatly stacking it in two-foot-long bricks on his rear bed. Created by a consortium of private companies, municipal governments and university researchers, Yuki-taro is equipped with two video cameras in his "eyes" as well as a...

The origins of ice-skating have been traced by scientists to the frozen lakes of Finland about 5,000 years ago, when people used skates made from animal bone. Researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University have calculated that skating on the primitive blades would have reduced the energy cost of travelling by 10 per cent, suggesting that it emerged as a practical method of transport and not as recreation. Southern Finland has been identified as the most likely home of skating through an analysis of the shape and distribution of lakes in central and northern Europe, which shows that the early Finns would...

Hollywood socialite Nicole Richie has lent her voice to a campaign to stop dogs peeing on lamp posts. When Paris Hilton's dog-loving pal learned of Swedish inventor Lennart Järlebro's plans to design a urinal for dogs, she immediately vowed to spread the word in the United States. "This invention is just so clever. It's a cute rubber cup attached to the post and a hose that pipes urine into the gutter," Richie, 26, told the Daily Star. Lennart Järlebro began designing a toilet for dogs after reading a newspaper report about the corrosive effects of dogs' urine on lamp posts....

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Wedgie-proof underwear earned 8-year-old twin boys a spot Friday on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show." Using rigged boxers and fabric fasteners to hold together some seams, Jared and Justin Serovich came up with the "Rip Away 1000." "When the person tries to grab you—like the bully or the person tries to give you a wedgie—they just rip away," Justin explained Thursday by phone from Los Angeles, where the TV segment was taped Wednesday. The third graders from Gables Elementary School began brainstorming one day after they were horsing around, giving each other the treatment. Their mother's partner...