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Prague, Aug 19 (CTK) - The police have accused the organiser of the Communist secret service StB plot called Kamen (Stone) aimed to catch people trying to escape from then Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes Monday. If convicted, the man, aged 92, who lives in Prague, may be sentenced up to 10 years in prison, MfD writes. Shortly after the 1948 Communist coup, the StB started catching the escapees in a trap under the cover name Kamen, it adds. A false border was established in order to make them believe that they could forget...

Bay Area Mayors Gavin Newsom, Chuck Reed and Ron Dellums want to turn California into the Detroit of green cars with their new public-private initiative (See "California E-Car Dreaming.") Now, I'm a conservationist, but I'm also a libertarian. So while I'm all for bringing green business to Silicon Valley, I have to ask: Does that mean rescuing a business that shows no evidence of being able to make it on its own? Electric car maverick Tesla Motors, of San Carlos, Calif., is asking the U.S. Department of Energy for $400 million in direct loans. To me, it seems like a...

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...

Dean Kamen's "Luke Arm" Prosthesis Readies for Clinical Trials By Sarah Adee This story is part of a series about advances in prosthetic arms. For more, watch the video of the "Luke Arm" in action. PHOTO: Dean Kamen: DEKA Research; Robo Hand: Dirk van der Merwe Dean Kamen's “Luke arm”—a prosthesis named for the remarkably lifelike prosthetic worn by Luke Skywalker in Star Wars—came to the end of its two-year funding last month. Its fate now rests in the hands of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the project. If DARPA gives the project the green...

In a world of Stepford executives who never deviate from the corporate party line, there's something refreshing about an entrepreneur willing to take a tumble - literally - for his latest innovation. In uber-inventor Dean Kamen's case that meant crashing his Stirling electric hybrid scooter in front of Green Wombat and a photographer. In June, Green Wombat visited Westwind, Kamen's estate outside Manchester, New Hampshire, to talk to the Segway inventor about his plans to install a Stirling heat engine in an electric car made by Norway's Think. (See "Have You Driven a Fjord Lately?" in the August issue of...

<p>Inventor Dean Kamen promised that his superscooter would change the world. Then reality hit - hard.</p> <p>It would be premature to call the most talked about scooter in the history of humankind a huge bust. But the Segway has always been ahead of its time. For a decade, Dean Kamen fiddled and tested and tinkered with his invention, finally stage-managing its public unveiling in December 2001. He figured 2002 would be the year that the Segway Human Transporter launched a transportation revolution. Executives at companies like FedEx and Amazon.com would behold his high tech superscooter and wonder how they'd managed all these years without it. The US Postal Service and police departments across the nation would overwhelm the company with orders. And behind Segway's institutional customers, Kamen envisioned a long line of consumers from around the globe, checkbooks in hand. Maybe not all 6 billion of us would clamor at once to own one, but to him that seemed only a matter of time. After all, he was hawking the Segway as not merely a faster way to get from here to there but also a solution to urban congestion, air pollution, and dependency on fossil fuel. To prepare for the onslaught, Kamen leased a 77,000-square-foot factory near his home in Manchester, New Hampshire,and began puzzling through the logistics of running round-the-clock shifts. He hired scores of lobbyists, who spent much of last year trying to persuade state legislatures to rewrite their laws to permit his scooter to operate on city sidewalks. Before he'd sold a single one, Kamen blithely forecast that by the end of 2002, his enterprise would be stamping out 10,000 machines a week. Meanwhile, his best-known backer, venture capitalist John Doerr, predicted Segway would rack up $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history.</p>

(CBS) Lots of people talk and dream about changing the world. Dean Kamen is actually doing it. His latest creation, a personal transportation vehicle called the Segway, may be the most revolutionary leap since the automobile. His next invention may prove to be even more important. Dan Rather reports. Kamen loves to work: "I’m somebody who is absorbed by work," he says. "And some people, I think, misunderstand that, and think that's a problem, or I don't get a chance to have fun. To me, life is a blur of my activities, I mean it's only a job if you'd...

In the latest twist to the long-running Ginger saga, it's now being rumored that the two-wheeled device unveiled by inventor Dean Kamen last December isn't in fact the real deal. According to a posting on the 'ginger-chat.com' site, the Segway Human Transporter (SHT for short) cannot be the same thing as the much-hyped mystery invention originally known as Ginger and IT. The claim revolves around inconsistencies between the description of Ginger contained in publicity for a book written by journalist Steve Kemper and the actual scooter-like invention. There are also some alleged patent irregularities. The book is yet to hit...

The once-secret product "Ginger," also known as "IT," has been declared so revolutionary that it would "change the way cities are designed," according to one high-tech luminary, Apple Computer's Steve Jobs. But some cities aren't sure they're ready for this computerized "human transporter," a sort of high-tech scooter that can carry a rider at up to 10 mph -- potentially at odds with pedestrians on busy sidewalks. And its New Hampshire inventor, Dean Kamen, has feared his product might be regulated right out of the reach of consumers. Fear not. The Segway Human Transporter, or HT, has apparently rolled over...