Rain Drum umbrella is as amusing as it sounds

You may have come across various umbrella designs, but this one really sets a new benchmark. Check out the Rain Drum umbrella. As you can predict, this umbrella literally makes sound of drums when rain drops fall on it. Consisting of tom, snare, crash, hi-hat and bass, this umbrella covers all the important drum parts. To make the sounds possible, it consists of five different sized wax-cloth made ’shades’, with different elasticities. And depending on the elasticity and size of the ’shades’, the frequency of sound emitted differs accordingly.

Of course you cannot rule out the fact that the person standing closest to you may not enjoy the sounds as much as you do, nonetheless this is a new idea, and will find its place especially in the teenage crowd. The Rain Drum umbrella is the brain child of designer Dong Min Park.

Brainwave Heating Device, microwave of the future

Care for another desktop appliance? Called the Brainwave, it is actually a desktop microwave oven which can warm up your packaged food without having you to leave the desk. You just open up the packaged food, insert it, [there's a little scanning part] and the rest is done by the device in the picture.

To make the experience more user friendly the ‘Brainwave’ meal has been designed to come with a fork that has a Radio Frequency Identification tag attached to it. There’s a scanner with the machine through which the fork is swiped just like an electronic card, so that the information about the particular meal [heat setting and time] is automatically recognized by the microwave.So it makes heating your food that easy.”The microwave is powered through a C8 port connected to the mains and controlled through a computer application connected via USB.” This Brainwave Desktop Microwave has been designed by London based designer Steve Gates.

BUILDING MADE FROM WATER: MIT’s Digital Pavillion

Ever imagine a building could be built from water? Brick, wood and steel are the materials one normally thinks of when it comes to creating buildings - hard substances that don’t flow, change or move over time. That’s why we are amazed by the creativity and ingenuity of some architects from MIT who designed a building which is composed in large part by water. Water makes up the walls and even the roof of this amazing new “Water Pavillion” from MIT.

Designed by brainacs from MIT in collaboration with dozens of other partners, the Digital Water Pavilion will make a huge splash at the Expo Zaragoza in Spain next year, the theme of the Expo being Water and Sustainable Development. Continuously recycled water cascading from the roof of the pavilion will form the four exterior walls and several interior partitions, while displaying various digital messages and pre-programmed graphics formed by actual breaks in the water. The pavilion itself will house a café, public area, and exhibition space for the water-focused Expo.

The covered roof, which can be lowered in case of too much wind, will be covered by what else, a thin layer of water. At the end of the day, the roof of the structure lowers itself into the ground, making the entire structure of the exhibit disappear. And if you’re wondering how to get into the building without getting drenched, not to worry, the MIT engineers have thought of that: the same technology that creates air gaps in the graphics also uses integrated sensors, giving anyone (or thing) that approaches the ability to part water, coming out dry on the other side.

Nicknamed Liquid Pixels, Carlo Ratti, head of MIT’s SENSEable City gives his simplistic explanation of the artistic water walls, “To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water.” The more technical aspect of the water wall technology explains how a row of closely spaced solenoid valves are opened and closed at high frequencies, controlled by a computer creating gaps at specific locations in the wall.

Expo Zaragoza 2008 promises to be a gathering of sustainable minds, all there to discuss issues of Water and Sustainable Development. And what better piece of stunning architecture to bring that theme home than the Digital Water Pavilion.

Whether or not you’re more interested in the technology of the Digital Water Pavilion or just the fact that its so darn cool, one thing’s for sure: the Digital Water Pavilion will leave you thirsting for more.

The World’s Largest Basket

You might have already come across a picture of this unique building. Well if not, then you are by now surprised to see this Basket Building! Situated in Newark,Ohio, this basket shaped building is actually the Longaberger [basket-maker] corporate headquarters.The design of the gigantic basket is in fact an imitation of the Longaberger’s ‘medium market basket’ style. The building stands seven-stories tall, has 84 windows and scale wise is “160 times longer, wider and taller than the medium market basket”.

Dave Longaberger is said to be the mind behind this creation who dreamt of handling his company from a replica of one of its products itself. The World’s Largest Basket that houses 500 employees started its operation on 9th December 1997. For more details you might like to visit longaberger.com.

Mazda to design new vehicle KAAN with electonic tires

Electric cars are not new, but few companies have been as pioneering as Mazda in this area. Now they are coming up with something no one has seen before…KAAN. The car has been designed to compete in the E1 races. It uses Mazda’s patented electronic tire system technology and can reach speeds upto 250 mph with absolutely no harmful emissions !

“Inspiration for the KAAN comes from electric fields and textures seen in nature, particularly those in a lightning bolt. The car is uniquely designed around its powerful electric wheels while the cockpit acts as a capsule to safely house the driver, allowing for tighter peloton formations and a team victory. “

Robot specializing in handling household chores

So what’s this cute looking bot up to? Looks like it is filling the cup with water or else could it be washing it? Do not mistake it for a scene from a sci-fi movie; it is truly a Dishbot. Startling as it may sound but this HRP-2 humanoid bot is real and has been developed to take care of the cleaning process that involves dish washing starting right from the table itself!

The robot is able to act with technology which involves human motion capture and video game simulations. The researchers from University of Tokyo’s Jouhou System Kougaku Laboratory have employed the aforementioned techniques so that the robot is able to distinguish the different flatware and wash them accordingly. They are also in the process of making use of 3D sensors for the bots so that the robot can smoothly move in the house. As you may have already noticed, the robotic palms that involve contact with water have been taken care of with special waterproof gloves. With the looks of the pictures below it seems that this robot is quite capable of handling numerous other domestic chores.

Good Bye Floppy !!!!!!!

Stop us if you've heard this before: the floppy drive is dead. Sony has announced that it will stop selling the long-running storage medium next year.

According to the BBC, the end of floppy sales in Japan coupled with Sony's dropping international floppy sales earlier this year sticks the proverbial fork in the finicky, low-capacity storage medium.

Well, almost. The venerable 3.5-inch floppy is still available from the likes of Verbatim, Imation (3M), and Maxell- although Sony's abandonment of the once-ubiquitous media moves it another giant step towards utter irrelevance.

But the floppy's journey to inconsequentiality has been one long, slow slog.

When Steve Jobs announced his company-saving iMac in May of 1998, its lack of a floppy drive was met with an outcry of outrage - but the handwriting was on the wall. And it said: "Goodbye, floppy."

When the iMac shipped in August of that year, reviews of its floppylessness were mixed.Macworld, for example, wrote: "The most shocking part of the iMac isn't what it offers, but what it lacks. The iMac has no floppy drive, which might be forgivable if there were a Zip drive or other removable-media option, but there isn't."

Others, however, were more understanding. Ars Technica for example, noted: "Apple has gotten a lot of heat for dumping the floppy, but I don't have any problem with the action in principle. It's high time we move ourselves away from this pathetically small kind of storage."

Soon, more rumors of the floppy's demise began to circulate. At its 1999 Developer Forum, devs were told to prepare for a floppy-free future. In 2001, Intel hustled to deny that it was advising the removal of floppy drives from PCs, as had been revealed in internal documents.

Then, in 2003, Dell said it would drop the flop, which hastened the inexorable decline of the sales of the diskettes. In 2007, floppies disappeared from UK retailer PC World's shelves.

Not that there wasn't a gaggle of floppy replacements floated by various and sundry manufacturers. Insite's Floptical drive - which guided the read-write head optically but used standard magnetic storage techniques - increased the little fellow's capacity to 21MB. This hybrid tech resurfaced in Imation's 120MB SuperDisk - but that drive met with only limited success.

Other manufacturers tried putting flexible media into different high-capacity removable-disk technologies even before the floppy's demise - Iomega's 100MB Zip Drive, introduced in May 1995, being arguably the most successful.

In those removable-disk salad days, cartridges based on rigid-disk technologies were also being popped into internal and external drives - most notably SyQuest (bought by Iomega in 1999), followed by Iomega's 1GB and 2GB Jaz and 35GB "Son of Jaz," the Rev. During the waning days of rigid removables, SyQuest founder Syed Iftikar's start-up Castlewood flogged the 2GB Orb drive to little success.

And no trip down removable magnetic-media memory lane would be complete without at least a passing nod to Iomega's two-inch Clik!, introduced in 1999 and rebranded in 2000 as the Pocket Zip. As Iomega admits, "These products met limited market acceptance and were eventually discontinued."

The Zip drive - which was boosted to 250MB in 1998 and to 750MB in 2002 - was a follow-on to Iomega's Bernoulli Box technology. It was the only high-capacity flexible-media removable adopted to any great degree by OEMs. That success was never matched by other attempts such as Sony's 200MB HiFD, Samsung's 123MB Pro-FD, Matsushita-Kotobuki's 32MB FD32MB, or the aforementioned Imation SuperDisk.

Floppies, on the other hand, were everywhere during their heyday. Starting out in the early 1970s in an 8-inch form factor, they became de rigueur in early S-100 CP/M systems, especially after the DSDD (double-sided, double-density), 1.2MB version was released in the late 70s.

Floppies then shrank to 5.25 inches, popularized in the Apple II and IBM Personal Computers. When the 3.5-inch floppy appeared in the early 1980s the magnetic disk itself remained flexible, but it was encased in a hard-plastic case - which undoubtedly led to puzzlement among the younger generation of PC users, who wondered where the term "floppy" came from.

The most popular of those 3.5-inch disks began at 400KB (as in the original 128K Macintosh), then grew to 800KB (as in the Macintosh 512ke) and finally stabilized with 1.44MB FDHD format in the late 80s - which Apple, in its characteristically understated marketing-speak, dubbed the SuperDrive.

But as file sizes grew, floppies were doomed. Their first serious competition were CD-R andCD-RW drives - although the latter never managed to deal the floppy the final death blow.

That coup de grâce came with the introduction of flash-based thumb drives, which soon became the new hotness. Not only did thumb-drive capacities quickly rise and prices quickly fall, but their portability, relative speed, and reliability soon made them sneakernet's go-to media. Faster LANs, simplified PC-to-PC file-sharing, and broadband also made both simple drag-and-drop file-sharing and emailing more-secure methods of transfering files.

To be sure, floppies put up a good fight. Witness, for example, Maplin's combo floppy-drive-cum-card-reader of 2008. But thumb drives were not to be denied - although Memorex did give a nod to nostalgia with its retro FlashDisc offered by Buffalo and Verbatim.

And now with Sony's announcement, Steve Jobs gets to say "I told you so." ®