iCandy: Pairing People With Processors

Visitors to Resorts World on Sentosa Island, Singapore, can witness a 10-minute animatronics spectacle wherein two 80-metric-ton mechanical cranes appear to emerge from the water and flap their wings as they fall in love. The cranes’ 25-meter-wide wings are created by spraying nearly 37 000 liters of seawater from the 10-story-tall birds’ bodies over the course of each show.

Someone who has a lot riding on an event is said to have “skin in the game.” But Patrick Vaillancourt of Montreal has taken the phrase literally in his efforts to provide money for Care Canada’s humanitarian projects. He hopes to raise US $3.5 million by turning himself into a walking billboard and allowing up to 100 000 Internet addresses to be tattooed on his body.

We’ve all wished we had eyes in the back of our heads. But New York University photography professor Wafaa Bilal has made it happen. A surgically implanted mount on the back of his head serves as the base for a digital camera. For the project, called “The 3rd I,” images from the camera will be streamed over the Web.

Philipp Robbel, an MIT robotics student, has answered the question “What do you get when you cross a cousin of iRobot’s Roomba automated floor sweeper with Microsoft’s Kinect gesture-recognizing, hands-free game controller?” His “KinectBot” will heed you when you point out that it missed a spot.

It was a moment of pure genius when someone created a room where you can experience the thrill of free fall without the anxiety of wondering whether your parachute will open. Here, a Turkish soldier is pictured in an indoor skydiving facility in Ankara whose 260-kilometer-per-hour winds keep divers aloft.

The new Cobra iRadar app for the iPhone was shown off in the cockpit of its namesake—a 1967 Shelby Cobra GT500 CR—at November’s SEMA show in Las Vegas. The software allows motorists who have iRadar detectors synced with their iPhones to share information about the location of speed traps so they can avoid traffic tickets.

ReWalk robotic pants, which allow paralyzed people to stand up, walk, and even climb stairs, will go on sale this month. The device, from Argo Medical Technologies, in Yokneam, Israel, was invented at the behest of an Israeli entrepreneur who was paralyzed in a car crash in 1997. It uses a suite of sensors to determine a user’s intentions and electronic motors to carry them out.

John Pederson, the CEO of LVX System, basks in the glow of dual-purpose LED lighting that his company patented. The 36-watt light source not only brightens a workspace but also transmits data wirelessly by pulsing on and off thousands of times a second—frequencies that are imperceptible to the human eye. The initial version introduced in November can transfer 3 megabits per second.

This is what a U.S. Navy electromagnetic rail gun looks like after firing a small projectile with a force of 33 megajoules. That record-setting shove is said to be enough to make a projectile strike a target nearly 180 kilometers away after it leaves the muzzle of the gun at close to 2400 meters per second.