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iCandy: November 2009

Spectrum's monthly slideshow proves that a picture is worth a thousand bytes

18 Nov 2009

LONG LIFE: To publicize its latest, most energy-dense battery formulation, Panasonic staged a 24-hour endurance event in which this three-wheel trike toy motored around a racetrack guided by an infrared beam projected from the back of its own personal pace car. The 17-centimeter-tall cyclist covered 24 kilometers.
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Photo: Michael Caronna/Reuters

YOU’VE GOT THAT GLOW: A light-therapy machine called ReGen, produced by Swansea, England–based Energist, uses high-intensity LEDs to soften skin, smooth wrinkles, and erase blemishes. Each of the four light boxes has 1024 dual-wavelength LEDs that can be set to glow red or blue. Twenty minutes twice a week is supposed to reduce the signs of aging.
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Photo: Kyodo/Landov

HOLIDAY CHEER: The village scene dazzling the crowd is one of dozens of displays at the annual Towers Lights illumination festival in Nagoya, Japan. The scene is only one page in an illuminated picture book made possible by a million LEDs and a lot of programming.
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Photo: LAPP-PRO.de/Barcroft Media/Getty Images

OLD SCHOOL: To make images like this, Photoshop wizards need not apply: The colorful winged creature seen here was not the result of digital manipulation. Light Art Performance Photography, a group of artists from Bremen, Germany, adorned the subject with LEDs and captured its attempt at flight with a camera set to a long exposure time.
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Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

REAL-WORLD JOYSTICK: Let’s face it—most iPhone apps are stupid. But the electrical engineers at Freie Universität Berlin who rigged a Dodge minivan for remote operation by an iPhone have a winner on their hands. Rotating the device turns the steering wheel; pressing the “gas” and “brake” icons makes the car accelerate and stop.
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Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

BLACK: THE NEW GREEN? This field of coal is the feedstock for a New Haven, W. Va., power plant that’s been retrofitted with equipment that captures 90 percent of the carbon dioxide that would otherwise be emitted from the plant’s smokestacks. The greenhouse gas is instead pumped into permanent underground storage.
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Photo: Olivier-Laban Mattei/AFP/Getty Images

ANALYZE THIS: A new scanning and multispectral-analysis technique from Lumiere Technology, in Paris, is being used to ferret out details in paintings, allowing experts to tell whether an artwork is a forgery masquerading as a masterpiece. The portrait on the screen is said to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
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Photo: Glenn Campbell/Fairfax Photos/The New York Times/Redux

PHOTO(N) FINISH: A race car covered with photovoltaic panels, produced by professors and students at MIT, soaks up the last of the day’s rays as it speeds across Australia with the sun as its only power source. It finished fifth in the Global Green Challenge (formerly the World Solar Challenge), a biennial 3000-kilometer solar car race from Darwin to Adelaide.
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[clickimagelink_new]https://spectrum.ieee.org/slideshow/computing/hardware/icandy[/clickimagelink_new]

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type:slideshow gadgets clean coal panasonic towers lights medical devices world solar challenge solar regen tools and toys

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