Who doesn't love Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born movie actress who starred in such classic movies as 1941's Ziegfeld Girl or 1944's Experiment Perilous? Of course, if the life of a glamorous movie star of the black and white era doesn't interest you, there's also the minor fact that she invented a device that would eventually lead to the development of GPS, Wifi and Bluetooth technology.
Hitting newsstands shortly, TIME’s “50 Best Inventions” issue spotlights some of the most amazing new ideas and innovations from the past year. If you’re a TIME subscriber, you can already see the article online right here. Of course, many of the inventions highlighted are infused with a heaping helping of technology and, as such, have [...]
If you’re reading this, you’re online and, as such, you probably have an email account. But have you ever wondered about the origins of email? It’s not exactly a cut-and-dried case, as various forms of electronic messaging have been around since the humble telegraph. I had the opportunity to sit down with V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who holds the first copyright for “EMAIL”—a system he began building in 1978 at just 14 years of age. It was modeled after the communication system being used at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. His task: replicate the University’s traditional mail system electronically.
If someone up and asked you “who invented the computer,” how would you respond? Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Al Gore? Or say you’re more historically savvy, might you venture Alan Turing? Perhaps Konrad Zuse?
All of the above could prove wrong, depending on what a British research team and millions of dollars turn up over the next decade.
Yesterday we mentioned recent predictions that solar power will be as cheap as coal by 2013; today, though, the word is that it will also be a helluva lot easier to generate too.
Think of Card 2.0 as a universal remote for all your other debit and credit cards. Developed by a company called Dynamics, Inc., it looks like any other credit card except for a few small buttons on the front of it.
The crowdsourcing community over at Quirky.com has unveiled its latest creation as the Twice Ice Bucket. It’s made of two chambers—a half-gallon one and a 2/3-gallon one—and can be flipped on either end to suit whatever size beverage or beverages you’d like to keep cold.
Sometimes it seems like pencil technology moves so fast that it’s like, hey, why am I even trying to keep up with this stuff? First there was the pencil, then the eraser, then different numbered pencils, and now this new liquid pencil thing from Sharpie. Slow down!
Mouseless is a self-described “invisible computer mouse that provides the familiarity of interaction of a physical mouse without actually needing a real hardware mouse.”
The MIT-developed Proverbial Wallet appears similar to an ordinary wallet except for the slightly odd looking apparatus in the middle. That’s where all the action happens, though.
The Lemelson-MIT Program was established in 1994 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The program “recognizes outstanding inventors, encourages sustainable new solutions to real-world problems, and enables and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention.” Several grants are given out every year, including many to “InvenTeams” made up of high school [...]
