Recently, I came across this video demonstrating what has been called the Hutchinson Effect. In the 1980’s John Hutchinson claims to have stumbled upon these paranormal results resembling anti-gravity. Other phenomena that resulted from these experiments include the “levitation of heavy objects, the fusion of dissimilar materials such as metal and wood, the anomalous heating of metals without burning adjacent material, the spontaneous fracturing of metals, and creating both temporary and permanent changes in the crystalline structure and physical properties of metals”. Supposedly, these effects are impossible according to modern day physics.

Unfortunately, these experiments haven’t successfully been replicated by anyone in the mainstream scientific community. This has led many to question Hutchinson’s findings despite this video of evidence. I really would like to believe that this is real evidence for the finding of anti-gravity and hope that Hutchinson’s findings will one day be replicated and provide further insight into future uses of this technology.

The following is a video of John Hutchinson that aired on the late TechTV show “Invent This” a few years ago. I actually remember seeing this when it aired, but I had no idea what he was really known for. If you have time, I really recommend checking out the video if for no other reason than to see his apartment - it is any DIY scientist’s dream home.

Neural-Robotics, a company specializing in unmanned mini-helicopters for various purposes, is now planning on attaching semi-automatic weapons to their units, thus transforming a remote-controlled toy into a flying death machine. These can be controlled manually or autonomously on a preprogrammed mission, that is of course until they become self-aware and begin to lay waste to all of human civilization. Now I suppose all that is left is to choose who our anti-robot savior will be: John Conner, Neo, or Will Smith? I’m personally hoping for an anti-robot-robot sent from the future, but that’s just me.

link [via RobotGossip]

This is the first work in the area of optical camouflage that I have actually been impressed with. This team of reasearchers from Japan have made some headway into this incredibly useful technology. Their system, however, is a little awkward and not very easy to replicate. The picture above was from one of their “invisibility suits”. The scenery behind the camouflaged person is recorded and sent to a nearby projector perpendicular to the line of sight between the person wearing the suit and the viewer. The background is then projected onto a half-mirror tilted at an angle that projects onto the suit, which is made of a highly reflective material. The resulting effect is shown as the suit appears transparent.

Obviously this technology could be used for numerous things, but the overhead that is needed to successfully perform this is enough to prevent its use in most applications. I remember hearing about a theoretical technology that supposedly performs the same effect but uses fiberoptics. The fiber was supposed to bend the light from the back of the image to the front, so anyone standing on any side of the subject would only see the light coming from the subject’s opposite side. This concept makes a lot of sense to me, but I’m sure there are still a lot of technical problems to overcome. In any event, this suit is still pretty cool, even if it can’t currently be used like the Predator’s active camo.

link to the project site with several other videos of this technology in action

This is the future ladies and gentlemen. I don’t really have much information on this, but I’m going to go ahead and use my powers of assumption and state that this will be what we all will be using 6 months from now. Murder will be non-existent and Tom Cruise will be the world’s foremost police officer. Seriously, this blows my PowerGlove out of the water. After two days, my hack is already outdated

quote from the YouTube page,

“This is a video of a multi-input touch screen that hopefully will make its way into consumer computer market in time. A standard touch screen allows one input at a time. This allows multiple people to use it and allows for Minority Report like features. Super Cool”