Techalyzer

Some of the most amusing stocking stuffers this year are the kitchen gadgets. They are usually, small, nifty and incredibly useful. Many of them deserve design awards simply because they are so cute and practical.
A good example is the new Tea Tool. This looks like a tear dropped piece of plastic with sharp teeth in the loop. Its sole purpose is to prevent you from burning your fingers by helping you fish your teabag out of your hot cup of water after you are done brewing.
Scared your kid is going to plunge a knife down the toaster and electrocute him or herself while trying to retrieve a piece of burning toast. This need no longer is a concern. Now you can get wooden toast tongues. Everyone knows that it is the metal that conducts the electricity that can cause electrocution but the metal toast tongs can help allay the common fear that one will forget this once the toaster starts flaming. It is a good safety measure just to keep around your home toaster just in case.
Another neat little thing is called the Fat Magnet. This looks like a tiny steam iron and you fill it with ice cubes. It is used to vacuum fat off of the surface of soup.
Of course manufacturers will never get sick of ways to figure out how to grate garlic without getting your fingers smelly. One of the newer gadgets is the Garlic Car which looks like a small automobile and is simply grated over the cheese so that the peelings fall out like exhaust. You can also get a grater that looks like a small credit card that is very handy. There is also something called the Garlic Zoom which looks exactly like a pencil sharpener.
Another garlic macerator is called the Cuilinare Fresh Hands which is like a magical pebble. This is a ball made out of a special metal that when fondled in the hand gets rid of the smell of garlic from your fingers (which after all is inevitable). It apparently also can get rid of the smell of oranges.
Have you noticed that your fruits and vegetables, such as delicate tomatoes and peaches were getting bruised by lying flat on your refrigerator hard surface. If so then it might be time to give them their own little pillows by buying vegetable cushions. This is basically bubble wrap that helps prevent spoilage and softness.
Of course Christmas would not be complete without a musical cake slicer. You can get all kinds of different versions of these on line with graphics and that play tunes such as Jingle Bells and For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.
And if crumbs land on your table be sure to investigate the Hoover Dog which is a small plastic musical dog that vacuums up the debris left on your cake plate.

The flying car is finally here but the inventors would rather that you not call it that and instead call it a “readable aircraft.” It is just like something out of Blade Runner or George Jetson. This flying car has been fixed in everyone’s imaginations for some years and finally it is no longer just a figment of our imaginations.
The future is definitely here. The curvaceous and sleek white vehicle which is going to be on sale next year is able to cruise smoothly on the road and then lift off into the sky. No more sitting in traffic.
This car, which is called the Transition, is going to go on sale next year. It has four wheels, a Formula One type of suspension, and ten foot wide wings that folds up and disappear when the car is no longer touching the road.
This is not the first flying car that was ever evened and most of them (pardon the pun) never took off. Many inventors have spent their entire lives perfecting these types of cars. In the 1950s an eccentric Navy pilot named Molt Taylor invented a vehicle called the Aerocar. He just could not find any buyers for it and so he went of business. Nobody was interested in it as a viable form of transportation.
The Transition car is a very practical vehicle that has been invented by some very serious engineers. It is basically a single engine rear propeller aircraft that also just happens to be a car. The design that was developed by Marc Stiller, Carl Dietrich and Andrew Heafitz meets Federal Aviation, Adminstration standards for flying and also the National Highway Transportaiton Sfety Administration and Environmental Protection Agency regulations for driving.
However you can forget the fantasy that you will be able to somehow take off from a road and fly over to available parking spaces or round the corners of buildings like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. You will only be able to drive it to a runway and take off from there. Also you will need to get a pilot’s license to go along; with your driver’s license before you can fly the thing.
This will also not be a mass manufactured car. There will only be about several hundred of these cars sold a year for now. The first flight test for the car has not happened yet. It is scheduled for late November.
Another problem is that, according to the New York Times, this venture is also not very well funded as of yet. It only as about a million in private funding a couple of presales for the car that were made in good faith. However because it is such an extravagant project the flying car could once again disappear from our radar - especially now that the market has crashed.

What do you do when the spirit is willing but the body is not able? The answer in the near future might be to don a robotic suit. This past month old and disabled individuals in Japan were able to rent a robotic suit that could help them become more mobile.
This suit looks like an exoskeleton that goes up either side of the body. It attaches with very large Velcro straps. There is a bone like hooded shoulder piece that holds the whole thing together and it consists of bulbous piece of white plastic that fit exactly on the joints like the knees, ankles, hips, elbows and shoulders. There is a padded control panel that wraps around the waist.
The idea is that the joints and muscles are stimulated electronically so that the useless limbs can function. In essence the plastic exoskeleton becomes like the puppet strings. There is also big control unit on the back of the suit. A battery pack is attached to the waist and is encapsulated in a zipped up pouch. This is a big bulky suit so obviously the disabled person needs professional help to get into it.
There are two versions of this robotic suit available. There is a version with two legs that rents for $2200 a month and another one leg version that rents for $1500 a month. The suit is called HAL which is an acronym for Hybrid Assistive Limb. Essentially it is a big computer with sensors that helps read your brain signals and direct your leg and arm movements. The number of sensors on this invention is incredible. There is even one that senses the amount of force needed for the foot to hit different types of floors.
Yoshiyuki Sinai, the creator of the robot suit, is a professor at the University of Tsukuba and the CEO of Cyber dyne, which is manufacturing and renting the suits. Of course at this price it is not very affordable. This is not one of those gadgets that will be assisting the elderly or ill population in general any time soon. Even just recharging the twenty two pound battery would be expensive and time consuming.
However it is miraculous in what it can accomplish. Sinai claims that the reason it works so beautifully in helping people regain their natural movements is because it can pick up faint bio signals that are on the surface of the skin when the human brain tries to move the exoskeleton. The effort is picked up by the sensors and the robot suit then starts moving to support the action.
One concern about this robotic suit is that it will soon just be assumed into military service. However the company Cyberdene has sworn that it will not sell it for war like purposes and instead sell it only to the needy in Japan. However before it is sold successfully to anyone the price of this suit obviously has to drop
It’s not known when, if ever, the HAL robotic suit will be available outside of Japan.