Lightning Activated Shutter Release

lightning trigger

 

 

 

Today I saw that both MAKE and Ohgizmo are talking about a lightning activated shutter release. An expensive but cool device if you want to trip your camera once a lightning bolt flashes in front of the camera. It works because most lightning strikes are more than one arc of energy. As the bolt strikes a few times in a tiny moment the sensor commands the camera to trip it’s shutter. Bingo, you have a photo. That’s cool and everything but I prefer to do things the old fashioned way. For most of my lightning photos I use a pinhole camera and just let it sit there for up to an hour. Do I get some good shots? I think so.

Lightning Strikes (thin)

All of my pinhole lightning photos 

Tiny Unmanned Aircraft to Fly Into Hurricanes

Tiny aircraft to track storm dataWhat would you say if someone told you that they are going to fly their model  plane into a hurricane? Crazy right? That’s exactly what you would think but the bright lads over at the Aerosonde Corporation think it’s crazy not to. Each small airplane is equipped with scientific instruments that will monitor temperature, pressure, humidity and wind speeds inside the storm. This data will be transmitted back to a receiving station in real time as the tiny craft spirals into the eye of the storm and then back out. It’s hoped that such data will help NASA and NOAA better understand how these large storms develop in order to predict changes in hurricane intensity.

Tiny uncrewed aircraft to fly into hurricanes

Armed Border Guard Robots

Robot guns

Well, I bet no one saw this one coming. NOT! South Korea has announced that they will be using automated gun emplacements along it’s border with the most friendly nation on the planet, North Korea. Did I see this in a movie once?

The Commerce Ministry said the robot, which can fire a machine gun or rubber bullets and sound an alarm when it detects suspicious movement, could dramatically improve surveillance capability.

The robot also can distinguish people from moving objects such as a vehicles from up to two kilometres (1.2 miles) away in the daytime, and half that distance at night, the ministry said in a news release.

Holy cow! How long will it be until something like this is installed at key points along the US boarders? A long time I hope. I’m going to pop Aliens in my DVD player and see just how effective automatic sentry guns can be.

Robot Gossip

Sydney Morning Herald 

The Funhaler

FunhalerWow! Yeah, it’s for kids but still… It would be kind of cool to have one of these whenever I had to take a puff of my asthma medication.

The Funhaler® is a paediatric small volume spacer that makes it easier for young children to take their aerosol-based medication. The Funhaler® is specifically designed to improve compliance in asthmatic children through being both functional in delivering medication and fun to use. It has the unique feature of having an incentive module that encourages children to use the delivery device more effectively

The Funhaler