I read a small blurb in Wired Magazine about a company called Emotiv Systems that has created a really interesting product called the EPOC. It basically brings brain control to your computer or to video games. The EPOC is a headband helmet type thing that actually picks up your brain waves allowing you to interact with a video game or a computer simply by thinking about it. The videos make the interactions look very simplified in their demo games. There is also an emotion sensing piece to it as well - you smile, and your avatar smiles, you frown, so does your avatar. Given the simple demos, I’m willing to cut them some slack since it’s just a version 1 product, and it’s freakin’ brain wave control for crying out loud. They’re promising a release date before the holidays this year, and the price is only $299, which seems really cheap for brain control. This thing looks like it is has some promise, and when this thing is out, we’ll see how developers take advantage of it. I can’t wait till I don’t have to manipulate a keyboard and a mouse to run around an blow things up in my computer games. This is just one step closer to putting you inside the game.

You knew something like this would happen sooner or later. Someone has gone out and created a toaster that you hook to the internet. The toaster pulls down news stories and burns it to your bread so you can read as you eat, I guess. It can also toast images to your bread. It’s kind of a cool idea, but I don’t’ know how practical. This crazy new home appliance is actually a finalist in a design competition so you can’t go out and buy one of these yet… but I’m sure the day is coming.

Ever wonder what would happen if you tried the infamous Diet Coke and Mentos experiment in Zero G? Robert Woodhead decided to take that experiment to the skies… literally. He packed up an experiment kit (Mentos, Diet Coke, containment bag) and took off in a special ZeroG plane to get weightless.

the hypothesis that we wanted to test was that convection of the soda was an important part of the whole reaction; under normal gravity, bubbles formed around the mentos rise up through the soda, allowing more soda to come in contact with the candy, and thus more bubbles form. However, in microgravity, there’s no “up”, so any bubbles that form will just stay near the mento, and will in fact keep new cola from reaching it.