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faraday

Ideo's prize-winning utility bike debuts via Kickstarter

A clever electric bike, which won a design competition last fall for creating the best urban utility bike, is coming to market via Kickstarter today.

The Faraday, designed by the Palo Alto, Calif., design consultancy Ideo and Santa Cruz, Calif., bike-maker Rock Lobster Custom Cycles, took home top honors in the Oregon Manifest creative collaboration challenge, which CNET followed. The competition paired global design firms with small, handcrafted bike builders to create a bike for city living.

That success generated enough interest that Adam Vollmer, who led the design efforts for Ideo, left the firm to launch a company to … Read more

"Novel" receiver to protect electronics against electromagnetic pulse attack

A Malibu, CA company is developing a new system to protect military communication gear from high-power microwave weapons, nuclear blast generated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and the mythic, directed-energy "e-bomb".

One nuclear airburst can unleash the EMP equivalent to 100,000 volts per square centimeter, frying computer, radar and communication equipment within hundreds of miles. It's possible to protect electronic circuitry from EMP with something called a Faraday cage, or covering it up with 1 inch mesh, grounded, copper chicken wire as they've done with FEMA headquarters; problem is-nothing gets out either, which defeats the purpose when … Read more