waterloo

A Virginia Tech University engineering team on Thursday won first place in the EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge with an 82-mile-per-gallon, extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) using E85 (ethanol).

The results of the three-year EcoCAR competition were announced on L'Enfant Plaza, in Washington, D.C. United States Secretary of Energy Steven Chu congratulated the team at an award ceremony. A total of 16 teams participated in the competition that was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors (GM).

A student team from Ohio State University took second place with an E85 EREV. Third place went to a … Read more

Boston Bruins Captain Zdeno Chara probably has enough to worry about during the Stanley Cup finals against the Vancouver Canucks to care that his fastest slapshot record can be broken by a robot.

The SlapShot XT can apparently beat Chara's world record of 105.9 mph. Developed by Hockey Robotics, a spinoff of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, the two-armed robot can repeatedly send pucks flying through the air at 110 mph.

The start-up developed the puck smasher as a method of testing the strength of hockey sticks. Since the introduction of composite sticks some years ago, broken sticks have been a problem in NHL and amateur games alike.

Golf club makers have used similar robots to test their product, but the XT is more complex because it uses two arms to wield a stick. It uses a gear, sprocket, and belt system to whack pucks into the net (see the vid below). … Read more

Links from Friday's episode of Loaded:

Dell announces the 7-inch Dell Streak, an Android-based tablet

Skype announces its acquisition of Qik

Lady Gaga announces her Grey Line of Polaroid products including a camera, a printer, and sunglasses with a built-in camera

Verizon shows off a home energy and security monitoring system

RealD announces standardized universal 3D glasses

Apple's Mac App Store launches with 1 million downloads in its first day

Waterloo Labs shows off eyeball controlled gaming

Dreambots is just what your sore muscles need: a motorized masseuse

LAS VEGAS--First came remote controls, then systems like Kinect, where you use your body as a remote control. The next advancement in motion control tech doesn't require you to move much at all, with the exception of an eye muscle or two.

Today at CES, I got a demo of a very early but still interesting prototype that uses the motion of your eyeballs to control things on a screen. The technology was built just in the last few months and demonstrated here by Hunter Smith and Christopher Culver from Waterloo Labs, a research group within National Instruments.

For … Read more

Got tweeted milk? Cows at a farm in Ontario, Canada, are sending out Twitter messages about the milk they produce. And that ain't no bull.

"Unloaded 12.7 kgs frothy milk from my udders," says a heifer who goes by the user name Freeride Speedy. She and 11 other cows at Buttermine Farms in Brant, southwest of Toronto, are part of the Teat Tweet project coordinated by Marcel O'Gorman from the University of Waterloo's Critical Media Lab.

The tweeting herd was outfitted with RFID tags. When a heifer approaches a milking pen with a laser-guided … Read more

Science has proven, once again, that advertising is effective. Who knew?

Researchers from upset-destined Duke University (fill out those brackets, people) and the University of Waterloo have published the results of a study that suggests that brief exposure to Apple's brand logo drives higher levels of creativity than exposure to IBM's logo. In fact, the researchers suggest that subliminal advertising is actually more effective than regular advertising, because people don't have time to raise their anti-ad defenses.

The researchers tested 341 students, who were told they were taking a "visual acuity test." The test involved … Read more