Hasta La Ideas

The streets of New York don’t glitter with gold, but they are pretty sparkly from all that recycled glass mixed in with the asphalt. Putting crushed-up glass into roadways was previously the go-to option for what to do with the stuff, since it was just about impossible to separate broken glass from the other stuff in the recycling bin in a cost-effective way.

Now, however, better sorting technologies mean recycling companies can isolate clear glass—that’s the stuff you want, if you want to turn it back into bottles–through a hi-tech series of automated processes. Check it out:

<@-- p>Secrets From The Recycling Plant: How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle from Planet Money on Vimeo.

I realize it would be impossible to collect old bottles, sanitize them and re-use them, as we once did with milk bottles, but I wonder what the energy costs of that would be, versus recycling.

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Marrying the concept of wearable technology with appliances is a new arena that designers are delving into. Imagine wearing a device or appliance that dispels purified air that is aromatic and the fragrance customizable. Say hello to the Hand Tree, a personal air purifier concept that cleans and filters the air around the wearer.

Working on the principle of plants, Hand Tree absorbs the dirty air and emits purified one, thus creating its own atmosphere around a person. It surrounds a person with perfume of their choice.

Hand Tree is an Electrolux Design Lab 2013 semi-finalist project.

Designer: Alexandr Kostin

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(Wearable Clean Air was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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As we saw in yesterday’s Humans Are Awesome video, the human body is capable of some incredible stuff. But it’s weird to think of how even the mundane activities we perform are quite biomechanically sophisticated. Running sideways with a football and throwing it to your buddy who is sprinting in a different direction, riding a bicycle, or even the mere act of getting in and out of a vehicle require myriad instantaneous microcalculations that prove how in control of our bodies we are.

Humanoid robots, on the other hand, are not. But DARPA still feels the humanoid form factor has some merit for robots, at least those designed to work in disaster areas. While attaching a fire hose to a water source, for instance, hands with fingers come in handy, as do legs you can use to step over and around the hose as you do it. And if you’re going to send ‘bots into the Fukushima reactor to shut it down, it’s best if the can manipulate equipment designed to be worked on by human-shaped bodies. So the DARPA Robotics Challenge asked entrants to propose how humanoid robots can realistically complete simple tasks.

You’ll realize what a daunting task this is when you see this very weird footage of a robot trying to get into a car. Look how long it takes this robot known as Atlas:

Not weird enough for you? Here’s some alternative methods (and in the third, it almost looks like the robot is flipping off the camera):

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The idea of a wave-pool often calls to mind crowded water-parks with little ripples that are hardly worthy of their name. Spain’s Wavegarden, the emerging leader in wave-pool technology is quickly changing that. Wavegarden creates consistently…

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The convinece of face recognition is evident in photography and social sites where people are automatically tagged. Extending this concept to telephones, the Elderly E Phone uses image recognition rather than a keypad for the entering of phone numbers. It is aimed at the silver generation, who have a hard time dialing or remembering numbers.

The designers explain, “Elderly e Phone concept uses simple image recognition for the making of calls. First, the phone must be pre-set with the numbers that correspond to particular facial photographs of one’s contacts. When a call is to be made to one of these people, the user simply needs to hold the phone’s image finder above the photograph and press ‘OK’. The phone will recall the appropriate number and the call will be placed directly.”

Elderly E Phone is a 2013 red dot award: design concept winning entry.

Designers: Prof. Dai Yunting, Lu Junshi, Liu Fei, Jiang Ying & Zhu Yunpeng

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Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design!
(New Meaning To Face Recognition was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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