Here’s one of those “why didn’t I think of that” inventions: A pencil sharpener that stops once your pencil is sufficiently sharp. The real beauty here is that the device costs less than $20. If you use a lot of pencils, it could pay for itself in pencil savings (I so wanted to say shavings).
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NASA teamed up with Goodyear to make a new breed of airless mesh tires. They brought in the engineers of the original lunar rover tires- guys who have been engineering since before I bought my first bottle of acne body wash , and they re-created the original airless tires, then redesigned them using the old tires as a starting point.
While we may never see these being sold to the general public, they took home the 2010 R&D Award for this design, and I’m sure these tires will see some moon dust on our next lunar mission. Since metal doesn’t provide great traction on pavement, I’m guessing these won’t ever see road use (besides, metal has a tendency to be brittle). These might be good for off-roading, though.
This is way cool… these guys build a bike lock that climbs poles so that people can’t deflate your tires or steal individual components from your bike. You’d better have one expensive bike to warrant a lok like this. I mean, even the cheapest bike locks are in the $5-$20 price range. I’ll bet that a remote controlled, motorized bicycles lock would cost you as much as a fort lauderdale car rental or even more. In raw parts alone, I’m seeing at least one nice motor that would set you back twenty bucks, a few battery packs that would cast another $20-$30 each… the remote, the skate wheels… it’s an expensive rig. Awesome, but expensive. The downside is that this probably only works on one size of pole.
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