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Uber users in the UK can reserve a premium ride a month in advance
Uber Reserve is initially available in London, Manchester, Bristol and Bath.
The long wait for a 1,000MPH car
On October 28th, Bloodhound's EJ200 jet engine roared to life. The needle-shaped car sped down a closed-off airstrip in Newquay, England, as 3,500 people looked on. At first, a cone of flame could be seen at the back of the vehicle, but it quickly faded as pilot Andy Green reached top speed and hit the brakes. From the roof of a temporary broadcast studio, I watched as a line of photographers rattled off shots and jostled for position. Within a matter of seconds, the blue blur had reached the end of the runway and veered left onto a parallel strip that led back toward the starting line. It was a moment everyone present had waited nine years for.
Pee-powered socks generate emergency electricity
A team of researchers from University of the West of England in Bristol, UK want you to pee in your socks. You know, in case of an emergency. They've developed a novel power system that leverages your own liquid waste to generate electricity in an emergency. It's essentially the same process as the still suits from Dune, just with electricity instead of water filtration.
'World's first' solar hot air balloon takes flight in the UK
The UK's International Balloon Fiesta in Bristol is a celebration of all things hot air ballooning, but this year it's taken a big stride into the future. August 6th saw the maiden public flight of the world's first hybrid hot air balloon, which flies by heating regular air from the sun alone. (Google's Project Loon balloons are also solar-heated, but filled with helium.) Built by Cameron Balloons in the UK, the Bristol 2015 Solar Balloon sounds simple enough. The air inside the balloon is heated by the sun instead of a propane burner, causing it to rise -- much like solar heated balloons for kids. But the company's sales director, Nick Purvis, told Engadget that it took a lot of trial and error to make it work.
Uber starts getting serious in the UK
Uber is finally making its move to become an ubiquitous transport service in Britain. For months, the company has been slowly growing with launches in major cities such as Leeds, Birmingham and Newcastle. We've been waiting for the floodgates to open, and it seems that moment has now arrived: last week, the company expanded into Bristol and Sheffield, as well as the smaller towns of Maidenhead, Slough and Windsor. Uber still has plenty of cities left to cover -- it's currently hiring in Belfast, Edinburgh and Glasgow -- but it marks the start of a larger push to become a widely known and accessible service in the UK. Uber's competition is limited to Hailo, Kabbee and a smattering of smaller startups in Britain, so this is the perfect time for it to cement a market-leading position. Increasing its reach and popularity could also work in its favour as it battles the courts and disgruntled taxi drivers.
Britain's first 'poo bus' hits the streets
Thanks to a range of new technologies, Britain's buses are steadily swapping traditional fuel for greener alternatives. Over in Bristol, however, Wessex Water believes more can be done with the brown stuff. That's why it's today put the UK's first bus powered entirely by human and food waste into service. The Bio-Bus, as it's known, is a 40-seater shuttle capable of travelling up to 186 miles on a full tank of bio-methane gas, which is generated via a process called anaerobic digestion.
Environmentally friendly robots will feed the flowers they trample
Dr Jonathan Rossiter, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol's Department of Engineering and Mathematics, has snagged a two-year research grant of over £200,000 to develop robots that decompose once their mission if complete. This means instead of our automaton friends rusting away, devoid of purpose, they could return gracefully (and more importantly non-toxically) back to mother earth. Not only would this be a boon to the environment, but scientists would no longer need to track and retrieve their mechanical progeny once it reached the end of its usable life, further sparing resources and allowing mass deployment. At least we know, when the day comes, the planet won't be harmed.
ESPN EVP and CTO Chuck Pagano opens a new facility, sees 4K sports on the horizon
While we were very pleased to hear that our friend Chuck Pagano just got a new title at ESPN -- Executive Vice President & CTO -- we're even happier about his remarks at the opening of a new building at the sports broadcaster's Bristol campus. This week it broke ground on DC 2, a four-story 193,000 square foot building that should be ready to go in 2014 with studios, control rooms with plans to take over as the new home of SportsCenter. There's no word on exactly what tech ESPN is putting in, but with ESPN 3D already up and running and the 1080p-ready LA studios plus MPEG-4 broadcast equipment ready to go, it wasn't a shock to hear Chuck asked people to "get used to hearing the term 4K TV." If you're not familiar with the name, check after the break for an Engadget Show segment we filmed with him in Bristol last year as well as a press release that rattles off his (long) list of accomplishments.
Doctor Who's sonic screwdriver is still fiction -- but not forever
Kudos to Bristol University for catching our attention, and doing so in the name of promoting education. Professor of Ultrasonics Bruce Drinkwater is evoking a rather iconic name to better explain how cool science / engineering can be. Though already used in the manufacturing and medical fields -- don't yawn and look away just yet -- Drinkwater expresses some confidence that the future of this technology could very well usher in a pocketable device similar to the sonic screwdriver fancied by a certain former resident of Gallifrey. You know, that do-it-all device that can repair electronic equipment, burn and cut items, fuse metals, scan for information, and render virtually any lock useless... except here we're focusing on ultrasonic sound waves capable of fixing parts together and creating miniature force fields. As for the Time Lord himself, we know of at least one past Doctor who, as joked by a later incarnation, would rather "save the universe using a kettle and some string" (and has, in more recent iterations, pulled out miraculous victories with even a BlackBerry Storm). Point is, you should maybe consider a degree in Physics and an eccentric outfit should you ever find yourself holding a working prototype.
Urinal power plants to juice up Lollapalooza-dwelling robots
Do you have to relieve yourself? Is your robot low on batteries? Your previously problematic world could soon be harmonized in one magical step. The Bristol Robotics Lab has been feeding funny trash to its Microbial Fuel Cells for quite some time -- rotten fruit, decomposed-in-sludge fly juice, grass clippings -- things like that. The Lab has now found that the nitrogen-urea-chloride-potassium-bilirubin cocktail present in urine is a particularly useful waste fuel which will play nicely with stacked fuel cells, as long as the fuel is, um... flowing. They've already partnered with waterless urinal manufacturer Ecoprod to create a portable urinal power plant that "could be used [...] at music festivals and other outdoor events," and hey, if HP can power their data centers with excrement, who can take offense to this? [Image of Dr. Ioannis Ieropolous holding a microbial fuel cell courtesy of University of the West of England]
Shear-thickening liquid hardens upon impact, makes for lighter and more effective body armor
Scientists at BAE Systems in Bristol, UK have come up with a "shear-thickening" (or dilatant) liquid that can be combined with Kevlar to create a new, more powerful bullet-proof material. Similar to the "body armor" used by some Olympic skiers, shear-thickening material acts as a lubricant at low velocities, but quickly hardens upon impact. The scientists describe it as "bullet-proof custard," which shouldn't make us hungry but is for some reason. According to the company, recent tests in which a large gas gun fired metal projectiles at over 300 meters / second into both thirty-one layers of untreated kevlar and ten layers of kevlar combined with the liquid have determined that the liquid armor could be used to effectively protect soldiers from bullets and shrapnel.
Bristol's ViewSurfer TVs let you use XP from 10 feet away
Face it, we're not normal. Most consumers don't want to convert their home PCs into media centers. That doesn't stop them from wanting a single device serving as both their TV and PC, however. That's where the 22- and 32-inch Bristol ViewSurfer PC/TVs carve out their niche. Each set features a FreeView tuner and an integrated, netbook-like, Atom-based Windows XP computer with 160GB of storage, 1GB of memory, 4x USB, and Ethernet. The PC lacks integrated WiFi, oddly enough, and the TV seems to function in complete isolation from the computer processing -- so no integrated DVR, for example. The £500 (about $814) 22-inch model does feature a 1680 x 1050 pixel resolution, well above the 1024 x 600 display found in most netbooks. Not that you'll be pushing Flash-based video from YouTube or BBC's iPlayer full-screen as these ViewSurfers are undoubtedly saddled with Intel's integrated 945GSE netbook graphics. Bristol remains mum about the specs on the 32 incher. Available in October if you're still game.
Researchers demo "unbreakable encryption" based on quantum cryptography
Call us devilish, but we just can't help but love these types of stories. Here we have yet another overly confident group of researchers grossly underestimating the collective power of the hacking underground, as gurus from all across Europe have joined together to announce "the first commercial communication network using unbreakable encryption based on quantum cryptography." Interestingly enough, quantum cryptography has already been cracked in a kinda-sorta way, but that's not stopping these folks from pushing this claim hard to government agencies, financial institutions and companies with distributed subsidiaries. We've no doubt this stuff is pretty secure, but the last time we heard someone utter a claim similar to this, we saw him uncomfortably chowing down on those very words merely months later.[Via Physorg]
Shoulder-mounted camera could extend human abilities
No question about it, strapping a webcam to your dome or rocking a set of unsightly head-mounted displays can kill a substantial amount of time, but researchers from the University of Bristol are looking at more practical uses of wearable cameras. A shoulder-mounted camera system that "automatically tracks head movements and can recognize hand gestures" has been developed in the UK, and eventually, they hope for it to recognize what the user is doing and make his / her life easier by communicating with other devices based on their actions. The cam is controlled wirelessly by a host computer, which "uses the camera's output to keep track of objects, map its position and recognize different hand gestures made by the user." Interestingly, the perched device even includes a trio of motors for muti-directional assistance, and built-in inertia sensors keep it level with the dips and dodges of life. Of course, we can't promise you that everyone (like mall security) will take kindly to a Big Brother-type device flanked on your shoulder, but at least you won't have to hire a bodyguard to watch your back, right?
