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Ascape Audio's earbuds boast wireless sound in a convenient package
If you want to put a little Motown in your ears, the Kickstarter campaign for Ascape Audio's newest Detroit-designed fully wireless earbuds and charging case has finally launched. The pitch is as follows: The AmpPack is a charging case that holds and charges the AscapePod fully wireless earbuds. The AmpPack automatically starts charging the twist-to-lock earbuds as soon as you secure them into the cradle near your phone's earpiece. The case's internal battery has enough power to charge them 20 times, or, it can double the life of your phone battery.
Why sneakerheads are leaving eBay for Detroit startup StockX
Buying a pair of new rare sneakers is harder than reselling them on StockX. To buy new, the Yeezy or Jordan gods have to smile upon you, giving you that winning raffle ticket at a local store or letting you beat the bots online. To resell, all you have to do is go to the StockX website and set a price. You don't take photos or haggle with potential buyers. Instead, you look at what price the shoes are selling for and list your pair at whatever amount you think someone will pay for them. Like a stock exchange, buyer and seller identities are kept from one another. StockX acts as a middleman, only releasing payment once it verifies that goods are authentic. It's this simplicity that has helped the company earn so many loyal users. StockX was founded in 2015 after Quicken Loans founder and CEO Dan Gilbert bought Campless -- an online repository for sneaker sales data -- from Josh Luber. As part of the purchase, Luber moved from his native Philadelphia to the Detroit metro area, taking up the mantle of StockX CEO and working from Gilbert's One Campus Martius building downtown. In a little under three years, the company has become the go-to source for buying rare high-end shoes and streetwear.
Michigan Tech's anti-drone drone snatches drones in mid air
Drones are in the mainstream now, and for every good drone operator, there's a nefarious one looking to do something nasty with theirs. A team of researchers from Michigan Tech is hoping to prevent disasters by building an anti-drone drone that can shoot a net to trap and catch its prey in mid-air. The project, led by Dr. Mo Rastgaar, was born out of the idea that using snipers to shoot drones made no sense if they were carrying harmful substances. For instance, the drone found on the roof of Japan's prime minister back in April 2015 was carrying radioactive material which could have been scattered around the surrounding area.
Researchers turn to Twitter in the search for time travelers
Whether or not time travel is even physically possible remains to be seen. But researchers at Michigan Technological University have already started scouring the internet for evidence that we've been visited by tourists from the future. The theory is that anyone who has moved backwards through space-time may have left their mark by tweeting, updating Facebook or posting on Google+ (who knows, maybe it's super popular in the future). The team began looking for mentions of two particular terms, "comet ISON" and "Pope Francis" before they would have entered our lexicon on September 21, 2012 and March 16, 2013, respectively. The ability to backdate Facebook posts and the fact that Google Trends only picks up popular terms limited the effectiveness of those particular tools, but that did not deter the researchers. They also performed a version of an experiment first conducted by Stephen Hawking in 2012, who sent out an invitation to a party after he'd already thrown it. Not surprisingly, no one traveled back in time to attend after they'd received the invitation. The Michigan Tech team decided to use Twitter hashtags instead. They asked people to tweet with #ICanChangeThePast2 and #ICannotChangeThePast2, then searched for messages including those tags that would have been sent before they put out the call to the would be time travelers. Unfortunately, none of their work turned up any evidence that there are currently people from the future in our midst. Of course, we already know they're here -- Nic Cage is the only evidence we need. The full academic paper awaits you at the source link.
Alt-week 7.8.2012: Solar flares, trapping dark matter, and life-sized Lego trees
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. This week we swing by some superhero news, look at how solar panels might shape up in the future, explore a Lego forest and see how to grab dark matter just using some household gold and strands of DNA. Not only that, we discover how the sun likes to celebrate the fourth of July with its own firework display. This is alt-week
Invisibility cloak upgraded to bend infrared light, not to mention our minds
The fabled cloak of invisibility was once considered impossible for modern science, chilling out with perpetual motion up in the clouds, but these days scientists are tilting at blurry windmills with a modicum of success several times a year. The latest advance in theory comes to us from Michigan Tech, which says it can now cloak objects in the infrared spectrum. Previous attempts using metallic metamaterials could only bend microwave radiation, the study claims, but using tiny resonators made of chalcogenide glass arranged in spokes around the object (see diagram at left) researcher Elena Semouchkina and colleagues successfully hid a simulated metal cylinder from 3.5 terahertz waves. While it's hard to say when we might see similar solutions for visible light, even a practical application of infrared cloaking could put your night vision goggles to shame, or perhaps block covert objects from being detected by those newfangled terahertz x-rays.
Michigan Tech students craft 20,000 watt snow horn
While we've seen water-based, cement cast, and speaker-shaped speakers make their respective debuts lately, this Michigan Tech project might just take the proverbial cake. Seeking to becoming kings of university's annual snow statue building contest, a few zany students crafted a monstrous snow horn, fully equipped with tweeters, mid-range drivers, and subwoofers. The horn was unfortunately disqualified from the competition due to using "materials other than snow," but how can you not hand over a gold medal to a team that braved the freezing cold in order to craft a 20,000-watt megaphone? You heard right, powering this immense array of drivers were nine Behringer EP2500s and a Crown XLS602, and while we've no way of confirming, we have every reason to believe that folks have "called to complain from miles away." So if you've ever wondered what (is probably) the loudest speaker to ever be constructed primarily from snow looks like, be sure to hit the read link for a bevy of in-progress and finalized snapshots.[Via Audio Junkies, thanks Lukas G]
