Motorcycle riders, also known as “donor bikes” to certain medical professionals of my acquaintance, are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to high speed collisions: they’re not protected by a cage of metal like their SUV-driving brethren. Several companies are looking to right that injustice with jackets that inflate in an accident protecting the motorcyclist’s neck and spine.

Superconductive power cables allow the transmission of power with half as much loss to heat, meaning a superconductive grid wastes a lot less electricity. A Japanese company expects to start installing superconductive cables at the end of 2006.

Share Your OPML looks to be a primitive delicious for XML feeds.

Twelve measly bits? Small beer in the world of traditional semiconductor logic, I’ll grant you. But the successful decohering of a twelve-bit quantum register is a big step forward in quantum computing.

Robotic limbs based on the ‘opposable thumb’ design tend to damage delicate stuff. So researchers have turned to the sea for inspiration, and are basing robotic limbs on octopus tentacles – ideal for probing into awkward and narrow spaces as well as picking up fragile things.