Da Gadgetz

This computer microscope allows you to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary for hours of fun and learning. View specimens collected around the house, backyard, your desk, or the fridge. Look at the micro-printing on a dollar bill or examine the traces on your motherboard. This microscope provides you an easy way to zoom in on a wide variety of objects to satisfy your curiosity of the world around you.

Simple plug and play operation with included software that allows you to magnify objects and view them on your PC up to 200X and take snapshots and time-lapse movies. You can also manipulate images with drawing and painting tools. The QX5 microscope is detachable from the stand to allow you to get closer to large objects.

• Take snapshots, video, and time-lapse movies
• 3 magnification levels - 10X, 60X, and 200X
• Super-brite LED lighting for bright top and bottom illumination
• Video playback at 15 frames/sec
• Resolution of 640x480
• Software works with Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP
• Handheld mode allows for expanded viewing possibilities
• Comes with: Microscope, USB cable, Stand, Specimen Jars, Sample Slide, Tweezers, Eye Dropper, Slide Clip, and Software CD-ROM

Bathsheba Grossman is an artist exploring how math, science and sculpture interconnect. Her work is about life in three dimensions, symmetry and balance, and always finding beauty in geometry. These are three excellent examples of her work. The Gyroid is a triply periodic minimal surface and was discovered by Alan Schoen. The artist then used Mathematica and Kenneth Brakke's Surface Evolver to compute this section of it, adding her own perforations. The Quintrino is a dodecahedral shape with a large and hidden inner volume.

Using a variety of modeling techniques and tools the design of these shapes is created using CAD software. The next stage is to get them from a virtual model to a physical object - this is accomplished by direct-metal printing. The design is laid down, one layer at a time, in stainless-steel powder, held in place by a laser-activated binder. You can see the remnants of the layering on the finished pieces and each layer is .004" to .007" thick. The piece then goes into an oven, where heat drives off the binder and fuses the steel powder that was used during the printing process. This produces a porous steel sculpture that's about 60% dense. The next phase is to get rid of the porosity by replacing the airspace that remains in the piece with liquid bronze. To do this the sculpture is heated again, and special stems that protrude from the piece are dipped in a crucible of molten bronze. Capillary action causes the bronze to wick throughout the piece. Impossible as it seems, the end result is a composite metal that's fully dense with properties intermediate between steel and bronze.

Sony has unveiled eyeglasses that can show full-color video images. The prototype supports a QVGA resolution, weighs 120g, is 3mm thick at the lens, and has a contrast ratio of 50:1.The glasses use a proprietary holographic waveguide and an optical engine made up of a LED light source and a transparent LCD panel. Video coming from the optical engine is reflected by a film in the holographic waveguide. It then bounces off a glass plate and is diffracted to the eyes by a second holographic film.Before it brings the glasses to market, Sony is trying to slim the prototype down to 80g and make the lenses transmissive enough to be used in dark places. The company says it's hoping to commercialize the produce by 2010.

Get ready to do wonders with colour. Here is a digital brush with a natural palette! Yes with this you can pick the colour of your hair to make your digital paintings realistic. Or even the pattern of your tie to turn the background very artistic. But how?

I/O brush is the wonder boy. You can use the brush to pick up textures, colours and patterns from anything and then paint it onto a digital canvas. So how does it work?

The inside of brush has a camera, lights, touch sensitive optic strands. When the brush comes in contact with a surface, the optic strands sense it and lights up the bulb. Once the frame is clear the camera takes a snapshot and stores it in an internal memory. And you can retrieve it onto the digital canvas whenever you are ready to paint. The I/O brush is now in its conceptual phase. Surely the artists of tomorrow can make real use of it.