Gearfuse

Japanese students lucky enough to snatch a free iPhone 3G from their school shouldn’t get too excited just yet. Your universities mean serious business. The iPhone might just be a smart ploy to get your asses in school.

A Japanese university has started to employ a special school attendance app which keeps track of whether you show your face in class or not. So not only are the iPhones to be used for studying purposes, but you can bet your academic arse that officials will be checking GPS records as well. So, you know what you do? Switch off with your friend, once every other day, give your friend your phone to bring to class. Let them deal with it.

Link

Those brits! Always inventing such crazy stuff like Fawlty Towers and The Office!

This time around, researchers at Cambridge University have designed an LED-based lightbulb that costs a mere $3 and has a 100,000 hour lifespan. Very impressive, considering that my current fucking lightbulbs tend to burn out after three months. Researchers say the bulb could also help lower electricity bills.

It should be available in, let’s see, about two to three years. Not too shabby, but not soon enough.

Link

The ultimate gaming rig has now become your car. It doesn’t sport the powerhouse graphics offered by the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 nor the gimmicky bullshit that encompasses the Nintendo Wii, but it does have a cool name: the Carcade. Students at the Berlin University of the Arts designed this “augmented reality in-car videogame” which utilizes a laptop and webcam to turn the scenery you’re driving by into the level of the game.

It’s like the standard shooter except it’s all about avoidance rather than racking up points by demolishing enemies. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun, considering that the faster the driver is going will directly affect the difficulty and speed of the game. Just hope the driver keeps his/her eyes on the road and off the game.

Link [via]

Scientists are always trying to replicate phenomenons here on earth. With the Large Hadron Collider attempting to test various theories and even replicate the big bang, you’d think scientists all over the world have their hands full.

On the contrary, scientists at the University of Maryland have their own little maniacal tests to conduct. They’ve built a ten foot high, 30 ton apparatus that’ll attempt to generate a magnetic field by spinning liquid sodium metal, much like the way Earth produces its own magnetic field. John Biggs of CrunchGear suggests putting beer in it. We couldn’t agree more.

Link [via]

Parametric Bookshelves look hip, sensible and certainly colorful. But unfortunately, there’s more than meets the eye. See, these bookshelves are the product of some clusterfuck orgy between Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Italian architectural firm Tiazzoldi and Research Lab NSU. Essentially, it’s an ivy-league bookshelf that is so pretentious, it only holds Ayn Rand novels.

Sounds pretty rad and all, save for the pretentiousness, right? Wrong! You just bought a fucking bookshelf for holding shoes!

Parametric Stalactites is the new design proposal by Tiazzoldi.org for a luxury Italian shoe brand. It has been conceived as an adaptable layout for a shoe store.

Boom. Have a colorful living room? Might as well get one of these.

Link

Well they didn’t really take over the entire library; they merely took over the jobs of librarians and the hassles of students. Students no longer have to search through the massive stacks of books to find that obscure book their philosophy teacher asked them to pick up. Every book, CD, and DVD in the library are tagged with a radio-frequency ID chip for the robots to detect. While librarians get to keep their job organizing media published after 1990, the robots automate the process for all other media. These fork-like machines can detect, pick-up, and store all the materials in a large, three-story facility; it would be funny to see some freshman trying to get a book from the top of a three-story high stack of books.

When working at maximum capacity, these robots can travel at a whopping 7 mph, meaning they can retrieve 5 books in an average of 2.5 minutes. No human could ever get 5 books in 2.5 minutes unless it was by the same author. This quick return time in retrieving books will save hours (literary) for students at Chicago State University, where the average time for students to retrieve 5 books was 2 hours. Now they can spend time reading the books instead of looking for them. Now they students at CSU can really enjoy their $38 million facility in its entirety, with its 800,000 volumes. Now the librarians don’t have to yell at kids making out in the library for being so loud. — Nick Rice

CSU library [Wired News]