I grew up near Seattle, Washington, and one of the biggest companies in the area is, of course, the Boeing Corporation. They have a testing field located outside the city that is almost as big as Sea-Tac Airport. The aviation giant recently announced the development of the Skyhook JHL-40.

The Skyhook is a terrific looking aircraft with eight engines. Four of them are vertical rotors that can give some extra lift, allowing the airship to lift 40 tons. The other four engines are directional propellers to control the precise movement of the Skyhook.

What I would give to live close to Boeing again as they develop this advanced airship. Not only is it a quantum leap over the Goodyear Blimp, but very environmentally friendly. The Skyhook has a reduced carbon footprint, and does not disturb the landscape like an airplane or helicopter.

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I once heard a comedian talk about the miscellaneous cloth that people have in their kitchens. It’s usually hung on the handle of the refrigerator or oven door, and it gets used for everything. You can wipe spills with it, clean off excess water, even wipe kid’s nose. Then when it’s time to eat an apple, we usually wipe it clean with the very same cloth.

Apparently that comedian wasn’t the only one to have noticed this obvious problem of spreading bacteria in the kitchen. Fortunately, an inventor who is graduating from De Monfort University in Leicaster has developed a high-tech replacement alternative for kitchen cloths.

His invention is called the Aquavac, and it is designed to clean up wet and dry messes. It will also dry hands and crockery. The Aquavac is designed with certain polymers that contain anti-bacterial substances, making it dishwasher safe and completely hygienic.

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I’d like to take a moment to be grateful for modern day inventions like the washing machine. In the old days, Laundry Day was a grueling chore of hand and washboard scrubbing. Now we just sit on our butts and let the machines do most of the work.

I guess it’s just a natural evolutionary progress that someone made a washing machine that we can actually sit on. This concept device of washing machine/cozy chair is designed by Harsha Vardhan. Since no water is required to run this device, you don’t have to devote a “laundry room” to this washing machine seat.

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Powerstrips aren’t exactly the most exciting of electronic devices. However, on occasion someone decides to be a little creative with the boring powerstrips. It also looks a bit like a D20 (even if it is a bit short on sides), which shows a bit of love for your D&D days, as well as the rest of the geeky games that involve dice. Even if your back in the day gaming was just last week. I know, it’s hard to get through those long work weeks to get to your weekend round of Magic.

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The hoodie shown here may look like just your average hoodie, but it has a bit of added protection for skateboarders.  In the picture where you see the darkened sections, all but the one at the neck, are spots with added pads.  When you take a nasty spill, it will help protect you from injuries.  Also the spot where your hands slip through has another built-in pad.  When you just want to wear the hoodie as a normal hoodie or it needs washed, the pads can be removed by unzipping the pouch.

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Even the manliest of men need to admit that they need food to survive. Preferably a nice juicy steak with a hot baked potato, but of course a slice of strawberry cheesecake would do. The point is that you can stock up on every tool in the catalog, but a nice pair of eating utensils is always an investment worth making.

Of course, with this outburst of industrial design influence, everything is being mixed and mashed into one beautiful product of productivity. These eating utensils are made for not only eating, but for crouching down for some butt-crack revealing plumbing, or even fixing a loose spark plug on your vehicle.

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As a species, us humans just have a really hard time getting ourselves up in the morning. Whether it be an instinctual habit of receiving as much rest as possible or just an inherited laziness we’ve developed over the generations, we just really dislike getting woken up before we want to be awake.  Just look at some of the alarm clocks we’ve talked about in the past for proof of that.

What human emotion to we need to spur in order to alert ourselves that we must wake up? Anger could work, but also might result in one very broken alarm clock. The Tyrant Clock uses one of the most feared emotions, humiliation. Forget drunk dialing, this is sleep dialing.

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I always enjoy reporting on the latest Conceptual Gadgets, so I couldn’t resist reporting on this one. It is known as the “Kage roi”, is a concept gadget that helps groups come up with more concepts.

Simply put, the Kage roi is a boardroom table that has built-in voice recognition ability. So the next time you and a group of businesspeople are having a vocal brainstorming session, the Kage roi picks up on your keywords, and provides each person a display of its internet search. In short, the Kage Roi is a brainstorming table with a brain.

But it isn’t just the table that is the concept. Apparently, the room is equipped with LEDs that can change the lighting. For example, if you want to make people feel like the sun is about to set, the Kage roi can accommodate you.

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