Mattel’s new ThingMaker is a $300 3D printer for toys

We’ve been waiting years for 3D printing to finally be simple enough for mainstream consumers — and now, it looks like Mattel might be the first company to make that happen. At NYC’s Toy Fair this weekend, Mattel unveiled ThingMaker, a revival of its 60’s era toy maker using modern 3D printing technology. It’ll also do much more than the original model: Instead of just spitting out fairly simple Creepy Crawlers, you can design complex objects like figurines, jewelry and accessories using the ThingMaker Design app, which Mattel developed together with Autodesk. ThingMaker will start shipping this fall for $300, and Mattel also started taking pre-orders today.

Instead of actually having kids cook toys like its predecessor, an obviously dangerous prospect, the new ThingMaker spits them out just like any other 3D printer. It even locks the printing door when it’s working, and it retracts the printing head after a job, all to protect kids from burning themselves. According to USA Today, Mattel is positioning ThingMaker for kids over 13, and it rates printed objects as safe for children three and over.

Sure, it’s not the first inexpensive 3D printer, but if Mattel manages to make the overall printing and designing experience easy enough for children, it could be on to something huge. It gives kids some early training in 3D design, which will likely be increasingly important over the next few decades. Similar to Minecraft, it’s also an ideal way for kids to use technology creatively. And, if it takes off, you can bet Mattel will make bank from accessory purchases.

Via: USA Today

Barbie’s new Dreamhouse goes full IoT with voice commands

Last year, Mattel debuted its WiFi-enabled Hello Barbie to make playtime a bit more interactive. A connected doll needs an internet-friendly home, too. At this year’s Toy Fair, the company is showing off just that. The Barbie Hello Dreamhouse gives the brand’s namesake her very own smart home that actually connects to the internet and a companion app. That connectivity allows the toy to accept voice commands from kids for tasks ranging from flipping on the lights to operating the elevator. Because of course Barbie has an elevator… duh.

When the weekend arrives, there’s Party Mode that handles the flashing lights and music for all of those end of the week festivities. And yes, you can flip it on with a voice command, too. Party Mode will also turn the stair case into a slide, because time spent walking is better used doing anything else at the Dreamhouse. As you might expect, Barbie’s new home doesn’t come cheap as it’s priced at $299 and expected to hit stores this fall.

What’s more, Barbie’s hopping on the drone bandwagon as well. The $60 Star Light Adventure RC Hoverboard is a tiny remote-controlled drone that will have the doll flying through your living room with ease in an outfit appropriate for said activity. The flying accessory is expected to arrive this fall too, so Barbie fans will have more than one tech-related option to ask Santa for this year.

Source: Toyland, Mashable

BioLite’s latest gear includes a stove, lamp and a pair of solar panels

The smell of burning wood from pot belly stoves and fireplaces is noticeable in some Brooklyn neighborhoods during the winter, but down underneath the Manhattan Bridge overpass at BioLite headquarters it’s business as usual. The company’s been hard at work updating last year’s line of off-the-grid power and cooking gear. That means plenty of design, testing and the occasional conflagration in its “burn lab” to perfect its products. The result of all this sweat and ash includes a new CookStove, PowerLight Mini and a pair of solar panels, which you can pick up at BioLite’s website.

CookStove

With the new CookStove, BioLite opted to leave off the thermoelectric generator used on the last-gen model; it instead has a chargeable battery to power its flame-controlling fans. It’s nearly a half-pound lighter and $30 cheaper than the earlier CampStove, but remains compatible with the existing stove’s accessories. The new edition is said to provide up to 30 hours of flame control when it’s fully charged and, as before, uses biomass (twigs, pinecones, etc.) for fuel. This is the first time BioLite’s engineers designed every component of its fan system in-house, to maximize efficiency. In particular, they constructed a small-scale wind tunnel and used 3D-printed prototypes to finalize the design.

SolarPanel 5/5+

BioLite is offering two versions of its SolarPanel: The 5+ with a battery for storing the sun’s juice for later use and the 5, a sip-as-you-go model acting as a conduit for charging devices without saving anything for later. The company is quick to admit that the selling point isn’t about the solar cell technology (it uses an ultraslim 5W monocrystalline panel) but rather the user interface and design. We’re told you can get a full charge on the 5+ after about two hours of peak sun, but keeping the panel in the ideal position for soaking up rays is the trick. These panels integrate a sundial and 360-degree adjustable kickstand to help you stay on target for maximum exposure as the sun’s angle changes.

A quick test proved the dial’s bullseye a useful method for manually achieving the optimum angle: full frontal sun. BioLite’s in-house engineers even constructed a mechanical stress-tester to put the resilience of its click-stop positionable stand to the test.

PowerLight Mini

This season’s lighting addition is basically a scaled-down version of the PowerLight, although it doesn’t support the daisy-chainable SiteLights. Still, its one of the more versatile items, with a combination of compact design, light output and a 1,350mAh battery to power devices. It’s more of a last-mile solution, though, as I only managed to get a 30-percent boost on my Nexus 5X before it was tapped out.

As a light, the Mini is rated to provide up to 52 hours of illumination (at a low setting). Like the SolarPanel, it also has a rotatable kickstand, but this only spins around about 270 degrees in one direction. When folded flat, it acts as a clip, which can attach to a belt, shirt, jacket or bag for hands-free illumination. (It works great for visibility in a blizzard, although long-term exposure may test the limits of its IPX4 weather resistance rating.) The Mini also comes with a bike clamp so you can easily slot it in as a tail- or headlight for safety and illumination. The output provides various types and levels of light: white (dimmable), white pinspot, red (for night vision) and a white or red strobe.

Radio Flyer’s Tesla Model S for kids hits the sidewalk in May

Thanks to Radio Flyer, your kid can have their very own Tesla Model S this spring. The toymaker teamed up with Elon Musk & Co. to create a version of the all-electric sedan for younger drivers. The Tesla Model S for Kids (catchy name, for sure) retains its EV roots by packing in Flight Speed lithium-ion battery tech. The feature not only increases range — er, playtime — but also makes quick work of the recharging process (as little as 3 hours). The battery is also removable, so you can keep a spare charged up. In fact, the charging unit itself looks an awful lot like those used for the full-size cars, and it connects to the kids version in a similar fashion.

There’s actually a lot of realistic details borrowed from the highway version. The kids model features working headlights, standard Model S paint schemes and a sound system that will accommodate a mobile device for some road trip tunes. What’s more, the children’s option has two speed settings that top out at 3 MPH and 6 MPH respectively. Unfortunately, there’s no word on autonomous features or that Ludicrous Mode. What we do know is the standard trim Model S for Kids will set you back $500, and it’s set to ship in May. For now, you can take a peek of the vehicle in action down below or mosey on over to the source link to sort out a pre-order.

Via: Electrek

Source: Radio Flyer

UK pilot union wants laser pens classified as offensive weapons

Following an incident on Sunday in which a New York-bound Virgin Atlantic flight out of Heathrow had to be diverted when the first officer was blinded by a laser beam, the British Airline Pilots Association has called for the devices to be reclassified as offensive weapons. “This is not an isolated incident,” British Airline Pilots Association’s general secretary Jim McAuslan told BBC News. “Aircraft are attacked with lasers at an alarming rate and with lasers with ever-increasing strength.”

In fact, the UK Civil Aviation Authority has logged nearly 9,000 such incidents between 2009 and 2015 — 20 of which occurred on a single evening last November. The UK already has laws on its books that prohibits shining lasers at passing aircraft, however the pilots union doesn’t think those statutes go far enough. Instead, the union is now lobbying to make even possessing one an offense on par with carrying a concealed knife. There’s no word on when or if Parliament will take up the issue.

Source: BBC

Monopoly money is no more in the new Ultimate Banking edition

Hasbro has released a new edition of Monopoly called Ultimate Banking, that should help keep familial infighting to a minimum. Instead of paper money, which can easily be laundered or stolen when you aren’t looking, this new edition uses debit cards. It also does away with the easily-corrupted Banker position, replacing the human with an electronic card reader (aka an ATM).

Both the players’ debit cards and the property cards themselves will be machine readable. So, when purchasing property, players will first scan the property’s bar code and then their own cash card. If they have enough money for the transaction, the funds will automatically be deducted from their account. Funds can also be transferred between players, if necessary. Removing the human influence should certainly help keep the financial shenanigans to a minimum — just hold on to those debit cards. Monopoly Ultimate Banking will hit store shelves later this summer for $25.

Via: SlashGear

Source: Hasbro

Researchers want to use wasps to improve UAV flight plans

After spending the past decade studying ground-nesting wasps a team of researchers from the Australian National University believe that they’ve unlocked the secret to the insects’ uncanny homing abilities — one they hope can be applied to future UAV development. Modern, autonomous UAVs have to be laden with high resolution cameras, GPS radios and a slew of other high-tech gadgetry in order to know where they are and where they’re going. Wasps, on the other hand, only need their compound eyes and a daily refresher flight.

The ANU team used high-speed cameras to track the wasps eye movements and, from that data, figure out where the insects were looking. “The learning and homing abilities of wasps make them smarter than anything humans know how to build,” ANU Professor Jochen Zeil said in a statement. “Roboticists look to replace expensive high resolution cameras and reduce power consumption without losing information that is crucial for visual navigation and our research could help with this.” The research should also help biologists better understand the mental mechanisms involved in the insects’ navigational skills.

Via: Slash Gear

Source: Australian National University

Bop It! 2016 is more complicated than you remember

If the return of The X-Files and Full House to TV wasn’t enough of an indication that pop culture has a thing for the Clinton years right now, then maybe news that Bop It is coming back will change that. But unlike the model of yore that only demanded you “bop it,” “twist it” and “pull it,” this one has “sing it” in addition to 21st century tasks including “selfie it” for certain modes. Naturally.

A prepared statement (PDF) out of this year’s Toy Fair says that there’s a trio of different games built into the device including Classic for Bop It! purists. Action mixes it up by utilizing on-board accelerometers and other sensors. Of course, there’s also the sound-based Beat Box mode which Hasbro touts is for Bop It! experts.

Unlike pricey vaporizers that also play Simon, this flashback game will only set you back $20 when it releases this fall. At that price, maybe Uber will add them to even more back seats to distract late-night fares who are more than a few sheets to the wind.

Source: Hasbro (PDF)

Johns Hopkins grows tiny brains in petri dishes for lab testing

Most new drugs tested on mice don’t work on humans, because we’re “not 150-pound rats,” says Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School’s Dr. Thomas Hartung. He and his team believe the “mini-brains” they’ve designed and grown in the lab are better test subjects for drug development, since they’re derived from human cells. These mini-brains are truly tiny at 350 micrometers in diameter, or about the size of a housefly.

To make them, the scientists reprogrammed adult skin cells into embryonic stem cells, which were then grown for a couple of months. That was long enough for them to develop four types of neurons and two support cells (astrocytes and oligodendrocytes). The team then tested the mini-brains by placing them on an electrode array and listening to the neurons’ electrical communication as the drugs were added.

Since they’re so small, researchers can grow a hundred of test subjects in a single petri dish, and each batch can produce hundreds to thousands of identical copies. Other institutions like Brown University developed in-vitro brain cell clumps in the past, but Hartung says these ensure accurate results:

We don’t have the first brain model nor are we claiming to have the best one. But this is the most standardized one. And when testing drugs, it is imperative that the cells being studied are as similar as possible to ensure the most comparable and accurate results.

Hartung is in the midst of building a company called ORGANOME in hopes of starting the mass production of his mini-brains by this year. He’s also hoping that labs across the world adopt the practice of making them, because we can only “replace animal testing on a large scale” — for brain-related research anyway — if using brain models becomes the norm. His creation has other potential applications, as well. By using skin cells from people afflicted with certain diseases, scientists can also grow tiny brains to study Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and autism.

Via: Motherboard

Source: Johns Hopkins

BMW iPerformance plug-in hybrids coming in July

BMW obviously has a long-term plug-in vehicle plan. Like megacity long. First hinted at in 2008 and finally announced in 2009, the Bavarian’s EV march has gone through the MINI E, the ActiveE, and then the i3 and i8. There’s got to be a detailed timeline chart taped to an office wall in Munich somewhere that we would love to get a glimpse of, but instead we just get bits and pieces of where BMW’s going next. At least now know the next phase: iPerformance.

The new iPerformance models will be vehicles from the core BMW line-up that have plug-in hybrid technology that was first used in the i3 or i8. This technology includes the, “electric motors, battery cells and electronic control systems” and the first models to use some of the i Brand guts will be the plug-in hybrid versions of the 7 Series, like the new BMW 740e iPerformance. BMW is also going to throw in some of the now-standard blue accents that you might be familiar with form the i3 and i8, in case you don’t recognize the outlet panel.

As for the continuation of the i vehicles (currently just that two-model line-up), we still don’t know anything other than the rumors of an i5 or i6 or who knows what. You can read the full release about iPerformance here.

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Source: BMW