One giant boing for mankind

In the wake of my recent posting on the insanity of jetpacks, Brian Corcoran pointed out yet another example of innovative technology designed to augment human abilities, and break every single bone in our bodies: The Springwalker. Pictured above, it’s a spring-powered exoskeleton that lets you boing along at high speed; in a demonstration video, the Springwalker looks and sounds eerily like one of those shuffling, Ewok-vulnerable AT-ST walkers from Star Wars. (Yes, I just wrote the phrase “Ewok-vulnerable”.) As the inventors told Fortune:

“Nature spent millions of years engineering us as running creatures. It will take some doing to better that — but we’ll soon be running at 30 miles per hour,” says NASA physicist John Dick, who co-invented this walking device at his Claremont, California, startup company in his spare time. “This is just a clumsy prototype, but it will give rise to a whole family of enhanced-gait machines the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

I gotta admit, it looks like a lot of fun — but you’d be picking road-gravel out of your larynx if you did a face-plant on one of these things.

(Thanks to Brian for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson