While I was at CES last January, I passed a booth for Cyberdyne. I saw that and wondered: “don’t they know that this is the organization that ended the world in the Terminator movies?”
Just to let you know, this company isn’t making Skynet, but it is making some serious exoskeletons that you see here known as the HAL-5.
Cyberdyne isn’t stealing from another science fiction film with the name HAL-5. HAL stands for Hybrid Assistive Limb, and the company demonstrated a lower-body suit that is meant for use by health care professionals and factory workers to help with heavy lifting. You can watch the video after the jump.
This weekend, I’m going to be sparking up the grill with the Looftlighter, an electric firestarter that looks like an oversized curling iron, sounds like a hair dryer, and gets a good-sized pile of charcoal briquettes ready to grill in just a few minutes.
I’ll admit I was skeptical about the $80 Looftlighter, which comes from Sweden and whose name, I believe, must be pronounced with as much Nordic accent as you can muster. It’s basically an air blower tucked behind a heating element. The idea is that it delivers a focused blast of hot air out the front. It’s hardly the “flamethrower” I’d been led to believe it was, however, and an initial test in the Wired offices proved that it was incapable of doing much more than charring the edges of a business card.
