Sports

You're biking along, minding your own business. You reach an amazing downhill stretch. You pick up speed. You're really cranking along. Oh no! A hippopotamus wanders onto the trail! You swerve and end up faceplanting in the bushes.

Don't fear, your helmet will dial your emergency contacts and give your location. The ICEdot Crash Sensor is a stick-on sensor that mounts onto your helmet. It connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth. When it senses an impact, it sounds an alarm and starts a countdown clock on the crash sensor app. You have a set amount of time to turn it off.… Read more

Collecting baseball player autographs is a time-honored tradition, one that goes hand-in-hand with the sport itself. Before and after any Major League Baseball game, fans will crowd the stands above the dugouts with pens, baseballs, and photographs in hand, waiting for their favorite players to emerge.

But fans who don't have access to a nearby stadium or the players have to settle for collecting autographs from memorabilia shops or Web sites like eBay. Enter Egraphs, a new online service where fans pay a fee for a personalized autograph and MP3 voice recording. It's the unique, one-on-one interaction between … Read more

Climbing walls have come a long way since phys ed lecturer Don Robinson glued real rocks to a hallway wall at Leeds University in 1964. Just down the street from my office, walls made of plywood reinforced with steel frames sport dozens of different types of holds and graded "problems" -- perfect for staying in shape during the rainy winter months in Portland.

But not everyone lives within walking distance of an indoor climbing hub, so Munich-based design studio Lunar Europe thought up a pretty sleek art piece that doubles as a climbing wall and syncs up with an iPhone app.… Read more

Great Britain's Olympic team has been given a friendly reminder to clamp down on athletes wearing the wrong brand of headphones, after medal-chasing Olympians were spied sporting non-sponsor Beats by Dr. Dre cans.

The bass-heavy Dr. Dre brand shipped batches of its headphones to hotels where British athletes were staying, the Associated Press reports.

The Beats brand is not an official sponsor of the London 2012 Olympics, and as such officials were none too pleased about the company's publicity ploy. British Olympic Association spokesperson Darryl Seibel said team leaders have been reminded of "the importance of protecting … Read more

I haven't tried doing an ollie on a skateboard in years, but this skate park in France looks like one of my teenage dreams.

Korean artist Koo Jeong-a has created a glowing collection of tunnels, ramps, and bowls that looks somewhat like a Tatooine ranch at night and reduces the need for harsh lighting.

The Otro park is fashioned of phosphorescent concrete. … Read more

Forget about the ripped-and-rugged sprinters and shot-putters, bring on the gold-medal geeks.

The opening ceremony of this summer's London Olympics obliged that sentiment, as Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee got the star treatment during the extravaganza.… Read more

A clever electric bike, which won a design competition last fall for creating the best urban utility bike, is coming to market via Kickstarter today.

The Faraday, designed by the Palo Alto, Calif., design consultancy Ideo and Santa Cruz, Calif., bike-maker Rock Lobster Custom Cycles, took home top honors in the Oregon Manifest creative collaboration challenge, which CNET followed. The competition paired global design firms with small, handcrafted bike builders to create a bike for city living.

That success generated enough interest that Adam Vollmer, who led the design efforts for Ideo, left the firm to launch a company to … Read more

We at CNET of course believe in the importance of science education -- and if going on a 1,000-mile bike ride with a life-size skeleton as a passenger helps more students get one, why, all the better.

Kadhim Shubber, a physics undergraduate at the high-ranking science-based Imperial College London, is currently riding the length of the British Isles to raise money for his school's Rector's Scholarship Fund. It's a long and sometimes tedious journey, but Shubber has constant company in the form of King Arthur, an artificial skeleton riding on the back of his Claud Butler racing tandem. … Read more

There's a retrograde little sports event happening in England this week called Wimbledon.

The organizers still force players to wear predominantly white clothing. Yes, even on the practice courts.

And yet, way back in 1980, Wimbledon began employing Cyclops technology to make service line calls.

Meanwhile, soccer (or football, as most of the world knows it) contented itself with sad little men carrying flags, often somehow blind to balls crossing the goal line.

But that perhaps will soon be no more. For the BBC reports that the International Football Association Board has finally decided that it should experiment with goal-line technology, starting in December at the slightly insignificant FIFA Club World Cup (not to be confused with the World Cup).… Read more