rubber

Shark Dash is another in a long line of Angry Birds clones, but offers enough variation in gameplay that it will appeal to any physics puzzle addict.

Like many sling-shot games, the goal with Shark Dash is to pull back, then fling your hero (in this case, a cute shark) to collect or destroy items in as few shots as possible. Also like Angry Birds, the storyline is simple: the evil rubber duckies have stolen Sharkee's girlfriend, Sally, and now Sharkee is exacting revenge while taking out the rubber duckies that continue to taunt him. Sound familiar? It's … Read more

Calm down, already. NASA swears that the Earth absolutely, definitely will not be annihilated by a massive flaming belch from the sun this year.

But just in case you're still a little worried, you'll no doubt be reassured to know the august space agency is holding nothing back in its efforts to study the sun's activity in 2012. In fact, it's even gone so far as to enlist the help of a very, very serious group of high school students, equipped with that most serious of scientific instruments: the rubber chicken.

Yes, students of Bishop Union High in Bishop, Calif. -- along with their mentor, Science@NASA's Tony Phillips, and a group of fifth-grade assistants -- recently launched a rubber chicken into the stratosphere during the most intense solar radiation storm since 2003.

Don't post a nasty, budget-related comment just yet, though. This wasn't any old astrorubberchicken; this was Camilla -- the mascot of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory -- and she was wearing a specially knitted spacesuit complete with high-tech sensors for measuring radiation. She was also accompanied by a specially modified lunchbox equipped with four cameras, two GPS trackers, a cryogenic thermometer, two-dozen sunflower seeds, and seven insects.… Read more

With almost 550,000 active apps in the iTunes App Store, you get plenty of variation, and one developer continues to release games that are downright silly.

Many iPhone gamers will probably remember Justin Smith's Enviro-Bear 2010 (99 cents) from Captain Games. When the game came out in 2009, our Mac and iOS freelance reviewer, Paul Hughes, started the review by saying, "Enviro-Bear 2010 is part game, part joke, part art piece, and part game-design experiment." In Enviro-Bear 2010, the premise is that you are a bear getting ready to hibernate and you must drive a car … Read more

From 1989 to 2001, a company called Used Rubber USA operated a retail store, offering cool gear to city-dwelling hipsters, on the corner of Fillmore and Haight streets in San Francisco. The company still turns old tires into book bags, wallets or belts and other merchandise--now online only.

Recycling used tires isn't a new idea, and now a study shows that most auto repair shops recycle tires rather than send them off to a landfill.

The organization Car Care Council has been urging auto repair shops to recycle more vehicle parts and engine fluids, in a consumer education campaign … Read more

Smells are strongly tied in with memories. There's the aroma of buttered popcorn from your first date with your spouse. The fragrance of futility as your beloved old car finally coughed and died in a cloud of smoke. Ah, it's like it happened only yesterday.

Now you can harness the power of perfume with Whiffers, rubber wristbands aimed at the student population. Think of them as silly bands for academics.

Alliance Rubber Company lays claim to inventing the world's first imprinted wrist bands, so you can thank those folks for the gazillions of colors and causes being worn as accessories.

You may soon start noticing a faint odor of lavender, peppermint, or spearmint wafting from wrists. Alliance suggests using the peppermint to boost concentration and the lavender to relax and curb test anxiety.… Read more

Talk about the rubber hitting the road. Researchers from Princeton and Caltech have come up with a power-generating rubber material that could harness walking and other movement to charge electronic devices.

The material is made from nanoribbons composed of lead zirconate titanate, or PZT, a ceramic substance that's "piezoelectric," meaning it generates an electrical voltage when pressure is applied. The "piezo-rubber chips" are embedded in clear silicone rubber sheets that produce electricity when flexed.

The scientists--who detail their findings in the new issue of Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society--say the rubber sheets could one day appear in shoes that power cell phones and other mobile electronic devices as the user walks or runs.

What's more, "the new electricity-harvesting devices could be implanted in the body to perpetually power medical devices, and the body wouldn't reject them," said Michael McAlpine, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton who led the project.

For example, the biocompatible material could be placed next to a person's lungs and utilize breathing motions to power pacemakers, the scientists say. That could reduce the need for surgery to replace batteries in the device.

We've heard of other gadgets that can be powered by kinetic energy, including the Dance Charge, which is strapped around the arm and powered, as the name suggests, by dancing.… Read more

I'm sure you've heard of a rubber tree plant, but have you also heard about the new rubber tree tire?

Researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) have developed a tire made from plant materials combined with rubber that offers several benefits over conventionally manufactured tires.

The rubber composite contains microcrystalline cellulose as an additive, a material that can be made from a wide variety of plant materials, instead of the usual carbon black or silica typically used.

Manufacturing tires from a renewable plant source could be less expensive to produce than tires using carbon black, which is made from oil, … Read more

It's day twenty-seven of our relationship. The Pre and I are getting along just swimmingly and I fall in love a little more each day...

I'm not the super geeky girl who can tell you how to install homebrew apps or hack your camera's default settings, but I've been around electronics long enough to tell you, the Palm Pre is one rockin' hot gadget.

I've been very impressed with the quality and sturdiness of the Pre. I'd originally looked at purchasing the Centro but was advised against it. Too many people told me it … Read more

I went shopping for my little brother's birthday last weekend, and I never thought I'd say it, but toys are way too complicated. In addition to having the most complicated packaging ever, all the action figures and playsets look like they were teleported out of some dystopian future. I really do miss the days when the imagination and roleplaying were the only accessories necessary to have a fun time. Which is precisely the reason why I've selected designer/craftsman Andy Mangold's Rubber Bandit modern take on the classic rubber band gun to show off today.

The … Read more