Deciding for gifts to give to your friends or loved ones can either be a pleasant or a stressful experience, or just prove to be a chore. Of course, that all depends if you want to put some effort and thought into your decision-making. If you need a jumpstarter for gift ideas, then check out the goods in the full article!

"It must be the shoes," as some would say to explain something extraordinary. In the case of VectraSense Technologies, however, that just might be the case. The company has launched what is called the Verb For Shoe "Smart Shoe Experience" - high-tech footwear. More on that in the full article after the jump.

The results of a 20-year old project started by the Boston Retinal Implant Project may soon allow degenerative blind patients to once again see their surroundings. A new bio-electronic optical implant is currently in the works and should be ready to roll out within a couple of years. You can check out the details of this technological breakthrough in our full article.

Even the most harmless-looking of appliances are not safe from getting the "terror" tag, it seems. Rebecca Stern and Rees Shad over at Sternlab have announced the release of a collaborative project they've just finished - the Declarative Lamp Project. The result of their work is a solar-powered lamp designed to say "I am not a bomb."

This peculiar invention was inspired by the infamous Boston Mooninite scare of 2007. During the said incident, several LED advertisement placards promoting the upcoming Aqua-Teen Hunger Force movie were mistaken by local police for Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Here's a video explaining the duo's project a little further:

These lamps are currently on display at the Kingston Peace Park. They are part of the ongoing Kingston Sculpture Biennial (NY) that will continue until October 20. For the guys interested in replicating this project (and want to keep their own lawn items off police suspicion), Stern and Shad were also kind enough to host an instruction guide on their site. Just click on the read link if you're interested... anybody care for talking garden gnomes?

It may look like R2D2, but this new electric-powered chariot just might be the new thing in law enforcement, if its tests prove promising.

Officially unveiled this October 14  at the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention in Boston, the T3 Series personal mobility was developed by Segway rival T3 Motion as a new light, agile and environment-friendly means for the boys in blue to get around. It sports a zero-degree turn radius and intuitive controls, much like its 2-wheeled competitor.

The whole thing runs on a battery pack that is rechargeable via an electrical outlet within 4 to 6 hours. In an emergency, the pack can be swapped with a fresh set. The packs will power this scooter along at a brisk 25 mph. Other features include integrated LED lights, a lockable glove box,  sirens and an optional GPS system. The battery and charger set cost somewhere between $1,200 to $1,800 depending on the model.

While it's still in the test stage, we thought this'd be a good addition for the average fuzz, all the more as we see traffic becoming commonplace in most major cities. Then again, we'd love to see what a police chase video would look like using this rig.

A group of three students submitted an interesting paper at the 4th Int'l. Symposium on Non-photorealistic Rendering and Animation (NPAR) 2006 entitled "Empathic Painting". Maria Shugrina and Margrit Betke from University of Boston and John Collomosse from University of Bath are all from the Computer Science department.

Emphatic painting is "an interactive painterly rendering whose appearance adapts in real time to reflect the perceived emotional state of the viewer". It is an experiment that uses human emotional states as a high level parameter that is set to affect the output of artistic rendering algorithms. It utilizes a suite of Computer Vision algorithms that is capable of recognising users' facial expressions through the detection of facial action units derived from the FACS scheme.

The algorithms reads your emotional state and display a painting that represents it. Here are some snapshots that indicate despair and cheerful emotional states and their respective paintings.

Despair:


Cheerful:

Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston claims to have developed a layer of protein made from genetically altered, light-sensitive microbe proteins which could store up to 50K GB or 50 terabytes. The light-activated protein, found in Halobacterium salinarum membrane, is also known as bacteriorhodopsin (bR). It captures and stores sunlight and converts it to chemical energy. When light shines on bR, it is converted to a series of intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and colour before returning to its 'ground state'.

By modifying the DNA that produces the bR protein, Prof Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues were able to produce an intermediate that normally last for a few days to lasts for more than several years. They also engineered the bR protein to be more stable at the high temperatures generated by storing terabytes of data. They said the new technology will ultimately pave the way for a binary system to store data. "What this will do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," said Renugopalakrishnan.

Prof Renugopalakrishnan believes the protein layer could allow DVDs and other external devices to store terabytes of information.The new protein-based DVD will have advantages over current optical storage devices including next-gen DVD wannabe Bluray and HD-DVD because the information is stored in proteins that are only a few nanometres across.

"The protein-based DVDs will be able to store at least 20 times more than the Blue-ray and eventually even up to 50,000 gigabytes (about 50 terabytes) of information. You can pack literally thousands and thousands of those proteins on a media like a DVD, a CD or a film or whatever," he said at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane.