Researchers at the University of Michigan have created a prosthesis that makes walking much easier on amputees than current options. The trick: an artificial foot that recycles the kinetic energy generated by walking. The device works by mimicking the natural push-off of a human ankle, using a microprocessor to control the device and capture the energy normally dissipated by the leg: In tests on subjects walking with an artificially-impaired ankle, a conventional prosthesis reduced ankle push-off work and increased net metabolic energy expenditure by 23% compared to normal walking. Energy recycling restored ankle push-off to normal and reduced the net metabolic energy penalty to 14%. That means less cumbersome dragging of an artificial limb and a more natural walking sensation. It also only requires a small battery to operate, running off of less than one watt of power

Detective’s Notebook , January 24: It’s raining. Again. Always raining. Hard. Thunder, lightning. Sounds angry.

We don’t know about you, but back in 1983 we were still playing in the mud with sticks and learning how to read. Frog Design, on the other hand, well, they were busy creating zany gadget prototypes. The company — which helped create such august products as the Apple IIc (which was unleashed in 1984) — also worked on a tablet pc for Apple around that same time, and its recently let slip some photos of what might have been. The tablet you see in the photos (there’s another after the break) was called Bashful, and it’s a pretty slim character considering its birth date, boasting a full physical keyboard and stylus to boot. Several prototypes of this little lover were made, including one with a disk drive and even one with a phone

We don’t know about you, but back in 1983 we were still playing in the mud with sticks and learning how to read. Frog Design, on the other hand, well, they were busy creating zany gadget prototypes. The company — which helped create such august products as the Apple IIc (which was unleashed in 1984) — also worked on a tablet pc for Apple around that same time, and its recently let slip some photos of what might have been. The tablet you see in the photos (there’s another after the break) was called Bashful, and it’s a pretty slim character considering its birth date, boasting a full physical keyboard and stylus to boot. Several prototypes of this little lover were made, including one with a disk drive and even one with a phone.

In today’s Remainders, the future! The soldiers of tomorrow get a new battery for their exoskeletons; a 2012 Olympic Stadium built from recycled weapons; a discovery showing that a big brain can indicate a great gamer, and more. Hulk For Hours The HULC exoskeleton is supposed to make you strong like the Hulk. Or strong like a creature with an exoskeleton. Whichever. We were fortunate enough to try the HULC out a few months ago, so we were pretty excited to hear that a new fuel-cell battery from Protonex gives HULC-wearers super strength for up to three hours

Still drooling over yesterday’s Adamo XPS pics? I am. But it could have been a very different machine. Early prototypes had LCD touchpads (similar to notebooks like Fujitsu’s N7010 and Sharp’s Mebius ), and even a capacitive-touch keyboard. Take a look: Though running certain apps in a tiny window could actually be pretty useful, Dell ultimately felt the cost didn’t justify the gimmickry

I was pretty skeptical about Kohjinsha’s dual 10.1-incher when I first wrote about it , but it actually looks decently engineered in this video. The second display simply slides out behind the first, like on GScreen’s Spacebook and Lenovo’s W700 . It’s slightly thicker than a normal netbook, but the insides are pretty much the same: Windows 7, 1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor, maximum 4GB RAM, and 160GB hard disk. How battery life would be affected remains to be seen.

I was pretty skeptical about Kohjinsha’s dual 10.1-incher when I first wrote about it , but it actually looks decently engineered in this video. The second display simply slides out behind the first, like on GScreen’s Spacebook and Lenovo’s W700 . It’s slightly thicker than a normal netbook, but the insides are pretty much the same: Windows 7, 1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor, maximum 4GB RAM, and 160GB hard disk. How battery life would be affected remains to be seen.

This is the acoustic hyperlens developed by the Xiang Zhang research group. Think of it as a radar dish for sound waves. Put into practice, it can increase performance of ultrasound baby-spotting and sonar submarine sighting by 8x. [ EurekAlert , popsci ]

I’m still not sure about this dual-screen laptop thing, but it’s interesting to see more concepts come out of the woodwork. The latest is Kohjinsha’s dual 10.1-inch screen netbook prototype, which is on display at the CEATEC show in Japan. Like Lenovo W700 , one screen can slide behind the other if you don’t need to use both. It’s slightly thicker than a normal netbook, but the insides are pretty much the same: Windows 7, 1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor, maximum 4GB RAM, and 160GB hard disk. How battery life would be affected remains to be seen. Kohjinsha didn’t say if it plans to actually start selling the concept (or how much it would cost), so if dual-screens are your thing, you best hope gScreen gets its act together