New Technologies

Earphones with a difference

They may come with a hefty price tag but these earphones reportedly take sound onto a new level. Denon's latest AH-C751 earphones cost £150 but the "Metal Bullet" design uses ultra-rigid machined aluminum that does not resonate, unlike plastic housings used in less expensive products. Denon's "Acoustic Optimiser" balances the sound pressure before and behind the diaphragm to reportedly give greater dynamics and fast transient response. All the contacts are made of gold, as is the 3.5 mm plug. They come with three pairs of ear adapters, a 0.8 m extension cord and rigid travel case.

For more information visit www.denon.co.uk/site/specials/xspace/index.html

Smart way to stop you losing things

There's now a smart way to stop losing things. The Smart Finder is a remote control device with four colour coded receivers which can be attached to pretty much anything — keys, wallets, mobile phones, hand bags, TV remotes... even your pets, children and HPLC columns! The Smart Finder has a 20 m range, an 85 dB alarm and radio signals that transmit through walls.

For more information visit smart-finder.co.uk/

Breakthrough product will be music to your ears

The Intempo Rebel allows you to listen to new music recorded from the radio free-of-charge. Rebel is a novel music sampling system that records the most-played tracks from any FM station then saves these as MP3 files. Moreover, the saved files have back-to-back music as DJ chats and adverts have been cut out. To start you need to leave it running for 12 hours or so to enable the system to get accustomed to the station. After this it'll start recognizing songs and digitally recording them. Once complete, simply download to your iPod or MP3 player.

For more information visit www.intempodigital.com

Novel way to clean-up desktops

There's now a quick and easy way to cleaning your desktop. The handy USB vacuum cleaner is powered by your computer — just plug it in to your USB port and get those crumbs and dust balls off your desk!

For more information visit www.red5.co.uk/

A robot you can control from anywhere in the world!

Made by Meccano, Spyke is the first robot to be built that can be controlled from a computer through a WiFi connection. So, wherever you are in this world you can control your Spyke over the Internet! Moreover it comes with a video camera, a microphone, a loudspeaker and two motors. The technology means this Robot can move, watch, hear, speak, take pictures, as well as having light and sound effects and record video and sound. It can even be a telephone as it can be used as a VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phone and webcam and is compatible with Skype 3.0. So, with Spyke, you can watch and experiment in another laboratory, record events from that experiment and also observe who else is watching.

For more information visit www.meccano.com/