Everything is electronic, and everything is rechargeable these days. So, er, why not ice cubes? Dave and Calvin Laituri from Wayland, Massachusetts, developed these stainless steel pieces that act just like ice cubes, and ensures your drink cools down to the temperature you want without any risk of it getting watered down. They’ve called it Pucs. What a name. It’s now being funded like crazy by thirsty folks to the tune of close to $60,000 — almost 24 times that of the $2,500 amount the Laituris asked for.

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A thermometer measures temperature. Sure, but it can do so much more. New York-based Kinsa, which aims to create the world’s first real-time map of human health, has given the thermometer a complete overhaul with its Kinsa Smart Thermometer.

The redesigned thermometer leverages on the connectivity of the smartphone to go beyond measuring your body heat — it can also track the health situation in your neighborhood, update you on what illnesses are going around, as well as hazard a quick forecast as to the infection you might have caught and give advice on what you can do about it.

Also in development are features such as a one-touch call nurse function, as well as the ability to dispatch photos and videos over quickly to your doctor. Kinsa is now appealing for funds via a Indiegogo campaign that will end in mid-June.

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Minneapolis-based Spark Devices, a team of engineers, designers and makers, have been working on the Spark Core, an open source Arduino-compatible device that connects the Internet to any hardware using Wifi. It’s a little board that looks more like a bug than the powerhouse it is: it has a 72 MHz ARM Cortex M3, a Wi-Fi module, wireless programming, pin outs and peripherals.

The team were so dedicated, they relocated to Shenzhen, China, to develop Spark Core under hardware accelerator program HAXLR8R. From the looks of it, the Spark Core is functionally cool — for instance, it can help you build anything from a wireless motion detector to a fridge magnet that displays tweets. The Kickstarter campaign is still ongoing but response has been crazy, with over $240,000 pledged so far, well ahead of the $10,000 fundraising goal. The project will be funded on June 1.

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A food scale that’s smart enough to track what you’re eating and dough out the exact nutritional information for the food you weigh and cook? That’s the Smart Food Scale, a Bluetooth-enabled food scale that comes with a companion iOS app.

You can use it as a normal scale and measure out portions with ease instead of using these pesky measuring cups and spoons.

Next, you can use the app and keep track of what goes into your food at every step along the way, so you can then view the nutritional information — handily retrieved from USDA — for the entire dish at the end. Even cooler: you can prioritize your nutritional information to go beyond calories and fat and track, say, your intake of Vitamin B or iron. Sounds good to us.

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The Cloud is a great place to store all your precious data, but that option, as the folks of Space Monkey tell us, will set you back by over $800 a year for every TB’s worth — plus it will take take months or years (that’s forever in Internet time) to push 1TB of data to the Cloud. So, in steps Space Monkey, a device that offers a complete Cloud storage subscription service at $10 per month for 1 TB storage.

It works a little differently from most Cloud services: instead of housing your data in data centers, Space Money provides a local device on your own network so you can transfer data 15 to 60 times faster than other services like Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive or iCloud.

It also purports to be resistant to Mother Nature outages: it splits up your files into pieces after encrypting them, then spreads out the security-locked pieces to geographically diverse locations, similar to the architecture used for email. The simplicity is great too — Space Monkey provides a folder on your desktop where you can upload your stuff to, and from there, it continues running in the background, encrypting files and making secure copies to store in the network.

The project has clearly caught the imagination of data-hungry geeks out there: it has already tripled its $100,000 funding goal on Kickstarter.

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Listed as one of the hottest inventions this year, according to Webmpires, Silent Velcro is a new product that everyone will want. The new concept lets you avoid those awkward moments of creating a painfully loud ripping noise the next time you go to open your velcro bag or take off your strap shoes. How is this possible?

Well, instead of working with tiny curved hooks, the teeth of the velcro all face the same way, making it easy for them to slide apart silently.

Now, never get caught in the middle of a painfully silent situation that leaves you with the uncomfortable dilemma of breaking the silence or not.  ilent velcro is due to be released to the public this summer and starts at only five cents per piece.

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Ridogulous Labs has developed the Smart Collar, a dog collar that works with a smartphone app and a proprietary algorithm to ensure that your canine companion reaps the benefits of today’s technology with you too. There’s GPS in it, which allows you to find your dog if he’s missing and comes with brain training and a library of interactive games for your dog to improve his cognitive abilities, be more obedient and handle higher level tasks.

There’s even a mobile invisible fence function so you can set up an dog containment zone without actual fences. We’re not sure how that’d work but it would definitely come in handy.

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If the new patent from South Korean electronic giant Samsung is anything to go by, we might all one day be able to bend TV screens to make the viewing angle display a whole lot better. Using infrared or Bluetooth, the remote control can transmit commands for the flexible display panel to rotate at an angle, bend a portion in a specific direction and degree.

Accordingly, the remote control will also come with menus, command keys and buttons to select the above. Wow. Now we no longer have to adjust our position on the couch, we can adjust the television itself.

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I’ve always had a small, nagging fear in the back of my mind that a monster meteorite might splinter the earth into a million pieces. But when I step back and think it through, there actually have been a whole lot of meteorite strikes. And the earth is still just fine. Thanks to the smarts of Carlo Zapponi, we can now get the animated visualization of all meteorites that have ever hit the earth.

That’s a lot of meteorites, about 1,042 meteorites in total. Zapponi is a data visualization designer at Nokia and obviously has a passion for astrological phenomenon. This animation is a great way to get used to the idea of alien rocks pelting our earth on a regular basis.

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When systems coordinator John Gallagher tried to make the perfect Long Island Ice Tea for his wife six years ago, he thought there had to be a easier way to mix drinks accurately all the time. Now in 2013, he has developed The Barman, an elegant little box you can put your glass down on and start pouring fast and furious accurately, thanks to its differential weighing technology more commonly found in most commercial-grade postage machines.

It also has the ability to measure just the components of the drink and exclude things that aren’t part of the drink, like ice, glasses and drink shakers. Once the Barman is powered on, you can select your drink and drink size from the complementing smartphone app — which has a ready database of hundreds of drink mixes — and transit this information via Bluetooth to the Barman.

From there, you can use the progress bar on the Barman as a guide to pour in the different ingredients accordingly. Whee, perfect drinks for bartending dummies. The Barman has already reached its $50,000 funding goal on Kickstarter, well ahead of its May 25 deadline.

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Think of lighting indoors, and bulbs naturally come to mind. Now a three-man team from San Francisco are turning these bulbs on their heads and turning to plants as light solutions in their place. That’s right, we’re talking about real plants that glow. It’s good news for those with green fingers.

Using synthetic biology techniques, bioluminescence genes are inserted into Arabidopsis, a member of the mustard family, to create plants that emit an intense glow. In the initial phase, the printed DNA will be inserted into a special type of bacteria which can then insert its DNA into the plant when the flowers of the plant are dipped into the bacteria-containing solution. Eventually the tested-to-perfection gene sequence will be iinserted into the plant using a gene gun.

What’s extra impressive is that the team have declared that all output, such as the DNA constructs, will be released open source. The DNA designs for one are already publicly available to anyone. As the team pointed out in their blog, a project of this nature would traditionally be done in a research institute or with the help of investors and hinder progress with so many strings attached — which is why they are securing funding via Kickstarter instead.

You can get a batch of glowing plant seeds for pledging US$40 on their Kickstarter page and an actual glowing plant for US$150. Sorry, if you’re thinking about eating these light plants, they are inedible.

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Wow. MaKey MaKey is an easy-to-use kit that lets you hook up anything (well, anything that can conduct a bit of electricity) to your computer using alligator keys and cables, and then hit these random objects as computer keys or mouse buttons. The power is yours to do this will cost you just US$49.99. If you understand your geek stuff, the MaKey MaKey is really a printed circuit board with an ATMega32u4 microcontroller running Arduino Leonardo firmware that uses the Human Interface Device (HID) protocol to communicate with your computer and send keypresses, mouse clicks, and mouse movements to it.

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Gamma Ray bursts were first stumbled upon back in the 1960s. They built telescopes to pick up on secret thermonuclear tests by the Soviets and Chinese, but they also began picking up on Gamma Rays generated from huge explosions in outer-space. Though this confounded scientists at the start, they now accept that these explosions go off about once a day.

Now, with the help of NASA satellites, Swift mission, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, we have images of the biggest gamma ray burst ever recorded. This vivid burst in the constellation Leo was so large that scientists now have much more information to study.

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Would you respond to advice given from a box of tissues? S Shyam Sundar of Media Effects Research Laboratory wants to know just how comfortable the general public is with talking objects. So he set up a study that involved a plain box of tissues, some lab workers, and a group of normal people as test subjects.  

While the test subjects were under the impression they were only participating in a cognitive study, they watched as a tissue box responded to sneezes with ’bless you’, ’here’, take a tissue’ and ‘take care’. Though a tissue box doesn’t look like a robot or smart phone, most participants responded positively to the small talking box.

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Last Friday, the first solar eclipse of the year was visible to a lucky few in Western Australia and some Pacific Islands. The unique celestial event created a ‘ring of fire’ pattern as the moon came between us earthlings and the sun. Though it is dangerous to look straight at an eclipse, audiences were provided with special glasses to watch it all happen. And if you weren’t lucky enough to be in a place to view it in person, Slooh created a free app to let people watch the live feed from a telescope.

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In case you aren’t familiar with Reddit, let me bring you up to speed. It’s a website that claims to be the front page of the Internet. And well, it is. Reddit fans read and rate stories, photos, and trends to see what will reach the top of the list of “what’s trending now”. But not only is it a huge comment board, it’s now also a video game. Thanks to Will Wnekowicz, we have a Karma Controller to play the social website just like the game it really is. Watch his video explaining how to use it here. I wonder when the Facebook video game controller is due to be released?

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Where would 007 be without his special watches, guns, pens, and bombs? We all know that James Bond would only be half the super spy he is without all those gadgets Q outfits him with. Take a gander at this website for a rundown of every gadget the agent has ever used. Categorized by movie and use, each clever invention is photographed and documented for all you Bond lovers out there.

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Like what you see? Go ahead, just download it for free. I love this new trend of free download for product designs. Now, even cool electronics have entered the realm of DIY arts and crafts. If you have access to a laser cutter and some extra materials lying around, then you can make this. And you can customize it with whatever fabrics you decide to recycle for it.

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Google Earth has taken things to new heights. Now mere earthlings can view a 3D Google Moon and Google Mars. Thanks to old photos and satellite shots, we can explore 360 degree views of these strange landscapes from the comfort of home. And the best part? You can get a tour with narration by Bill Nye the Science Guy.

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I’ve been really digging this weird photo app lately. In a world dominated by obnoxiously vintage photo filter apps, the Glitche app actually ruins your photos for free. Choose between different distortions to put over a photo, much like Instagram allows you to choose your filter. Each distortion looks like a different stage in an acid trip. Create a grid pattern, melt the photo into a world of acid colors, choose a scan pattern, and bingo…

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