A collection of ‘personal helicopters' and flying machines.As the T-shirt says - 'the is is the future, where is my Jetpack'. It seems that Jetpacks are basically dangerous, and since the appearance at the Los Angeles Olympics, nothing much has happened. Still, there are two manufacturers that will actually build one for you, for $250,000, and you can buy a glorified fan that will propel you on an ice rink at the same speed as a puck.If you want rotor blades rather than rockets, the current options are a bit cheaper and more practical, but are still less cool than the Soviet Fold-up helicopter, from the Cold War era.

Adding a sound system to something as skeletal as a bicycle is tricky task, but one that has been perfected around the world. From gangs in Queens to Critical Mass rallies boom box bikes are an interesting technological mix of eco and brash.

By the end of the decade, not one of New York's skyscrapers will be in the top 10 tallest, compared to those in Saudi Arabia or the Arab Emirates. The Burj Dubai, which is nearly completed will be the size of two Empire State buildings on top of each other and it would be completely dwarfed by proposals on either side of the Arabian peninsula for mile high towers. The Emirates contain some of the most surreal, monumental and ironic recent architectural projects, including a mammoth ferris wheel hotel, a twin tower Wold Trade Center and an enormous convention center intentionally modeled on the Death Star from Star Wars. Vote for the most surreal.

We tend to think of submarines as being a particularly 20th century object when we imagine the nuclear powered, nuclear missile carrying versions. Obviously however, they feature in the Jules Verne classic, ‘20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' and are, as such a definitive Victorian piece of technology, or to use the term currently in vogue, 'steampunk'.Although the idea of a submarine began as early as the 16th century, it was in the Victorian era that the modern cigar with periscope form was developed with France's Gymnote in 1889.Included here is a picture of the model of the Plongeur which was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in 1867. This was the actual item that Jules Verne saw and inspired the Nautilus in his seminal science fiction work, making it an historic item in the cultural history of technology.

Get into a car anywhere in the world and you are pretty much guaranteed that you will understand how to drive it. Cars have the ultimate user interface and Formula 1 cars perhaps represent the pinnacle of this UI, with the most demanding requirements.As recently as 1992, F1 steering wheels were round with 3 buttons (neutral, drinking water supply, radio), but since the advent of paddle gear changes there has been a sudden explosion of electronics and feature driven complexity.The complexity is ubiquitous, all 11 Formula 1 teams produce cars with more or less the same multi button design allowing adjustment and tweaks of traction and aerodynamics from the wheel itself. Unlike a road car, space and focus constraints mean that the entire dashboard is on the steering wheel. This is something that will no doubt be copied, unnecessarily, in consumer cars in future, but would that be a UI improvement?Given that all 11 F1 teams have converged on a remarkably similar UI, independently, you would think that dashboard steering wheel style was a rational design, however its complexity possibly caused Lewis Hamilton the 2007 F1 championship, when he accidentally pressed the neutral button (top left of the 2007 McLaren Mercedes wheel).We have gathered together as many of the modern style wheel designs that we could find and put a date to, to demonstrate the UI pattern. What is clear is that there is no clear accentuation of features (color, size) by how often the are used, merely by position. Even if drivers like Hamilton are experts and fully familiar with the UI, there is a tiny percentage chance of error. Our guess is that this trend in car UI would be a mistake if it filters through to everyday cars, and that F1 cars will revert to a more simple UI over time.

Todays welding is a long way removed from the video included here of forge welding at the beginning of the 20th century., where dissimilar metals were headed and beaten together with hammers. State of the art robotic welding machines can perform an intricate ballet of hi tech gadgety bravado, including the incredible remote welders which are shown spot welding materials several feet away, with laser beams.

Robots often look insect like, largely because of their jerky movements and exo-skeletal look, both of which are a result of them often being works in progress at the individual and overall state of the art. Making them climb walls and hang effortlessly off a ceiling just adds them looking particularly bug like.There are a variety of movements and gripping mechanisms, from electromagnetic to air suction, however our favorite is the friction based tree climber.

Below is the strangest skyscraper proposal you will ever see, an upside down underground tower block lit by a giant mirror.From deflecting the suns rays with mirrors to light up an entire Austrian town which is shrouded in shadow to fiber optic channels which light underground caverns, combinations of heliostats (sun trackers) and light pipes are being increasing used to create architectural lighting effects which are entirely natural.Included here are a variety of technique, including the recent park heliostats, in New York and light pipes which channel daylight from street level to the subway in Berlin. Vote for your faves.

What are the essential gadgets to carry around every day? The first in a series where various people describe their current or ideal stash. Today its Oobject's turn. Vote to rank our choices.

There’s not much information about helter skelters on Wikipedia, so we decided to find out more:Despite becoming a recent fixture at Victorian themed winter fairs and a perennial one at summer funfairs, the helter skelter is clearly modeled on a Victorian lighthouse, and so is originally and end of pier attraction. We found a picture from 1907 where the helter skelter is clearly labeled as a one and we even found one labeled a helter skelter at Coney Island, so perhaps its a term that did carry to the US. The architectural style is even referenced in a spire at Disneyland, the capital of the funfair world.An almost exclusively British term for a spiral fairground slide, helter skelter is known in the US from songs by the Beatles, Oasis and Genesis, and from the association with Charles Manson. In the UK its one of those things that every child can recognize, but which when you really look at, becomes strangely unfamiliar and weird - an architectural naked lunch. The taste of this naked lunch combines hints of jousting, medieval pageants and overtones of Paganesque Englishness, from Morris Dancing to the Wicker Man. Its principal flavor, however, is of the English seaside: damp and Victorian.

One of the most cliched images in technology is that of someone wearing a burka-like clean suit holding a raw silicon wafer, like a trophy.To complete the cliche, a favorite science photo shoot lighting effect, consists of a deep blue, purple or green background. No labs actually look like this. In reality, they tend to be shadowless environments, awash with white light, like something in between a drug store and the spaceship entrance in Close Encounters, but for some reason, pastel lighting indicates hi-tech.Vote for the most cliched image in the list.

In case there were any doubt about just how unpleasantly weird Kim Jong Il’s tyrannical grip over North Korea, here are 12 examples of his propaganda posters. They range from imagery of attacks on the US in a bizarre blend of Soviet art and 50s American comic books to perhaps the most macabre of all, pictures of copious abundance of produce in a place where people are starving to death.

Almost everything there is to know about modernism is contained in a single room slice of a curtain wall tower dropped into the Illinois countryside. The Farnsworth house was a project designed and built by Mies van der Rohe 60 years ago, undeserving of its patron's name, who wrongfully sued and which still seems to win prizes and be declared as innovative when architects consciously or unconsciously copy it today. Here are a dozen examples to demonstrate it.

Its October 2010 and Chinese property booms while most of the Western world's houses have shrunk to more realistic levels. In the US, homes have ceased to be ATMs to buy oriental barbecues, but in Britain, a crowded island with a cultural attachment to carving out a personal defensible space are Englishmen's homes still castles, with prices to match.As US housing prices adjusted, UK ones, faltered then regained their losses smack in the middle of the recession. This time things look different, with last month seeing the largest dip in housing prices in history. Perhaps prices in Britain will go up forever, or perhaps Britain will be like Japan, another crowded island which had the same phenomenon and where eventual capitulation resulted in a crash where property is worth less than a decade ago?One way to judge judge this is to look at what a million dollars gets you in London and its hinterland - a place where an apartment recently sold for a quarter of a billion dollars during the biggest downturn since the Great Depression.

If you believe adverts like these, sugar, Fat, TV, Coke, cocaine, radiation, cigarettes: they’re all actually good for you. Manufactured consent!

Some of America's best Mid Century Modern architecture is in the form of gas stations, with their simple space requirements and focus on innovative roofs.Several of the best known names in architecture have created gas stations, around the world, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van der Rohe, Willem Dudok, Jean Prouve, Arne Jacobsen and Norman Foster, but nobody created a design package that was as enduring and comprehensive as Elliot Noyes for Mobil.

New York, a city which is defined by its skyline, existed as a metropolis well before skyscrapers and has gone through several distinct architectural phases.I’ve picked this collection to demonstrate these, from the earliest known photograph of New York in the 1840s which shows the Upper West side as rural, to the Brooklyn Bridge dominated skyline of the mid nineteenth century.A postcard from 1904 is labeled ‘New York Skyscrapers’ but shows very few of what we would call skyscrapers today, consisting of the early steel framed buildings epitomized by the flatiron.Between the 1920’s and 1930’s the machine age skyscraper city of masonry-clad, art deco splendor grows at breakneck speed and remains similar in texture until the emergence of curtain wall, glass and steel buildings in the 1950s, after the completion of the Seagram in 1958.The 1973 opening of the iconic World Trade Center coincides the building of other inferior block like buildings along the periphery of lower Manhattan, notably at Water St., which destroy the hill like collection of spires.

Bamboo scaffolding is used around the world, but nowhere does it stand out more than in Hong Kong, where the majority of scaffolding is bamboo. It may look low tech. but bamboo is a perfect scaffold material, being strong, straight, lightweight, cheap and renewable. This ancient building material is most impressive when juxtaposed against modern high tech buildings and is sometimes used as scaffold for the tallest of skyscrapers. Here is a list of our favorite examples.

Why absurd? Well, there is something particularly vulnerable about a piece of military hardware that can be rendered inactive by a group of boy scouts laying an iron bar sufficient to derail it. At the same time, the ordinary look of many steam trains seemed more robust than some of these tin can efforts. I chose this list because they are a design backwater with unusual looking phenotypes.

Just how much of the human body can you replace or augment: seemingly everything apart from the tadpole like remnants of the brain and spinal chord.Bionic eyes, ears, hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, hands, feets, legs, arms and skin are now real science rather than concept designs. For this list, we have gathered together as many real devices including commercially available products rather than concept designs or imagery that appeal based on gimmick value. The one exception is the tooth and ear cellphone implant which is feasible today.An interesting idea is how the notion of a cyborg might change (often imagined as fusion of mechanical and electronic technology with human biology), since many of these devices use technology that is itself principally biological, such as stem cell lines in the bioreactor liver or artificial skin.