German Physiks has come up with what everyone wants – speakers with 360-degree sound projection.

The Loreley Mk II uses four of the proprietary DDD "Bending wave" drivers in a line source array along with four 10" passive radiators and two 12" inverted dome subwoofers.

Pricing is as follows:
$165,995 with venner finish
$179,995 with high-polish veneer finish
$199,995 with carbon finish

It’s a trade-off, I suppose. On the one hand, at the new robotic German restaurant in Nuremberg, you won’t get that lovable waiter banter that we’ve all come to love. On the other, you won’t have to tip. Just select your meal from the touch screen, and it makes its way to your table sans human involvement. If these take off, restaurant critics will have one thing less to talk about. 

German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM and the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research IFAM, plus a team of research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen have developed a way of harnessing natural body heat to generate electricity.

“We combined a number of components in a completely new way to create circuits that can operate on 200 millivolts. This has enabled us to build entire electronic systems that do not require an internal battery, but draw their energy from body heat alone.”

It all is based on a thermoelectric generator (TEG) which extracts electrical energy from hot and cold temperatire differentials. Future improvements will allow a temperature difference of only 0.5 degrees to generate electricity.

Quantum physics is a strange area to explore, but here we are, on that very frontier. Two German scientists, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, say they may have broken the speed of light.

Their experiment consisted of microwave photons (energetic packets of light) which traveled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart. They achieved this by "quantum tunnelling", which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws, in essence, throwing out all our physical laws

Breaking this speed of light threshold leads to mind-bending consequences. Like an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving. Hmmmm.

German researchers at the University of Madgeburg-Stendal have developed the "OLE" robot, which like its model, the pillbug, would scurry on the forest floor with its "biosensors" to detect fires and the ability to extinguish them if found.

According to the researchers, 30 of these OLEs could protect a forest area as large as 2,700 square miles, but no word on what happens if an animal decides to eat it.