Electric cars may very well be the face of future transport, but they’re not without their drawbacks. Besides a low fuel economy and a lack of places to recharge, actually powering up your vehicle is one hell of a time-consuming event. But it seems that Volvo may have finally found a way past that.

Volvo has come up with what it calls the world’s first three-phase charger, that can juice a car up in around 90 minutes. That’s a massive improvement over the current chargers, which can take far more hours to get a vehicle up and running.

With that improvement on the horizon, Volvo says that a half hour charge can deliver 80 km worth of driving, while a full charge triples that in an hour and half. In addition, Volvo says that an overnight charge will get users around 8-10 hours of drive-time.

“The user can ‘top up’ the battery pack with electricity one or more times during the day,” Lennart Stegland, Volvo’s vice president for electric propulsion systems explained. “This means that the total daily range is significantly extended, yet with the same low operating cost compared to a car with a conventional power train.”

Volvo is planning to test the fast charger out on a fleet of C30 Electric cars first, before it goes into fulls-scale production.

Man, our airports are in a mess these days. If you’re not being buggered thanks to dodgy staff with a “Eff you” man attitude, then another local flight operator is closing down and leaving you stranded. Time to cut even more costs, but let’s face it: adding more seats won’t exactly help. So how about taking those seats out of airplanes then?Ryanair, the super lowcost UK airline service, is no stranger to controversial ideas which grab a fair share of publicity. Their flights are ridiculously cheap, thanks to ideas about telling you to bring your own in flight meal, and that using the toilet will cost ya extra.

It’s worked wonders for the company, and now, they want to add some standing room to their flights. CEO Michael O’Leary is of the opinion that seatbelts on planes are pretty much useless, and that it’d be cheaper on both sides to just make people stand during a flight by ripping out ten rows of seats from his aircraft. According to the Telegraph:

He is currently seeking to create “standing room only” cabins for students and budget travellers, selling £1 tickets to European destinations… When it came to landing, he suggested, passengers could “hang on to the handle” and would be “fine”.

R14 for a ticket from London to Spain? Why, with a savings like that, I’d more than enough cash left over to buy the animal tranquilizers that I need to quell my abnormal fear of flying!

What about you? Would you take a short standing jaunt on a plane for that price?

Look at your media these days. That’s all 16:9 anamorphic aspect ratio baby! With 4:3 viewing options for movies and television now deader than the dodo, entertainment screens have had to adapt as well in order to survive. One such screen that will be doing that specific shuffle in order to make some scratch is LG, who’ll be taking another stab at the ultra widescreen market later this year.Measuring in at 29 inches, and boasting a resolution of 2560 x 1080, the LG EA93 is widescreen monitor which makes full use of that extra aspect ratio. Sure, movies will probably look great on it, but when it comes to desktop work, the extra space is reserved for side by side applications.

It’s got the usual connections contained on the sides and rear, from DVI and HDMI, through to DisplayPort and MHL support. It’ll cost ya though, as the monitor is currently priced at $633 when it goes on sale next year in Korea.

And for that amount of cash, it’d be easier to just buy a 32 inch TV and HDMI that up to your PC instead.

Is this next article about technology? Not in the slightest. But did it need untold amounts of science to manufacture and create, and can it be termed as a toy, technically? I’m going to say yes. Because for frigs sake people, this is a gummy snake, and it is HUGE!

Just look at it. It’s eight feet long, weighs 11 kilograms and has 36 720 calories in it. The gummy snake also comes in Blue Raspberry/Green Apple or Red Cherry/Blue Raspberry flava variants, and will set you back $150, or around R1200.

And you just know that this behemoth treat is going to find it’s way into a porn movie, sooner or later.

Your credit card is never safe. There are people out there, with all manner of devices that can rip the binary out of it. Time to make a card that is more secure then. And fortunately for us, Mastercard has some encrypted ideas up their sleeves.Over in Singapore, Mastercard has begun testing out a new version of getting some authentication done, with a card that contains an LCD and touchscreen keypad, for added security;

At present, banking institutions that necessitate a higher level of security for their online banking services require the use of a separate authentication token or device. The innovative 2-in-1 device, which combines the functionality of a standard payment card with a state-of-the-art security token, currently reflects the customer’s OTP.

In future, this card could incorporate additional functionalities and be able to indicate other real time information such as available credit balance, loyalty or reward points, recent transactions, and other interactive information.

I’ll be honest, I’d love to have one of these cards because it just looks so futurey and cool to me.

Sooner or later, someone is going to lose an arm. Now, I’m not saying that machete fights should be banned, but the ratio at which limbs are lost to that noble tradition are mighty high indeed. Good thing in the future though, that we’ll be able to snap a replacement appendage on our stumps then.

The Bebionic3 is the most advanced prosthetic arm on the market rightnow, and it also happens to look pretty rad. It’s fluid, responsive, and gentle enough to squeeze a nipple write some stuff.

The Bebionic3 is a myoelectric prosthetic hand that uses residual neuro-muscular signals from your muscles to operate a number of precise functions.Featuring a range of 14 hand positions and grips, the Bebionic3 is also offered with a skin-tone glove that approximates the appearance of a real hand.

Hoenstly, why would you want a flesh glove, when you’re well on the way to becoming Robocop, huh?

Oh Kim Dotcom, you never cease to amaze me with your unrelenting arrogance. While Megaupload may have landed the Kimgpin in hot water (And jail) last year, the big man is bouncing back with a new file-sharing site by the name of Me.Ga, which has a foolproof method of avoiding the authorities this time. Except that it’s already been scuppered by none other than Africa.

The Kimgpin has been on the hype train recently, as he was preparing to launch the new file-sharing site Me.Ga on the eve that Megaupload was siezed by the feds.

Except the country that he was planning to host the servers in, Gabon, doesn’t want his company in their .ga domain, as communications minister Blaise Louembe explained to Stuff.co.nz;

Communications Minister Blaise Louembe has reportedly said he had given an instruction for www.me.ga to be “suspended” and that Gabon “cannot serve as a platform or screen for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights, nor be used by unscrupulous people”.

Not to worry says the rotund bucaneer, as he’ll be hosting his site somewhere else then. Hopefully not though.

If there’s one great movie villain out there, it’s Freddy Krueger. A child molester, killer and all around jerkass, the maniac was bad enough before he was resurrected into an unstoppable creation of nightmare fuel. Now imagine owning that horror in miniature  as it watches you go to sleep every single night…

One of the latest creations from Sideshow toys, Freddy stands at 58 cm tall, comes decked in his trademark fedora , Christmas jersey and spiked glove, and weighs in at a hefty 3.5 kilos. Better not leave him anywhere near that Jason figure of yours.

The Elm Street slasher comes with some creepy extras, and will set you back $350 when he eventually arrives in December. And you’d beter hurry, as there’ll only be 1250 editions of the maniac.

There is nothing that mankind cannot kill, giving enough time and resources. We’re currently weaponising greenhouse effects in order to enact some payback on Mother Nature for all those millenia of natural disasters, and now, we’ve turned the deadliest piece of Mexican cuisine into a tool of destruction.

Built by Torchy’s Tacos in Texas, USA, the taco cannon above can shoot Mexican bean and cheese ammo that has been wrapped in a bandanna, at a distance of up to 200 feet. Which I think is about 60 meters or so. Use the damn metric system America!

Still, this might be the deadliest weapon ever created. After all, what army in the world could withstand the squirts that come with the consumption of a burrito? Beware the weapon of mass ring-sting!

The American elections are right around the corner this week, and while we won’t be seeing people downloading iPad apps in order to rock their vote, you can rest assured that NASA is putting tax payers money into a method to allow their astronauts to cast their ballot. Here’s how they’re doing it.According to Live Science, it looks like the lunar explorers of the US of A are going digital:

Astronauts residing on the orbiting lab receive a digital version of their ballot, which is beamed up by Mission Control at the agency’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. Filled-out ballots find their way back down to Earth along the same path.

“They send it back to Mission Control,” said NASA spokesman Jay Bolden of JSC. “It’s a secure ballot that is then sent directly to the voting authorities.”

But wait, how can you vote if you’re not on American soil? Well, thanks to one handy 1997 bill, American space explorers can indeed vote. No idea on how much it costs, but I’m pretty sure that the Russian version is far more simple;

“Dmitri, this is Russian Space Command. Who you want to vote for?”

“Vladimir Putin”

“Okay. noted. Have a nice day comrade.”