These flash drives by Shu-Chun Hsiao are serious. The drives are encased in concrete and are embossed with the weight of each one, a number that correlates with the flash drive’s capacity.

I love the idea, but 256g sticking out the front of my desktop is just going to destroy itself.

The proponent of this idea – a professor at Washington University Babak Amir Parvi. He proposes to make contact lenses, which integrates a lot of electronics have not yet established.

For example, a display consisting of microlenses, power supply, wireless communication modules, solar panel and various sensors. If we draw an analogy with virtual reality, the pair of contact lenses, virtually unnoticeable to others easily replace bulky helmets virtual reality.

Intel debuted and demonstrated its Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) processor Wednesday. The processor has 48 cores–24 dual-core “tiles”–connected with a high-speed mesh network. Intel wants the experimental chip, at least 100 of which it’ll distribute to researchers in 2010, to lead to new attempts to tackle multicore system and software design. Ultimately, Intel believes its aggressive multicore approach will be the way computers get enough power for tasks such as vision and speech comparable to what humans have.

Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner showed off the SCC chip. Here he holds a silicon wafer of the processors at a press event in San Francisco. The processor consumes between 25 and 125 watts of power-the numbers from Rattner’s slide presentation projected on the wafer.

Intel had two SCC prototype computers on display. Because the SCC chips use ordinary x86 processor cores, regular software such as Windows and Linux can run on them. The SCC systems can accommodate up to 64GB of memory, but this machine had 16GB.

Intel’s SCC chip’s x86 cores each are comparable in power to the lower-end Atom line used in Netbooks today. Intel expects programmers eventually will have to reckon with many more cores. That’s an issue that the computing industry is struggling to adjust to because most PC software is geared to perform a single sequence of instructions, not many things in parallel.

Each node on the SCC chip includes two x86 cores with its own memory cache. Linking them to the outside world is router circuitry that handles networking on the chip. The network lets processors exchange information and communicate with any of four DDR3 memory banks.

Here is what the description says: “Battle Mug starts as a 13.5 pound solid block of 6061 T6 billet aluminium before it enters a state of the art CNC facility which produces specialized parts and equipment for the U.S. Department of Defense, major weapons manufacturers, NASA…etc. Built to military specifications, Battle Mug features a M1913 rail interface system which allows the operator to mount a standard issue M4 carry handle, tactical light, laser device…” Each unit costs $279.

Karin Johansson’s Dynamic Lamp charges itself by means of an internal dynamo. Each time you spin the lamp in stores a charge, converting kinetic energy into a soft glow.