Understanding the workings of insect ears could lead to new microphones able to capture and analyse extremely faint sounds. Scientists have been studying the workings of the 'ears' of a locust. These are micrometer-thick membranes with complex and varying structural properties.

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As computers become smaller and smaller, one of the problems is how to control them, when keyboards can't shrink beyond a certain size. Alvaro Cassinelli, Stephane Perrin & Masatoshi Ishikawa have developed a system that uses lasers to track hand gestures to this end.

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Hector is a robot that spray paints digital art on walls.

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Complete with tapedrive and typewriter. Operates at around 0.12Mhz, has roughly 2K of memory and each tape holds around 360K. It has 200 tubes, compared to hundreds of millions of transistors in a modern PC.

The thing that caught my eye about this is the typewriter. It's a Flexowriter by Singer. I bought one when I was 15 (it was 20+ years old by then). It was basically a typewriter that could read and write punched tape. I used it to print receipts for customers on my paper-route, and I was the shizits among my fellow paperboys.

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Simon Greenwold at MIT Media Lab developed a system that tracks virtual 3d objects in real space. A screen/camera combination is used to view an environment. A 3d mouse is used to create 3d blobs in that environment. The system remembers the locations of these blobs and combines them with the real elements of the environment. (link from BumbleStumble).

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Tom Rose built an under-water rebreather from inexpensive parts from Home Depot. A rebreather scrubs carbon-dioxide out of air, allowing it's user to re-use the air they breathe out. A rebreather is much lighter than the equivalent weight for a standard scuba setup, and the diver is less detectable, since their exhaled air isn't sent into the water as bubbles.

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David C. Roy builds sculptures that are wound up like a clock, then various pieces spin to make visually-interesting patterns.

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Connect your midi instrument to your computer and jam with musicians around the world. I built a similar technology almost 20 years ago so a friend and I could jam together through a 1200 baud modem connection. Unfortunately, there was enough delay that it wasn't much more than an interesting curiosity.

This site charges to jam with others, but as the mechanics are very simple, if it becomes popular, I wouldn't be surprised to see open-source versions pop up quickly.

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James R. Lavoie and Joseph M. Marino of Rite-Solutions set up an internal stock market where employees could buy and sell business ideas. The highest-valued stocks are seriously considered for implementation.

The market was begun in January 2005. Mr. Marino, president of Rite-Solutions, says the market has already made a dramatic difference in their business. One idea which he didn't support found overwhelming support in the internal market, and was implemented. It now accounts for 30% of Rite-View's total sales.

Sven König wrote software that will take a piece of music/video and automatically divide it into 16th beat samples. It will then listen to another sound-source (such as your voice), and find the best match for each sample of your voice in the original group of samples. It does this real-time, and interesting performance art can be generated with it.

To be honest, I'm not thoroughly impressed with the actual songs/videos it produces, but it's a great concept and the raw technology can no doubt be be improved and used by other technologists and artists to interesting effect. The site is a bit daunting. You may want to check out this video for a quicker understanding.