Swapnil.....Truly Mobile

The Antikythera Mechanism is what you call truly old school technology. Argued to be the world's oldest known computer, this ancient Greek invention was used some time circa 100BC to calculate and "predict celestial events and eclipses with unprecedented accuracy." Skipping past the two millennia in which it lay lost on a sea floor somewhere, the Mechanism has now been recreated by an Apple software engineer by the name of Andrew Carol, who has lovingly pieced 1,500 Lego Technic blocks together, creating 110 gears and four gearboxes in total. Each box is responsible for performing one piece of arithmetic, and when the resulting machine is fed with appropriate calendar data, it spits out a (hopefully accurate) prediction for the next time a solar eclipse should occur. All well and good, but we're really just amazed by the beauty of those gears working.

Science has prototyped flexible versions of just about everything a ever-loving geek needs: displays, memory, batteries, LEDs, speakers and an input device or three. Now, Reebok's looking to put some of that computing power up our sleeves. The apparel manufacturer's teamed up with MC10 -- a startup founded by our old friend John Rogers, who helped pioneer the field -- with the intent to build "conformable electronics" into high-performance clothing for athletes over the next couple of years. Though the company told MIT Technology Review the devices typically consist of thin silicon strips printed onto flexible materials, and that they might they might measure metabolism and performance using embedded sensors, hard details are few -- the only thing we know for sure is that a flexible tech scientist just scored a partnership with a major company, and we're hopeful they'll make something neat. PR after the break.