Everybody do the robot. Or something like that, anyway. It's the first annual Robot Parade in Greenwich Village. It all kicks off at 11:00 am at Washington Square Park on Sunday, September 18. According to the planners of the Robot Parade, participants must "be a robot, accompany a robot, or dress up like a robot."

In addition, "all robots must be human and robot friendly. That means no robots spitting fire, throwing knifes, or engaging in other activities harmful to humans and robots. Other than that, any device conceived with some sort of autonomous behavior in mind counts. We are an inclusive robot parade. Works in progress are welcome. And if you can't build or borrow a robot, dress up like one!"

Dorkbot-NYC is holding another second meeting in Chelsea after the Labor Day weekend to celebrate people doing strange things with electricity. What exactly does that mean? Well, there's Mark Esper, who will be offering a demo of a self-generating tornado. We hope, of course, that there are no plans in the works for a self-generating hurricane...

It's almost time for the start of the U.S. Open in Queens, so it's time to start thinking about tennis... In today's print edition (link from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) , The Wall Street Journal looks at the latest advances in materials and design in the U.S. tennis racket market:

"Head, Prince, Babolat, Wilson and Fischer are among those featuring nanotechnology, magnetic forces, aerodynamics and advanced physics principles in their new rackets, which claim to help players add power and precision to their strokes."

Apparently, most of the high-tech advances are driven as much by marketing needs as by the real need to produce more power or control in the racket. The number of tennis players has not changed much in the past five years, and sales of tennis gear are down from levels ten years ago. So what do you do when the size of the market is not increasing? Gotta promote things like "piezoelectric crystals" and "carbon nanotubes" to make people buy more rackets.

If you saw Scorsese's "The Aviator" last year, then you know that billionaire inventor Howard Hughes developed an obsessive-compulsive order when it came to germs. Surely, he never would have taken a ride on the New York City subway, which isn't exactly known for its cleanliness. Well, there's a company in Boston that has created the perfect subway "transit strap" for anyone who's ever had a bout of Howard Hughes-style obsessive-compulsiveness:

"Our premium quality products dramatically enhance a public transit experience. The patent-pending TranStrap™ provides a comfortable, hygienic, personal
handhold that securely grips the overhead bar yet goes on and off easily and
stows in a purse or pocket."

When we heard that the MTA was spending $212 million to install surveillance cams in the New York subway, we immediately wondered if there was some kind of geeky joke in there somewhere. 212, after all, is the area code for Manhattan.

Keep in mind that when Google decided to raise money in its IPO last year, the company's founders settled on the magic number of $2.718 billion for a reason:

"The amount of the $2.7 billion offering contains an inside joke for the math-minded. The exact offering, $2,718,281,828, is the product of "e" and $1 billion, where "e" is the base of the natural logarithm--a logarithm especially useful in calculus--and equals about 2.718281828."

Then, when Google announced that it planned to offer more shares to the public, it settled on the magic number of 14,159,265 shares for obvious reasons:

"And why, oh why, the strange numerology -- selling exactly 14,159,265 shares, which every educated 13-year-old recognizes as the digits to the right of the decimal point in the mathematical term pi."

Maybe it's one for Carl Bialik, who writes "The Numbers Guy" column for The Wall Street Journal, to ponder...

Apparently, a Russian neuropsychiatrist at Columbia University has pioneered a groundbreaking insomnia remedy known as brain music therapy. And, no, it doesn't involve a bottle of Stolichnaya or a trip to a Russian banya. Barbara Hoffman in the New York Post describes how the sleep technique developed by Dr. Galina Mindlin at Columbia University works:

"Developed a decade ago in Russia, it involves recording the brain's electrical activity, or brain waves, via an EEG, during a time when you're most relaxed — and transforming those same waves into synthesized musical sounds, which are recorded on a CD and played back at bedtime... The theory is that listening to your brain at rest helps your mind to relax into sleep."

In Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, Katy Marquardt has penned an interesting column on niche businesses with unrecognized profit potential. One of the companies profiled is Pall Corporation of East Hills, NY, which is apparently making a bundle in filters and filtration:

"From purifying water to preparing donated blood for transfusions, Pall's filtration devices apply similar technology across a variety of seemingly unrelated industries."

It's a non-glamorous company in a non-glamorous industry - kinda like a razor blade company that keeps selling high-tech blades and razors to customers, says Kiplinger. In this case, it's filters and filtering devices.

In the New York Times, there's a look at the new plan by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission to experiment with hybrid vehicles. It took a bit of political arm-twisting by the New York City Council and Mayor Bloomberg, but the hybrid vehicles are finally here! (check out the handy graphic comparing horsepower, rear leg room and miles per gallon for different models)

According to environmentalists, hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius and the Honda Accord generally have higher fuel efficiency and fewer harmful emissions than conventional cars. With that in mind, other cities - such as Boston and San Francisco - have already embraced the idea of hybrid vehicles.

Apparently, European physicists have just figured out what any New Yorker has known since Day 1: it's a heck of a lot easier to navigate a city when it's arranged according to a grid. Mindjack points to a new study recently conducted by Swedish and Danish physicists:

"Several physicists from Sweden and Denmark have compared the complexity of finding an address in Manhattan and in several Swedish cities. Not surprisingly, Manhattan, with its checkered grid plan, is easier to navigate than the older European cities. The scientists think their model could be used to allow city planners to see how street changes affect navigability."

OK, so that's the obvious part. The not-so-obvious part is coming up with a mathematical way to model the complexity of city street networks. (There's also a downloadable 1-page PDF available)

The Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, the flagship of the Sheraton hotel fleet, became the first hotel in Manhattan to use environmentally-friendly high temperature fuel cell technology. Apparently, PPL Corporation recently installed a high temperature 250-kilowatt Direct FuelCell power plant inside the hotel that is capable of providing 10% of the hotel's electricity and hot water. It sounds like some pretty cool technology that's environmentally-safe:

"Fuel cells generate electricity with no combustion. They are, in effect, like large, continuously operating batteries that generate electricity as long as a fuel source, such as natural gas, is supplied. Since the gas is not burned, there is no pollution commonly associated with the combustion of fossil fuels. Because hydrogen is generated directly within the fuel cell module from readily available fuels such as natural gas and wastewater treatment gas, FCE power plants are ready today and do not require the creation of a hydrogen infrastructure."

(photo: Starwood Hotels & Resorts)

The NanoBusiness 2005 event, held last week at the New York Marriott Financial Center, attracted little or no attention from the MSM (mainstream media). In fact, a search at Google News didn't turn up any MSM links to New York nanotech news, only a short preview of the conference from a site called Monsters & Critics:

"While applications for the technology are wide open and venture capital dollars are readily available - many of the companies assembled at the NanoBusiness Conference 2005, a trade show held here wherein nanotechnologists are rubbing elbows with each other and Wall Street types - the challenges are great for the industry, which is still in its infancy."

A few tech sector publications, however, did provide coverage of the nanotech conference keynote speech from Bell Labs president Jeffrey Jaffe: Information Week, PC Magazine and Red Herring.

Newsday says that the city is studying the effect of UV light on drinking water:

"The city's Department of Environmental Protection is studying the use of ultraviolet light to disinfect most of the 1.3 billion gallons of water that residents of the five boroughs and Westchester County use each day. It will take at least four years before New Yorkers could actually drink the UV-treated water, provided DEP can get all the necessary approvals."

Ultraviolet light, of course, is also used by tanning salons to give patrons that healthy, all-over orange glow. Hmmm, this could be an interesting marketing hook for New York's indoor tanning salons: 10 tans and 10 jugs of water for the same low price.

The New York Times takes a closer look at the science behind the new greenhouses at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx:

"The state-of-the-art greenhouses were designed by Mitchell/Giurgola Architects of Manhattan, in collaboration with the Van Wingerden Greenhouse Company... Just about everything, from the roof vents that open on a sunny day and close when it rains, to evaporative cooling systems that click on when one of the rooms gets too hot, is controlled by computer.

Under these controlled conditions, scientists can now grow plants for research studying the DNA of a primitive nonflowering plant like selaginella, for example. Gardeners can now plant the seeds of Victoria amazonica, the largest water lily in the world, in a pool kept at 80 degrees."

Can lab rats be trained to detect explosives? That's the premise behind experiments being conducted at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn: "Roborats may someday be the terrorist's worst nightmare —keen, furtive little spies that can be guided into a building through, say, an air duct and then allowed to roam freely to sniff out explosives, toxic chemicals, or other bad stuff."

The U.S. Defense Department is already interested in the experiments, and is encouraging researchers to find other "nosy little creatures for the perilous job, including rats, wasps, honeybees, and even yeast (yes, yeast)."

The physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island have been accelerating gold nuclei (atoms stripped of their surrounding clouds of electrons) to 99.995% of the speed of light using a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and then smashing these nuclei together, head-on. The result? "A sort of tiny, short-lived black hole - very, very tiny and very, very short-lived. It lasts less than one-10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second." At the time of collision, the temperature is in excess of one trillion degrees.

This may sound like a bunch of really smart kids slamming together their toys at really high speeds and really high temperatures and seeing what happens. To others, it also sounds like a scary little experiment with black holes and anti-matter and bizarre gravitational effects: "Before Brookhaven began its gold collision experiments in 2000, it issued assurances that the experiment could not accidentally create a black hole that would destroy the earth..."