April 4, 2014

You might not know it yet, but Friday is fun day at the Nutcase blog. We look at everything from the hilarious to the heinous in the world of helmets, for your sampling delight.

First, a blast from the past. Created by Science and Invention magazine editor Hugo Gernsbeck, the ‘Isolator’ was intended to give its wearer a sense of focus and concentration at the office. Want one at your desk?

April Fool’s Day brought out a host of strange helmet ideas. The Twitter helmet seen here would allow its users to ‘peck’ tweets on the go simply by moving their heads in birdlike fashion.

Not quite as practical as our Chia helmet, but definitely right up there.

Weird but wonderful helmet of the week award goes out to the University of San Diego’s ‘gooey’ and ‘dry’ helmets. The helmets record neural activity in the hopes of understanding how brain circuitry controls how we move, in order to improve the lives of people with maladies like Parkinson’s that affect so many of the functions – walking, talking – that we take for granted.

Gooey on the left, dry on the right.

The ‘gooey’ helmet is gooey because it needs conductive gel to record brain activity; the dry helmet is a new innovation that uses Bluetooth to transmit the brain activity without wires or goo. Take a look at the research here.

The next wave of research likely won’t be transmitted from a helmet at all, as direct brain implants to monitor activity become more common.

Happy Friday.