Zephyr

Football shirts are about to go high-tech, with the football club Tottenham Hotspur planning a kit that contains sensors to monitor how players are performing. The North London club has signed a 50-million pound ($80.3 million) deal with sportswear company Under Armour to wear its space-age E39 shirts.

The E39 features an onboard sensor called a Bug that monitors a player's body. It records heart rate, breathing, and skin temperature, storing the data on its 2GB hard drive and beaming the stats to a computer via Bluetooth. Coaches can see a player's performance during training on their iPad or iPhone.

The shirt also boasts an accelerometer, measuring a player's movements and recording how much G-force they face. The data is analyzed by software from Zephyr, which provides similar tech to the U.S. military.

Read more of "High-tech football shirt measures players' work rate in £50m Spurs deal" at Crave UK. … Read more

After 16 days, the Olympics concluded with 43 world records being broken. However, there's now another record that's no less exciting.

QinetiQ claimed Sunday that its propeller-driven aircraft called Zephyr flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes nonstop, more than doubling the official world record set by Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk in 2001.

The Zephyr is much different from the Global Hawk, which is about the size of a fighter and requires a runway for taking off and landing.

Zephyr, on the other hand, is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber aircraft that weighs less than 70 pounds and is … Read more

Our Xbox 360 Elite review sample showed up late yesterday afternoon, and we're working up a full review. But that's gonna be a 3,500-word monster intended more for casual gamers and tech newbies who don't know a thumbstick from a joystick or a shoulder button from a trigger. For those in the know, here's the crib sheet on the Elite.

Cosmetics: The Xbox 360 Elite has a matte-black finish. I strongly prefer it to the "iPod white" color scheme of past Xbox 360 models. The included wireless controller and Xbox Live headset are … Read more

The rumors were true: an upgraded Xbox 360 will be hitting stores later this spring. As reported at Gamespot, the Xbox 360 Elite will feature a black finish, a 120GB hard drive, and an HDMI output. The new unit will be available in North America on April 29 at a cost of $479. The Xbox 360 Elite will include a wireless controller, a wired Xbox Live headset (both in matching black), along with all manner of relevant cables: HDMI, Ethernet, and the combination composite/component A/V cable for connecting to standard and high-def TVs that lack an HDMI jack. … Read more

A small group of spy shots have surfaced on Chinese forum tgfcer.com, depicting what looks to be a large group of black Xbox 360s on the tail end of a production line. Also in the photos is a shot of the detachable hard drive, which pretty clearly looks to be 120GB, confirming several rumors that a new premium SKU for Microsoft's gaming console is forthcoming. The only thing missing from the shots is the back of the console, which would validate the claims an HDMI port was on the way.

For early adopters of the system (myself included), … Read more

... at least for the next six weeks. By then, the Xbox 360 "version 2" may finally be available. It seems that Game Informer magazine is reporting in its April issue that an upgraded 360 will soon be hitting store shelves, with at least some of the long-rumored goodies: 120GB hard drive (six times the current model's capacity), HDMI output, and a sweet black paint job. Kotaku (where we snagged the Game Informer page scan shown here) has confirmed with the magazine's editor that the story is legit, not an April Fool's joke. And Engadget followed … Read more