When it comes to submarines, stealth is no longer an excuse for being anti-social. A 40-inch-long buoy may soon allow submarine captains to send text messages from under the sea.

After leaving the submarine’s trash chute, the buoy stays tethered to the vessel by miles of cables, LiveScience reports. Once sailors have texted to their hearts’ content, they can cut the buoy loose. Alternatively, Lockheed Martin, the system’s designer, also pictures buoys dropped from airplanes, which could receive submarine messages via an “acoustic messaging system” that resembles sonar and send them along in text message form.

By air or by garbage disposal, the buoys would improve current submarine communications, Rod Reints at Lockheed Martin told LiveScience.

“Currently, they have to go up to near periscope depth to communicate . . . . They become more vulnerable to attack as they get closer to the surface. Ultimately, we’re trying to increase the communication availability of the sailors while increasing their safety.”

If successful, one could only imagine the buoy’s other applications. Underwater robots, for example, could text us live updates about sunken vessels or oil leaks. Also, given that we can now text in caves and tweet in space, the buoy, by allowing people to text from miles under water, means that there is nowhere lft 2 escape.

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Image: U.S. Navy

For those too busy (or self-important?) to pocket the iPhone while walking down the street and too safety-conscious to blunder out into traffic while texting, we’ve got just the app for you, via Gadget Venue:

The application is called Type and Walk and makes use of the camera on your iPhone to push video in to the background of an application where you can type on top of the video, thus being able to see obstacles as you are walking.

Type n Walk was designed to work with your favorite apps — not try to replace them. Use it to compose your email, text message, status update, or tweet and paste it into your target app (or the browser) to send.

Yes, the app shows you the same thing you’d see if you just looked ahead of you without the iPhone, the same way people have for thousands of years, and animals before them for millions of years. Is it genius? A signal that our species has really, finally gone too far with this technology thing?

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Video: YouTube / typenwalk

Farmers near the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya used to have to bang on pots and pans and wave burning sticks to keep elephants from destroying their crops. Now they rely on GPS and text messaging.

Kimani, a bull elephant who used to be a habitual farm raider, has been sporting a collar with GPS and a cell phone SIM card attached and maintained by the advocacy group Save the Elephants. Whenever he approaches the virtual “geofence” on the boundaries of the conservancy, a text message is sent to rangers who swiftly arrive to drive him back.

Using the text method, rangers have prevented potential human-elephant conflicts 15 times in the last two years, and Kimani now rarely approaches farms.

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