Here’s a merry-go-round with pods on the bottom for coma patients. The idea is that you spin them around real fast and hopefully they wake up. No…I kid. The idea here is that we can recover lost smells that no longer exist due to our changing environment.

In that sense, it’s probably the closest we are likely to come to a real time machine. At least until Doctor Who shows up. You would experience a kind of community based immersion in the capsule, and as we all know smells are linked very heavily with memory. So just like that you’re time travelling. Hopefully not to a point in history that smells really foul. It’s a concept for now so, smell ya later.

As part of the announcements at the MacWorld keynote speech today, Steve Jobs introduced the new Apple Time Capsule - a appliance designed to help facilitate wireless, automatic data backups from all the Macs in your home. The device works with machines running the Leopard OS along with the Time Machine software to automatically create back ups of everything on your Mac computer, hourly if you would prefer, and from multiple different Macs.

The Time Capsule coincides well with the launch of the MacBook Air since one of the common needs for an optical drive is to back up data. Since the Air doesn’t have an internal CD or DVD drive the Time Capsule makes a nice solution to provide wireless data backups to the notebook. The integrated software lets users look through history for lost files or even restore the system to a previous point in time.