Inventor and engineer Tom Ciamillo out of Athens, GA made his fortune building high-performance brakes for bicycles.  His most recent invention, named the Lunocent, is a new type of swim fin which some users have been able to go 8 milers per hour…about twice as fast as Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps at his fastest.

The Lunocent weighs just 2.5 pounds and is made of carbon fiber and fiberglass that attaches to an alumin foot plate.  It has a surface area that is almost three times the surface area of regular swim fins.  They are extremely wide, and the shape and angle are important to how well it works.  They are modeled after a dolpin’s tail, and dolphins are a good example to look at as they can swim up to 33 miles per hour.

You can find a lot more pictures and videos over at the Lunocent blog, where they continue to test and tweak the product to perfection.

[Source: Scientific American]