We’re already pretty much in love with OLED displays, but besides stunning picture quality and low power consumption, when they were first introduced it was promised that one day OLED panels could be actually printed. And that day has finally come.
Konica Minolta has created the first printhead that can be used for electronics manufacturing applications thanks to its incredibly small inkjets that can create drops a mere picoliter in size…
A team of University of California, San Diego researchers has built the smallest room-temperature nanolaser to date, as well as an even more startling device: a highly efficient, “thresholdless” laser that funnels all its photons into lasing, without any waste.
The two new lasers require very low power to operate, an important breakthrough since lasers usually require greater and greater “pump power” to begin lasing as they shrink to nano sizes. The small size and extremely low power of these nanolasers could make them very useful components for future optical circuits packed on to tiny computer chips, Mercedeh Khajavikhan and her UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering colleagues report in the Feb. 9 issue of the journal Nature…
Canadian inventor Rejean Neron’s Safety Sphere concept has to be the most, well, all-encompassing airbag for motorcyclists. Described as an “inflatable crash garment for non-enclosed vehicle riders”, Safety Sphere isn’t so much built into the rider’s suit as it is the rider’s suit. In the event of an accident, the intended results are nothing if not dramatic, as the CG video promo ably illustrates. (Pics)
I know I’ve been all about the old-fashioned-looking iPhone speakers lately, most of which are electricity-free. And 3D printing. So I’m jazzed the two have come together with this 3D printed iVictrola Gramophone dreamed up by Schreer Design and manufactured by Shapeways.
They may look like other jeans, but these smell different.
These jeans look like any other pair of denim you’d see on a fashionable twentysomething. Dark, slim fit and cut perfectly, heck, I wouldn’t mind buying these myself. But unlike other jeans, this pair is made with scratch ‘n sniff raspberry scented denim. Yes. Scratch and sniff. On your freaking jeans! This is awesome…
If your choices were fog, foam or snow, wouldn’t snow be a welcome change from the others?
In the early 1990’s, Francisco Guerra started making snow for his magic act. Within a few years, special events, movies, and theme parks wanted to use this unique effect to create magical snowfall.
What is amazing about this effect is that the snow never accumulates. It evaporates within 90 seconds and leaves no residue. This biodegradable, non-toxic, non-slip, flame retardant effect can be performed indoors as well as outdoors, from a small dance floor to a theme park. Global Special Effects is known as the inventor of evaporative snow™…
A powerful X-ray laser pulse from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source comes up from the lower-left corner (shown as green) and hits a neon atom (center). This intense incoming light energizes an electron from an inner orbit (or shell) closest to the neon nucleus (center, brown), knocking it totally out of the atom (upper-left, foreground). In some cases, an outer electron will drop down into the vacated inner orbit (orange starburst near the nucleus) and release a short-wavelength, high-energy (i.e. “hard”) X-ray photon of a specific wavelength (energy/color) (shown as yellow light heading out from the atom to the upper right along with the larger, green LCLS light).
Scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created the shortest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction and opening the door to a new range of scientific discovery.
The researchers, reporting in Nature, aimed SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at a capsule of neon gas, setting off an avalanche of X-ray emissions to create the world’s first “atomic X-ray laser.”
“X-rays give us a penetrating view into the world of atoms and molecules,” said physicist Nina Rohringer, who led the research. A group leader at the Max Planck Society’s Advanced Study Group in Hamburg, Germany, Rohringer collaborated with researchers from SLAC, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Colorado State University…
Futurist Thomas Frey talked about 3D food printers HERE and now we have a production model that can print with chocolate (and more). How awesome is that!
From Gizmodo:
Instead of the toxic smell of melted plastics, while the Imagine 3D printer is doing its thing, your workspace will be filled with the aroma of delicious confections. Because its printing head uses syringes that can be filled with chocolate…
Designer Prashant Chandra, an industrial designer from New Delhi, India, had come up with a solution for combining a whole lot of independent gadgets. Instead of repeating hardware — such as with an iPad acting as a larger version of an iPhone, an iPod acting like a lost part from said phone, and all of these acting as fragmented components of a laptop — this concept combines the traits of devices to create a functioning laptop in order to reduce repetition and wasted hardware…
Unless you work at the Pentagon, the key locks on your desk drawers are probably easy to compromise. So with their new Covert, the folks at Quirky figured that a drawer lock can’t be picked if it can’t be found.
The sliding locking mechanism comes with adhesive tape for a temporary solution, but if you were hoping for any kind of real security you’ll want to screw them in. Once installed on the inside of a drawer the mechanism is completely invisible, and the only way to open it is with an included magnetic key that lets you slide the latch across…
