Homemade Iron Man Glove Fires Lasers

In his latest project, laser enthusiast Patrick Priebe, owner of a company called Laser Gadgets, constructed a homemade Iron Man glove that lets him hold some pretty impressive superhero powers in the palm of his hand.

He can shoot a laser from his palm that’s powerful enough to pop a balloon or sear patterns into wood. He can also blast another laser from his knuckles, fire an aluminum slug and with an accompanying Iron Man arm piece, launch a missile made from cardboard and plastic.

The glove’s lasers are pretty substantial. A blue, 700mW laser blasts from his palm and is activated by the flex of Priebe’s hand. A 300mW laser comes from the top of his glove, deploying through an attached controller.

Priebe used aluminum to make the glove and spray-painted it with primer, metallic red and candy red on top. He made the inside firing mechanism with brass.

 

Priebe constructed the glove in anticipation of the new “Avengers: Age of Ultron” movie. He said it took him about three weeks to make.You can watch the glove in action here.
 

Haptic Glove Lets Gamers Feel the Virtual World

Rice University

With the imminent arrival of the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Morpheus, the era of virtual reality gaming is nearly upon is. Video game industry watchers expect the arrival of viable VR headsets to be the biggest revolution in gaming since the first generation of console machines some 40 years ago.
No matter how sophisticated, though, virtual reality headsets are still limited to the audio-visual experience. As such, several commercial and research groups are hoping to augment headsets by designing force feedback peripherals that replicate the sense of touch in the realm of virtual reality.

      

And whaddyknow, we have an example right here. A group of engineering students at Rice University introduced a prototype gaming glove this week that would let gamers literally feel the objects they touch in the virtual world.

The Hands Omni glove uses force-feedback design to approximate the sensation of touching, pressing or gripping a surface or object. If your avatar picks up an apple in the game — or more likely, a grenade — you’ll feel the object in your hand. The idea is, down the line, game designers could work with the Hands Omni software, programming touchable elements into new game titles.

The proprietary system uses a network of small inflatable air bladders in the glove to deliver the pressure to your fingertips. The glove is wireless and lightweight — abut 350 grams — and designed to be as unobtrusive as possible.

The Hands Omni glove was developed at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and sponsored by Virtuix, a Houston gaming technology company. Here’s a quick demo video from a recent design showcase.
 

Rare Turing Notebook Sells for $1 Million

A page from a notebook of British mathematician and pioneer in computer science Alan Turing is displayed during an auction preview in Hong Kong March 19, 2015.


A long-lost notebook owned by British mathematician and World War II code breaker Alan Turing sold at auction in New York on Monday for $1 million, Bonhams auction house said.

 

A chat-bot named "Eugene Goostman" made headlines for "his" good showing during a Turing test, in which he was able to fool human judges into thinking he was a real person.

DCI

The sale of the recently discovered notebook comes at a time of enormous interest in Turing's life and work generated by Oscar-winning movie "The Imitation Game".

The manuscript, which sold for $1.025 million in two minutes of bidding, dates back to the mid-1940s when Turing was working to break the Nazi Enigma code at Britain's Bletchley Park.

An original 1944 Enigma Machine, still fully operational, sold for $269,000 at the same auction, smashing pre-sale estimates of $140,000-180,000.
Both winning bids were in the room, but both buyers wanted to remain anonymous, the auction house said.


Turing was a computer scientist, philosopher and cryptologist ahead of his time who played a crucial role in breaking Enigma.
"We have no idea how many lives he saved. It is estimated that he shortened the war by two years," said Cassandra Hatton, director of Bonhams' history of science and technology department.
The notebook is believed to be the only extensive Turing autograph manuscript in existence and gives an insight into the man whose work, when he was just 24, led to the universal computer machine.
It features 56 pages of Turing's notes on the foundations of mathematical notations and computer science, made during his leisure time at Bletchley Park.

It shows that Turing was examining the works of German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, among others.

Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952 when it was a crime in Britain. Forced to undergo chemical castration, Turing killed himself in 1954 at the age of 41.
He was officially pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II only in 2013, six decades after his death.

British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, nominated for an Oscar for portraying Turing in last year's film, has described the prospect of being able to hold one of his manuscripts as "thrilling".

 

What Chat-Bot's Turing Test Triumph Means for AI

A chat-bot named "Eugene Goostman" made headlines for "his" good showing during a Turing test, in which he was able to fool human judges into thinking he was a real person.

DCI

The notebook was bought from a stationers in the English university city of Cambridge, where Turing was a fellow at King's College.

It was among papers left by Turing after his death in 1954 to friend and fellow mathematician, Robin Gandy.

On blank pages of the notebook, Gandy wrote a journal in which he called Turing a "dead father figure." Bonhams said the document remained hidden among Gandy's personal effects until his death.

Before the sale, Hatton told AFP that she hoped the notebook can be made available to researchers.
"What I really, really hope for is that a collector buys it and makes it available to an institution, at least loans it for a few years and makes it available to scholars," she said.
Andrew Hodges, who wrote the biography that inspired "The Imitation Game" said Turing was "parsimonious with his words and everything from his pen has special value.
"This notebook shines extra light on how, even when he was enmeshed in great world events, he remained committed to free-thinking work in pure mathematics."

Bonhams said a portion of the proceeds will be donated to charity.

"The Imitation Game" won an Oscar in February for best adapted screenplay. It had been nominated for eight Academy Awards.

Cool Motor cycle stunts in IET, Lucknow

Motorcycle(bike) stunts

Manually controlled robot in a hurdle race.

Cloud Lamp Brings Thunder and Lightning Inside

Interiors designers frequently speak about bringing the indoors outside to expand the living space. This designer wants to bring the outside in.

Richard Clarkson has conceived Cloud, a computer-controlled lamp that creates an audio-visual sensation for the homeowner. When a hidden sensor detects the motion of people around it, the lamp flashes and booms in realistic thundercloud manner.

In addition to bringing the weather indoors — sans rain — users can stream music through the fiber-filled cloud via a Bluetooth-compatible device. And the lights are able to change colors and brightness to adjust to your mood.
The Cloud is not for the budget-conscious. It costs $3,360 for the tricked-out model, which has a wireless remote, color-changing lights, two speakers plus a subwoofer and the motion detection. An additional $240 will get you a satellite add-on that makes the visual aspects of Cloud more realistic.

A less expensive version goes for $960 but doesn’t include the bells and whistles.

Credit: Richard Clarkson Studio

Beware the Cloned App, They may contain Malware

Cybercriminals can take advantage of the popularity of an app by creating a clone, which can extract personal data or even allow an attack to gain control of the device.

Malicious software is increasingly making its way into mobile phones through "cloned" versions of popular apps, and software weaknesses in legitimate ones, security researchers said Tuesday.

McAfee Labs said in its quarterly threat assessment that weaknesses in app security are becoming a growing problem for owners of mobile devices. In some cases, cybercriminals can take advantage of the popularity of an app by creating a clone, which can extract personal data or even allow an attack to gain control of the device.

This was the case with "Flappy Birds," a mobile game which saw a meteoric rise but was later withdrawn by its creator. McAfee Labs sampled 300 Flappy Bird clones and found that almost 80 percent contained malware.

"Some of the behavior we found includes making calls without the user's permission; sending, recording, and receiving SMS messages; extracting contact data; and tracking geolocation. In the worst cases, the malware gained root access, which allows uninhibited control of anything on the mobile device including confidential business information," the report said.

The McAfee report said some legitimate apps have security flaws which can be exploited by hackers. The researchers said they discovered an Android trojan "which exploits an encryption method weakness in the popular messaging app WhatsApp" and then steals conversations and pictures stored on the device.

"Although this vulnerability has now been fixed, we can easily imagine cybercriminals continuing to look for other flaws in this well-known app," the report said.

The researchers also said they identified malware that can steal money from a digital wallet. One of the malware programs identified "is disguised as an update for Adobe Flash Player or another legitimate utility app," and can take over a digital wallet to send a money transfer to the attacker's server.

Elusive On/Off Switch Found for Human Consciousness

When I was a child about nine years old or so, I embarked on a mission to discover the barrier between waking and sleeping. I believed that if I concentrated each night before falling asleep, I would recognize the moment I slipped out of consciousness and into dream. I never found the precise line — although I did, unintentionally, teach myself to lucid dream.

But now there is research showing that the brain does have an on/off switch that triggers unconsciousness. Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe for the first time a way to switch off consciousness by electrically stimulating a part of the brain called the claustrum.

Their accidental discovery could lead to a deeper understanding of a fundamental mystery of the human brain; that is, how conscious awareness arises.

The discovery came while the researchers were studying a woman who has epilepsy. During a procedure, they used deep brain electrodes to record signals from different parts of her brain in order to determine where here seizures were originating. One electrode was place next to the claustrum, a thin, sheet-like structure underneath the neocortex. Although this area has never been electrically stimulated before, it had been implicated in the past as a possible control center for consciousness by neuroscientist Francis Crick, who identified the structure of DNA, and his colleague Christof Koch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.

Koubeissi and his team found that Crick and Koch might have been on to something. When they stimulated the area with electrical impulses from the brain electrodes, the woman stopped reading, stared blankly into space and didn’t respond to auditory or visual commands. Her breathing slowed as well. She had lost consciousness. When the scientists turned off the electrical stimuli, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of blanking out. Additional attempts were tried over two days and each time, the same thing happened.

New Scientist reported on the results and in the article Koubeissi says he thinks the claustrum indeed plays a vital role in triggering conscious. “I would liken it to a car,” he told

“A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there’s only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key.”

One researcher, Anil Seth, who studies consciousness at the University of Sussex, UK, pointed out that the woman in the study had had part of her hippocampus removed earlier as a way to treat her epilepsy, so she doesn’t represent a “normal” brain.

Additional research is needed. But the results could open wide a door on one of the most mysterious aspects of existence. We could determine once and for all what living creatures are aware of themselves and the world around them.

Credit: PASIEKA/Science Photo Library/Corbis

Algae Turns Its Internal Quantum Computer On and Off

 

Photosynthetic algae make the most of the energy they receive and then deliver that energy from leaves with near perfect efficiency.

 

Scientists have shown that certain algae which use quantum effects to optimize photosynthesis are also capable of switching it off. It's a discovery that could lead to highly efficient organic solar cells and quantum-based electronics.
Like quantum computers, some organisms are capable of scanning all possible options in order to choose the most efficient path or solution. For plants and some photosynthetic algae, this means the ability to make the most of the energy they receive and then deliver that energy from leaves with near perfect efficiency. This effect, called quantum decoherence, is what allows some algae to survive in very low levels of light.

Recently, scientists from the UNSW School of Physics studied one of these algae, a tiny single-celled organism called cryptophytes. They typically live at the bottom of pools of water, or under thick ice, where light is scarce. The researchers found that there's a class of cryptophytes in which quantum decoherence is switched off, and it's on account of a single genetic mutation that alters the shape of a light-harvesting protein.
In quantum mechanics, a system is coherent when all quantum waves are in step with each other. When it's coherent, it can exist in many different states simultaneously, an effect known as superposition.
The researchers used X-ray crystallography to determine the crystal structure of the light-harvesting complexes from three different species. Two cryptophyte species had a mutation that led to the insertion of an extra amino acid that changes the structure of the protein complex, which disrupts decoherence.

Original article appeared on iO9; all rights reserved.

LEDs Deliver Speedy Wi-Fi Signals

Home wireless networks use routers that transmit data via radio waves, usually at a few hundred megabits per second. Years from now the routers might use LEDs, sending data at ten times that speed for a fraction of the cost.

A laboratory in the U.K. has demonstrated the technology with a device that transmits data in the flickering light of an LED at 10 gigabits per second. It’s called the Ultra-parallel visible light communications (UP-VLC) project, a joint venture between several British universities and partly government-funded.

For years, engineers have been exploring the use of light as a medium for transmitting data because it offers more channels to broadcast on. That could work better in situations where lots of people are trying to access the same network to send information — say, at a conference. Currently, in these situations, when a room full of people try to access a Wi-Fi connection at the same time, their collective use of the same wireless router slows the Internet connection. Using LEDs would mean less interference.

To send a signal, the LEDs change intensity millions of times per second. This is exactly the same thing that regular wireless routers and AM radios do, except with visible light rather than radio waves.

To further boost the data-carrying capacity, the researchers transmitted the data on three different wavelengths of light: red, blue and green. Each carried 3.5 gigabits per second. To the eye, the three signals just looked like a white light. The light actually flickered, but it was too fast for humans to see.

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute demonstrated LED-based data transmission as well, at speeds up to 3 Gbits/s. Chinese and American teams have also shown that LED transmission and receiving can be done — there’s at least one company called Visible Light Communications promoting slower versions of the technology.

As with any new technology there’s a down side. One issue with visible light is that it is line-of-sight. Unlike radio waves, light from LEDs doesn’t bend around corners easily. Light waves also don’t penetrate solids, whereas a wireless router works even in another room. And it won’t be easy to make this work in bright sunlight, as the sun would overwhelm the receivers.

Visible light would, however, work better than radio in places with lots of interference, like a trade show in which thousands of cell phone conversations and wireless connections are happening at once. Because the flickering of the LEDs is so fast, people can’t see it and so the signal could be integrated into a room’s overhead lights.

via BBC, University of Edinburgh

Credit: University of Edinburgh

Skateboard Tank Rolls Over Any Terrain

As it stands, skateboarding is fairly limited to the smooth surfaces of roads, sidewalks and skate parks. But a new all-terrain board — if you can even call it that — seeks to jump the curb and go off road.

Invented by Dan Baldwin, the so-called “Ungoverned” resembles a hybrid of a skateboard and tank and is designed to roll over rocks, sand, snow and other obstacles. The waterproof prototype’s spiked tracks are powered by a four-stroke engine situated between the feet of the rider, who control acceleration via a hand-held wired device. Top speeds haven’t been announced yet, but judging by this video, the Ungoverned has some real get up and go.

Baldwin points out that the 108-pound vehicle is much lighter than a snowmobile, not to mention the 143-pound Scarpar Powerboard, a similar prototype he created.

Australian startup Scarpar Pty is slated to further develop and bring Baldwin’s original Powerboard to market next year. In the meantime, he’s hoping Scarpar will do the same with the Ungoverned.

via Gizmag

Credit: Ungoverned

Alien 'Star Engine' Detectable in Exoplanet Data?

In 1948, astronomer Fred Zwicky, the esteemed co-discoverer of dark matter, speculated that “fusion jets” could be used by a future civilization to navigate our sun and solar system planets through the galaxy. He suggested that pellets of fuel could be fired into the sun to produce explosions that would push the sun along like firecrackers exploding in a tin can. But where to go?

Zwicky thought that the entire solar system could reach Alpha Centauri in a few thousand years.

Forty years later, physicist Leonid Shkadov proposed that far advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might harness the energy output of their sun for interstellar migration. They would use a “stellar engine” — no need for fusion motors here. Simply construct an immense spherical mirror that reflects some of the star’s radiation back onto its surface.

This radiation pressure on the star creates an imbalance where a net force pushes the star in the opposite direction. This is simply Newtonian physics, though Sir Isaac would have never imagined such an application.

To work, such a stellar engine would have to be a megastructure, millions of miles across (shown above). The bad news is that a planet might have to be dismantled to make such a monstrosity. The good news is that such megastructures — if they exist — should be detectable with today’s telescope technology.

Duncan Forgan, of the University of Edinburgh, proposes that such a mega-mirror might obstruct part of the disk of a star during our observations that look for planets passing across the face of a star, an event call a transit.

He modeled hypothetical light curves produced by exoplanets transiting a star that possesses a Shkadov thruster. Depending on its position, the gigantic mirror would abruptly block off the planet’s shadow prematurely (shown below), because it is occulting a portion of the star. The silhouette of the immense mirror would mysteriously truncate the predicted symmetrical U-shaped dip in starlight that is measure with each transit as a planet follows along its racetrack orbit.

ANALYSIS: Asteroid Forensics May Point to Alien Space Miners

It would be difficult to explain the oddball light curve that would be cause by such a intervening structure. Forgan cautions that the presence of starspots can produce “dents” in the transit light curve, as the planet crosses a starspot and this could be misinterpreted as an artificial structure. However the starspot would rotate out of view on subsequent transits. Assuming the monster-mirror is fixed in space, it’s silhouette should remain stable.

NASA’s Kepler space observatory has spent the last five years amassing a huge vault of planetary transit data on 150,000 stars in the constellation Cygnus. And so this hypothesis is testable.

The problem is there are many unknowns heaped upon many other unknowns. What is the probability an alien civilization has the wherewithal and audacity to try building such a monstrosity, and that it is close enough to detect?

After much speculation Forgan cautiously estimates a lower limit of one star in one million stars having such a detectable megastructure. This would put the nearest such star thruster 1,000 light-years away at best.

The Kepler database is several orders of magnitude smaller in surveyed stars. With such low chances of success it would be hard to convince anyone to fund a space observatory to go looking for alien engineering. So it will all be left as a serendipitous SETT (Search for Extraterrestrial Technology) opportunity as exoplanet surveys continue.

Why would a far advanced civilization go to the budget-busting expense of doing a megastructure project to steer its star around? It’s estimated that the sun has passed through 10 cold molecular hydrogen clouds laced with dust, along its galactic orbit. The consequences are that this would dim a star, and that it turn could cause some serious climate change on a planet. Long-lived aliens may want to steer around these galactic potholes.

Or the extraterrestrials might want to avoid a predicted close passage to a nearby star that might destabilize a comet cloud believe to surround planetary systems. (The approaching comet ISON is believed to be a distant visitor from this hypothesized Oort cloud around our solar system.)

There is an extraordinarily small but finite chance that evidence for such mega-engineering is buried in archival astronomy data. What’s more, the absence of such evidence might suggest there is an upper limit to how far a technological civilization can progress. Or, more sobering, it means there are narrow limits on the longevity of a technological society.

Supermoon 2013: Readers' Photos

On June 22 and 23, the Earth's only natural satellite put on a dazzling show. Although the 'supermoon' phenomenon isn't exactly an astronomical term, and it's not an event of any great scientific consequence, it captivated the world. The cosmic coincidence of the moon being at its full phase as it made its closest approach (perigee) in its elliptical orbit, caused the 2013 supermoon to be 14 percent larger in the sky (when compared to its furthest point in orbit, or apogee) and 30 percent brighter, according to NASA. It rapidly became a beautiful astronomical spectacle.

First look at Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1—a free update to Windows 8—is coming later this year, and a prerelease version is available now for you to try. Windows 8.1 has new ways for you to personalize your PC and includes a wave of awesome new apps and services.



How to install Windows 8.1 Preview from an ISO file 

To install Windows 8.1 Preview from an ISO file, you must first convert the ISO file into installation media stored on a DVD or a USB flash drive.

If you're using Windows 8, follow these steps to install Windows 8.1 Preview from an ISO file:

• Download the ISO (.iso) file.


• Double-tap or double-click the ISO file.


• Double-tap or double-click setup.exe and follow the steps.

Download:-

Product Key: NTTX3-RV7VB-T7X7F-WQYYY-9Y92F

Important: Windows 8.1 Preview isn't currently supported on some tablets and PCs with newer 32-bit Atom processors. Get the details

Language		Link to download		SHA-1 hash value
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English 32-bit (x86)		Download                                     (2.8 GB)		0x447CCD24EB3DC6CFD9A42E62A5F6418B578E3CBF
Arabic 64-bit (x64)		Download (2.8 GB)		0x15C3DD68E53C6B4602D06E2CAC577480D2E9331E
Arabic 32-bit (x86)		Download (3.8 GB)		0xC76BBB780893851892739768019EB8B9F235DF2A
Chinese (Simplified) 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.9 GB)		0xA34B8F71DCE39303F81402E2B44DA17117BB8970
Chinese (Simplified) 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.9 GB)		0xF394D21EB655867E455B2DCAAEC37A4160F6F812
Chinese (Traditional) 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.9 GB)		0x8A8F583D23B55F8D0BD1E3F6F3B3376F60A6498B
Chinese (Traditional) 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.9 GB)		0xF394D21EB655867E455B2DCAAEC37A4160F6F812
French 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.8 GB)		0x77B998037F5117A0339E3C575DC575812186A36B
French 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0x938EAAF0CED4A4D80A4619945D22AECD8368F360
German 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.8 GB)		0xD36DCEB20A734905D45FCC8A29CAFAEB83D8821F
German 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0xB59B03B978C9B9C79937E77F4FD86E6D4B3F605B
Japanese 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.8 GB)		0x90550D4CF6084177F4D8B15FF1935F04E02A8C91
Japanese 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0x39AC35DC262DE7BA1E4FA76D22840A135F98C383
Korean 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.8 GB)		0x42334C1334A3A5F3AF7D7BDBACA328ABA24E4514
Korean 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0xE15BB0ACD03AF0B034BC9C9C35F20C56D7702F97
Portuguese (Brazil) 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.7 GB)		0xFC163AB555EE347C3D70C608DFBC6860C48F1FCD
Portuguese (Brazil) 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0x8EE8EE031C656AE547E4076540562CEC132F741C
Russian 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.7 GB)		0xD23B862AE7FA349BBE84FCE4833CAF6EBE524104
Russian 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0xB2804B267B131C100E030B68EA826CC5328BDAFB
Spanish 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.8 GB)		0x83D93447997167F5DF1C37C1BE5DC897DAC28096
Spanish 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.8 GB)		0xE397E9B50FE449BFB3EBD68793CDE8B8C92E9036
Swedish 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.7 GB)		0xEE699B6D8B1B010E2F7AE56CF8A07683E3E077B2
Swedish 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.7 GB)		0x46830490C8A9D8B92FB5C1EB123915D55AB6C973
Turkish 64-bit (x64)		Download (3.7 GB)		0xF82792BD5629FE04CCD67EDA64E03DB1AFD2B7C7
Turkish 32-bit (x86)		Download (2.7 GB)

How to Fit 1,000 Terabytes Onto a DVD

DVDs and Blu-Rays don’t get a lot of respect from technophiles, because the optical disks aren’t able to store as much data as a typical hard drive. A team at Swinburne University in Australia could change that, by making it possible to store an entire year’s worth of video onto an optical disk. That could be good news for movie buffs but would also appeal to big data centers that who prefer to store the tremendous amounts of information they save in the least amount of space.

Storing data on conventional DVDs and Blu-Ray disk involves a single laser that burns a mark into the disk’s surfacing, changing its chemistry. The mark represents a 1 or 0, which is the basic binary language of all computer data. But because the marks can’t be smaller than a half the wavelength of the laser beam, there is a limit, to how many marks can be burned into the surface of a disk.

The Swinburne team, led by optoelectronics professor Min Gu, did something different. They used two lasers instead of one.

Each laser beamed a different wavelength of light onto the disk. The first one was in the near-infrared and created a spot of light, just like an ordinary DVD laser. The second laser beam was violet and partially interfered with the near-infrared beam in a way that ultimately shrank the spot burned into the disk. The technique shrank the size of the spot down to nine nanometers, enough to put 1,000 terabytes on a disk. For comparison, a Blu-Ray disk can hold 50 GB of data and a typical DVD holds about 4.7 GB of data.

The lasers are similar to those used in current players, so building a commercial version wouldn’t require any new technologies. Not too far in the future, the behemoth storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disk might seem as quaint as the 1.4 megabyte floppy disk.

Wearable Solar Clothing Fit For Charging

Whether it’s drone-proof hoodies, eye-tracking dresses or pants that let you text from your pocket, these days, clothing is doing a lot more than just making fashion statements and shielding us from the elements.

New to this task-oriented wardrobe is Wearable Solar, a potential clothing line that incorporates solar panels into garments for charging personal electronic devices.

The project led by Christiaan Holland of Dutch creative agency Gelderland Valoriseert, fashion designer Pauline van Dongen, solar panel specialist Gertjan Jongerden and students from theUniversity of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Two prototypes were created — a dress and a coat. Van Dongen said she carefully studied the layered structure in human skin cells, then translated that research into her designs. For example, with the coat, flaps embedded with solar cells can be unfolded on the shoulder and waist when the sun is shining. Alternatively, the flaps easily fold away and can be worn invisibly. Just a head’s up: Be prepared to feel like a lost character from the Matrix or Mortal Kombat, as unfolding the solar flaps is tough look, full of sharp, jutting shoulders and sweeping accents at the waist.

“The coat contains fairly rigid solar cells, which is why I used a combination of wool and leather. These materials both provide the strength needed and are aesthetically pleasing,” Van Dongen tolda Dutch design website. “In total some 48 solar cells are incorporated into modular leather panels, allowing a typical smartphone to be 50 percent charged if worn in the full sun for an hour.”

She added: “For the dress I used flexible solar cells. These are less efficient but are easier to integrate and more comfortable to wear. The dress is made from a flowing lightweight wool combined with leather. The cells have been subtly integrated in such a way that it’s hardly noticeable when you wear the dress as a normal piece of clothing.”

Future Buildings Could be Made of Artificial Bone

This photo shows the brick-and-mortar pattern of simulated bone and nacre against the backdrop of real nacre found in the inner shell of many molluscs.

 material in town and its origins may surprise you.

Developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), human bone is the inspiration behind the latest high-tech composite, which can be made in just a few hours using a 3D printer.

The new material, which is lauded for its durability, low density and environmentally sustainable constituents, gets its strength from its bone-like structure. Real bones have a complex hierarchical structure thanks to their two main building blocks, collagen protein and hydroxyapatite minerals.

MIT's new material replicates this hierarchical pattern, which is produced in bones with the help of electrochemical reactions. Such reactions are difficult to reproduce in a lab, but with a 3D printer, the researchers were able to replicate the fracture-resistant structure.

Under a microscope, the synthetic material the researchers created looks like a staggered brick-and-mortar wall. A soft black polymer serves as the mortar, simulating the work of collagen, bone's yielding cushion. A stiff blue polymer forms the bricks, behaving like hydroxyapatite, bone's strong but brittle frame.

And just as collagen and hydroxyapatite help a bone withstand fracturing by dissipating energy and distributing damage over a larger area, so too does the lab-made material. In fact, the material may prove to be even stronger than bone.

"The geometric patterns we used in the synthetic materials are based on those seen in natural materials like bone or nacre, but also include new designs that do not exist in nature," said Markus Buehler, lead researcher in the study.

"As engineers, we are no longer limited to the natural patterns. We can design our own, which may perform even better than the ones that already exist."

The 3D-printed bone material is 22 times more fracture-resistant than any of its constituent parts, an impressive ratio for a lab-made composite.

Researchers suggest that the process of 3D printing super-strong metamaterials is both entirely possible and more cost-effective than traditional methods of manufacturing. Buehler hopes that one day, optimized materials like the one created in MIT's lab will form the basis of entire buildings.

"The possibilities seem endless," he said, "As we are just beginning to push the limits of the kind of geometric features and material combinations we can print."

Shape-Shifting Dresses Respond To Stares

A great dress can easily move people into long fits of staring. Conversely, now those long fits of staring can actually move a dress.

It’s not polite to stare. But you might not be able to help yourself if you see someone wearing either of these two dresses made by fashion designer Ying Gao. Each one contorts and lights up whenever it detects a fixed gaze.

“We use an eye-tracking system so the dresses move when a spectator is staring,” Gao toldDezeen. “(The system) can also turn off the lights, then the dresses illuminate.”

The dresses are embedded with eye-tracking technology that reacts to an observer’s gaze by activating tiny motors that move parts of the dress in captivating patterns. Both gaze-activated dresses use glow-in-the-dark thread, creating a psychedelic effect when under black lights. One dress boasts an experimental design with luminescent tendrils, while the other has a more traditional cut.

“A photograph is said to be ‘spoiled’ by blinking eyes — here however, the concept of presence and of disappearance are questioned, as the experience of chiaroscuro (clarity/obscurity) is achieved through an unfixed gaze,” writes Gao.