gadgets

Researchers at the university of Storrs (Connecticut) used the electrospinning process to create long electrochemical polymers...Well, let's do shorter : researchers manufactured with changing colours.

Greg Sotzing, who seems to be the chief, explains that they have created a 1 kilometer long fibre that changes colour when they apply a different electrical voltage (red to blue, orange to blue). It's washable and a mix of different colours can be bent in a T-shirt, a shirt, a cover, ... that must also contain thing metal wires connected to a battery and a micro-controller. Hey hey !

All the small intermingled wires divide clothing into pixels, whose user could change the colour according to its tastes and its moods. Greg even imagines connecting the system to a camera and thus, clothing would match the colour of their environment. Here is a quite useful trick.

In 2003 already, BusinessWeek wrote an article on Dupont and the EIC laboratories which worked on camouflage for the US army. Howevere, the process was not the same one.

For the occasion, here is an article about a clothing that makes you invisible. It happens in Japan, why am I not surprised ?

The picture is impressive but you should know that it was taken through a special lens, otherwise it does not work at all. It's limited, but can be used also for the army.
Worst! There is a camera behind the guy, a camera that sends the picture from the back to the front, thanks to a spotlight and a reflecting surface.

source : NewScientist, april.

for those who do not know :
- a pixel is one of the many tiny dots that make up the representation of a picture in a computer's memory. Each such information element is not really a dot, nor a square, but an abstract sample.
- Electrospinning is a process by which fibers are drawn out from a viscous polymer/composite/sol-gel solution or melt by applying an electric field to a droplet of the solution (most often at a metallic needle tip).

Labels: gadgets