Proving there’s nothing wrong with looking good while fighting crime, new woven polyester fabrics containing a network of conductive threads connected to a built-in microcontroller will sound the alarm if cut or penetrated. The smart fabrics will not only alert authorities, but it can provide an exact location of the problem.

Developed by the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, the fabrics feature interwoven, silver-coated conductive threads that have an advantage … Read More → "Crime-fighting curtains sound the alarm when disturbed"

It was way back in 1974 when a project kickstarted from within the audio industry group at Philips in the Netherlands. The premise was to develop an optical audio disc with superior sound to that of the incumbent vinyl format, and coming in at 20cm, the initial dabblings were far chunkier than the products that eventually went to market.

Fast forward three years to 1977, and the group established a lab with the sole mission of building CDs and players – they opted for the name ‘Compact Disc’ because it was in line with another Philips … Read More → "The CD turns 30: The first player and album were released today in 1982"

How do you know when you have slipped from detail-oriented, past anal-retentive, all the way to obsessive-compulsive?

You might be an extreme case if you can’t wait to get your hands on Plus+ socks fromBlacksocks, a Swiss company that attaches a radio ID tag to its socks so you always put the correct pair together. Apparently this is something of a problem for people who wear nothing but identical black socks.< … Read More → "Radio-tagged socks for the obsessive"

Forty years ago this year, BBC premiered a series of four 30-minute films written and anchored by art critic and author John Berger. Soon adapted into a book, Ways of Seeing (public library) went on to become a landmark postmodernist critique of Western cultural aesthetics, exploring not only how visual culture came to dominate society but also how ideologies are created and transmitted via images — a subject of pressing timeliness in that golden age … Read More → "Ways of Seeing: John Berger’s classic 1972 BBC critique of consumer culture"

Building logic gates out of silicon is old hat, as is building them from discrete transistors, 555 chips, LEGO, and even gears. [Yukio-Pegio Gunji] and [Yuta Nishiyama] from Kobe University, along with [Andrew Adamatzky] from the aptly named Unconventional Computing Centre at the University of the West of England decided they needed a new way to build logic gates using crabs (PDF warning). Yes, the team successfully built functional logic … Read More → "Making logic gates out of crabs"

NASA’s Curiosity rover is traversing its way to Mount Sharp on the Martian surface, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to fully exploit the potential scientific discoveries all around on its way there. In fact, NASA’s just revealed that the rover’s discovered evidence of an old streambed. There’s been other evidence pointing to the previous existence of water on Mars, but Curiosity’ … Read More → "NASA’s Curiosity Rover discovers ancient streambed on Mars"

The ISS is pretty cool and all, and it’s got a sweet view of Earth, but you know what? Welive on Earth. Let’s do some exploring! The Orlando Sentinel is reporting that NASA may have its eye on a more exotic location for the successor to the ISS: out beyond the orbit of the Moon, serving as a gateway to Mars and beyond.

… Read More → "Will NASA’s next space station be beyond the moon?"

OpenDyslexic’s characters have been given “heavy-weighted bottoms” to prevent them from flipping and swapping around in the minds of their readers.

A recent update to the popular app Instapaper has adopted the text format as an option for its users.

The font has also been built into a word processor, an ebook reader and has been installed on school computers.
via Read More → "OpenDyslexic font gains ground with help of Instapaper"

We all know the consequences of driving on under-inflated tires: faster wear, increased potential for popping, and decreased gas milage. About half of all commercial vehicle breakdowns result from tire problems, according to the American Trucking Association, and tires are the single biggest expense for fleet operators. Since 2011, Goodyear has been working on self-regulating tires, and next year the company will begin testing its new self-inflating technology … Read More → "Self-regulating tires inflate while rolling"