I’ve been thinking about writing a sci-fi-ish story for a while and I happened upon this today:
[quote]Austrian and Japanese researchers on Wednesday unveiled solar cells thinner than a thread of spider silk that are flexible enough to be wrapped around a single human hair.
The thin-film device, comprising electrodes on a plastic foil, is about 1.9 micro-metres thick, a tenth the size of the thinnest solar cells currently available, the researchers said.
One micro-metre is one millionth of a metre (3.3 feet).
“The total thickness of this device is less than a typical thread of spider silk,” the researchers said in a report carried by online science journal Nature Communications.
“Being ultra-thin means you don’t feel its weight and it is elastic,” said one of the researchers, Tsuyoshi Sekitani from the University of Tokyo.
“You could attach the device to your clothes like a badge to collect electricity (from the sun)… Elderly people who might want to wear sensors to monitor their health would not need to carry around batteries,” Sekitani told AFP.[/quote] news.yahoo.com/scientists-develo … 14134.html
This is really kind of cool and has lots of wonderful and weird applications for a twisted writer bent on weirding people around in his stories.
Anything else out there that’s futuristic but not altogether impossible in the nearish future? For reference, I love the technofuture of Spider Jerusalem.
Yeah: flexible digital displays. Weave some of your photovoltaic thread through one of them and what could you cook up? An iPad Shirt, sure. But how about self-powered smart drones?
Arthur C Clarke wrote a story somewhat along these lines: Sunstorm.
Read Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and Freedom? Great near future sci fi? Elements of Google Glass.
[quote]If you venture into a coffee shop in the coming months and see someone with a pair of futuristic glasses that look like a prop from “Star Trek,” don’t worry. It’s probably just a Google employee testing the company’s new augmented-reality glasses.
On Wednesday, Google gave people a clearer picture of its secret initiative called Project Glass. The glasses are the company’s first venture into wearable computing.[/quote]
Just when you thought those guys with blue tooths in their ears were douches.
I’m pretty sure I invented the kindle when I was 17 but people told me it was a dumbass idea. Now who is the dumbass? ME! For not following it through. :roflmao: You can have the self-lighting smokes idea. I haven’t got the drive to make it happen.
I’m pretty sure I invented the kindle when I was 17 but people told me it was a dumbass idea. Now who is the dumbass? ME! For not following it through. :roflmao: You can have the self-lighting smokes idea. I haven’t got the drive to make it happen.[/quote]
I shall send it to Phillip Morris immediately.
But that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. I’d like a disruptor that turned off cellphones that people play games on. Nothing harmful. Just shuts them down. I remember years ago on some forum some POS kept kicking me off the board.
It got old after a while, but I imagine he quite enjoyed it. :bluemad:
[quote]STANFORD (CBS13) - In the 1966 film “Fantastic Voyage,” a submarine, full of scientists, is shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a seriously wounded diplomat.
Forty-six years later, the idea sounds less far fetched. In a Stanford lab, engineers are perfecting their fantastic voyage.
“And then, we can make it smaller,” said electrical engineer Professor Ada Poon, Ph.D.
Poon says smaller is the name of the game.
“We have been in this project for more than four years. So we encounter a lot of obstacles along the way and then we solve them one by one, said Poon.
Instead of a battery, which takes up lots of space, the device that will be used for travel is powered wirelessly with electromagnetic radio waves.
“The prototype we built is 3mm by 4mm. You can see here that we have a 2mm by 2mm receiving antennae,” said Dan Pivonka, PhD.
The result is a new class of medical devices that are so small they can travel through the bloodstream.
“Right now we could go to the arteries. The midsize could go through the arteries, but we want it to even go through some smaller bloodstreams,” said Poon.[/quote]
Incredible. Video games that allow you to literally blast off cancer cells. or fat cells.
Someone really needs to forward that video to some of the (large) Taiwanese companies I deal with whose websites are either unusable or nonexistent. Hey, 20 years on, I guess they’ve worked out the wrinkles in this new-fangled internet thing, right? Time for Taiwan to dip its toe cautiously in the water, methinks.
Someone really needs to forward that video to some of the (large) Taiwanese companies I deal with whose websites are either unusable or nonexistent. Hey, 20 years on, I guess they’ve worked out the wrinkles in this new-fangled internet thing, right? Time for Taiwan to dip its toe cautiously in the water, methinks.[/quote]
Hahaha! Yep it’s seems that a lot of websites here were built late circa 2001-2005 Flash is popular here but, with little or no reason to have built the site in Flash, other than someone learnt to, and that would do. Might be some time before they realise that huge amounts of users are on iPhones and iPads that don’t use Flash or that those sites are not geared to mobile use, but hey ho! Taiwan should be using HTML 5 by the time it’s super technocrap from the past.
