Bare is a paint that can transform your body into a circuit (without the inconvenience of electrocuting you).
A group of South Korean scientists have developed a transparent memory chip that could be the precursor to completely transparent electronics.
Those little interlaced blades of ice you sometimes get on the edge of ultra-cold things in wet air: that’s the image that popped into my head on seeing the Cara lamp. It’s by designer Andreas Ostwald and that fragile crystal-like shape is composed of interlocked flat white circuit boards with silver tracks, sprinkled with 70 white LEDs. How lighting should be to my mind: simple, elegant and stunning. Though presumably it’s designer status gives it a price premium that’ll place it beyond my lustful reach. [Contemporist via LuxuryLaunches]
Make a wish, blow, see if the LED dandelion seeds sprouting from the circuit board on your wall stay or go. That seems to be the idea with Fragile Future 2, a cool modular lighting system by Dutch house Design Drift. Each piece is approximately 20x30cm, and they can be combined in groups of up to 50 for custom wall-climbing circuits. I’ll take some. [Design Drift, Generate Design via Technabob] galleryPost('fragilefuture', 3, '');
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel have managed to build reliable logic gates out of neurons instead of wires. The process actually sounds fairly simple: a glass plate is coated with cell repellent then etched with the desired circuit pattern. The pattern itself is coated with a cell-friendly adhesive which forces the cells to grow only in the scratched areas. Because these scratched paths are so thin, the neurons grow in one direction only—forming straight connections around the circuit. This method has been used to replicate an AND logic gate that only produces output when it receives two inputs.
From toy guitars to the Furby Gurdy, modders have been taking cute, cuddly kids’ toys and transforming them into the demented, terrifying instruments of your nightmares for years now. The folks at OObject have collected a whole album’s worth of these twisted circuit-bent toy tunes for your listening displeasure. [OObject]
A fourth circuit element called memristor (the first three being resistors, capacitors and inductors) has been proposed since 1971, but HP labs has finally made a working physical model of the thing. What’s so special about this type of circuit? It remembers how much charge previously flowed through it, leading to applications like modelling and simulating brain behaviour in hardware instead of software. For the rest of us, it can totally revolutionise PCs by remembering the state of RAM when you shut off your machine, instantly booting back up where you left off when you come back—as opposed to current RAM that just dumps its load like last night’s fajitas when powered down. [Wired]
There’s very little that’s practical about these paper circuits. Oh, except that they can be printed out as a template and glued directly to a cardboard base. From there, builders can trace markings with wire and the circuit practically builds itself (the link here has some cool music boards for the aspiring eletroneers among you to try out). But in terms of building a personal Batcomputer out of nothing more than processed trees…you might want to invest in technologies that won’t go up in flames when the Penguin ashes his cigarette. [PCBs via MAKE]
