Archive for June, 2005

This is not one of the prod­ucts of the future that I was look­ing for­ward to, but if it gets rid of that sweaty boxer feel­ing (if you live/have lived in Texas, and you’re a guy, nat­u­rally, you know what I mean) then I might give it a try.

Some com­pany called Green-shield out of Tai­wan, “a Tai­wanese nan­otech com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in socks and under­wear designed to pro­tect you from the tra­di­tional dis­com­forts that plague these items”. Now that’s ingenuity.

The arti­cle where I read about this is basi­cally all promo-speak, but here’s some from it–

They have cre­ated arti­cles of cloth­ing that they claim can elim­i­nate up to 99.99 per­cent of bac­te­ria, 90 per­cent of odor and 75 per­cent of sticky mois­ture within the cloth as well as con­tribut­ing to the over­all health of the wearer.This is achieved through nan­otech­nol­ogy. Before the mate­r­ial is woven and sewn together to cre­ate gar­ments, Green-shield’s fibers are altered through a patented process so that they begin to release a con­stant stream of neg­a­tive ions and far-infrared rays.

The neg­a­tive ions cre­ate a mag­netic field that inhibits the repro­duc­tion of bac­te­ria, thus elim­i­nat­ing odor and low­er­ing the risk of skin infec­tion or irri­ta­tion. The neg­a­tive ions also help to increase cir­cu­la­tion and elim­i­nate tox­ins from the blood by react­ing with them and break­ing them down.

Mean­while, the far-infrared rays are absorbed by cells—not just in the skin but through­out the body—causing all the indi­vid­ual atoms to begin vibrat­ing at a higher fre­quency, which speeds up the metab­o­lism and the elim­i­na­tion of wastes. This is par­tic­u­larly help­ful for alle­vi­at­ing sore­ness due to fatigue or injury, accord­ing to Green-shield.

Well, thank god for a con­stant stream of neg­a­tive ions and far-infrared rays around your pri­vates. One ques­tion though about reduc­ing 90% of the odor – either these peo­ple need some FDS or maybe they should just wipe bet­ter, huh?

Don’t feel like para­phras­ing. Let’s just block quote –

Sci­en­tists who have cre­ated the small­est pre­cisely crafted organic par­ti­cles are billing their break­through as a poten­tial boon to med­i­cine and technology.The tiny struc­tures could one day be used as vehi­cles for deliv­er­ing drugs or genes into the human body or per­haps imag­ing you from the inside-out, the researchers said today. They might also find uses in electronics.

The nan­otech­nol­ogy indus­try has long been mak­ing strong claims, and this lat­est process is in its infancy. And it is no longer a big feat to make small things. Other sci­en­tists have cre­ated molecule-sized struc­tures and even micro­scopic motors in the nanome­ter range. A nanome­ter is a bil­lionth of a meter.

But tra­di­tional nano-products are made mostly of met­als and other inor­ganic mate­ri­als that must be baked, etched or processed with sol­vents that would destroy frag­ile DNA or drugs.

The new struc­tures are made of organic mate­ri­als with­out all the harsh trea­ment and can be con­structed as spheres, rods, cones, or trape­zoids. They could be made biode­grade­able to dis­inti­grate after inser­tion into the body.

“We believe that the par­ti­cles will offer break­throughs in the deliv­ery of ther­a­peu­tic, detec­tion and imag­ing agents for the diag­no­sis and treate­ment of dis­ease,” one of the study’s lead­ers, Joseph DeS­i­mone of the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill, told Live­Science. “In the elctron­ics indus­try, we believe we can make new mate­ri­als for high speed, high-resolution opti­cal displays.”

The new man­u­fac­tur­ing process is called Par­ti­cle Repli­ca­tion in Non­wet­ting Tem­plates, or PRINT, and was detailed in a recent issue of the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety. The work was sup­ported by the National Sci­ence Foundation.

DeS­i­mone and his col­leagues have formed a new com­pany, called Liq­uidia, to attempt to com­mer­cial­ize the discovery.

A day or so late, but the inven­tor of the semi­con­duc­tor chip is dead. God­speed, Mr. Kilby.

Meet the future of tele­por­ta­tion –

Well, Wal­lace and Gromit are the inspi­ra­tion for it at least.

Pro­fes­sors Todd Mowry and Seth Gold­stein of Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity came up with an inter­est­ing take on tele­por­ta­tion based on stop-action clay animation.

“We thought that a good anal­ogy for what we were going to do was clay­ma­tion – some­thing like the Wal­lace and Gromit shows,” Dr Mowry told BBC World Service’s Out­look programme.

What these two guys dreamed up was a novel solu­tion to a sci-fi problem.

(The pro­fes­sors) think that, within a human gen­er­a­tion, we might be able to repli­cate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of mate­r­ial made up of small syn­thetic “atoms”.Cameras would cap­ture the move­ment of an object or per­son and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assem­ble them­selves to make up an exact like­ness of the object.

Pro­fes­sor Gold­stein has envi­sioned that, even­tu­ally, the objects will be built with “nano-dust” – tiny objects that can be pro­grammed to bind to each other and move – but cur­rently they are try­ing to build at a much larger scale, work­ing with objects the size of table-tennis balls.

Their orig­i­nal plan was for the appli­ca­tion to work in face-to-face interaction.

The tech­nol­ogy mir­rors that used to cre­ate the char­ac­ter of Gol­lum.
“I’m in Pitts­burgh, and you’re in Lon­don. How do we make that hap­pen?” Dr Mowry said.

“We can’t tele­port some­body – nobody’s going to travel any­where – but if we’re in our own rooms a sys­tem of cam­eras will cap­ture exactly what’s in each room.”

Inter­est­ing. And very cool.