What you’re looking at is a carbon fiber drive shaft and a steel drive shaft being twisted with force until they break. As you can see in this torque test between the two, the carbon fiber shaft doesn’t budge (that’s not a still image, folks) while the steel shaft cork screws itself and becomes deformed under the same amount of twisting pressure. Gnarly.
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Crushing cans with your bare hands or stepping on them with your full body weight or shooting them with a bb gun are all fun ways to destroy an aluminum can. What might be most fun is letting it crush itself. How? Magical pressure.
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You might have heard grandma or grandpa predicting a storm because they "could feel it in their bones" and when a storm hit you probably thought they’d been watching the weather channel. Turns out, their joints *probably* do get a little achy when it’s about to rain.
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Jellyfish are amazing creatures, travelling in massive blooms and pulsating mesmerically to drive themselves through the water. But how does that simple motion manage to push them through the water so quickly?
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Outside of pen input, pressure sensors don’t get much love these days. However, Georgia Tech has just built an extremely accurate sensor that could give pressure-based devices their due. When a user pushes down on the new invention, its grid of zinc-oxide nanowires emits light that’s captured by fiber optics underneath at a very sensitive 6,300DPI. The combination of high resolution with light-speed responsiveness could lead to touch surfaces that capture far more detail than we’re used to. While computing interfaces are clearly prime candidates for the technology, Georgia Tech also sees potential uses in pressure-based fingerprint readers and even devices that simulate touch with skin-like behavior. We’ve reached out to the school for more information regarding its long-term plans, but it already anticipates improving the sensors with more efficient manufacturing techniques. Take a closer look at the sensor after the break.
Update: We’ve since had a chance to follow up, and we’re told that commercialization is likely five to seven years ahead.
Source: Georgia Tech
Flexible circuitry is frequently a one-way affair — we’ve seen bendy displays and touch layers, but rarely both in one surface. UC Berkeley is at last merging those two technologies through a plastic skin whose display reacts to touch. By curing a polymer on top of a silicon wafer, the school’s researchers found that they could unite a grid of pressure sensors with an OLED screen; they just had to remove the polymer to create a flexible skin. As the film-like material can be laminated on just about anything, it maylead to touch displays in places where they were previously impractical, or even very thin blood pressure sensors. It could also be easy to produce — since the skins use off-the-shelf chip manufacturing techniques, commercial products are well within reach.
Filed under: Science
Via: Phys.org
Source: UC Berkeley
After a long and awkward delay, there’s been some movement in the saga known as “Surface Pro’s Pen accessory won’t work with the software that could most benefit from it.” Microsoft’s Panos Panay tweeted yesterday that he had a beta driver from Wacom that had enabled his Pen’s pressure sensitivity in Adobe Photoshop. Around the same time, an updated driver (“Enhanced Tablet Driver 7.1.1-12”) appeared on Wacom’s site, which PocketNow reckons contains the necessary fix. This file may not be final, and there’s no specific reference to Microsoft’s tablet in its changelog, but it’s definitely worth a try at the source link below. Meanwhile, if you’re one of the artistic types who’s been holding off from buying a Surface Pro until this is resolved, then maybe just stay patient a little longer until more users report back on their progress. We’re giving it a go ourselves, and in any case we’ve been assured by our own contacts at Microsoft that there’ll be a happy ending within days.
Filed under: Tablets, Software, Microsoft
Source: Panos Panay (Twitter), Wacom
Apple likes to build devices using metal. Unfortunately, the material isn’t usually conducive to touch, in the literal sense of the word — capacitive touch doesn’t always register on a metal gadget, and you can often forget about a response to pressure. A newly published patent from the company could at last get these unfeeling devices to acknowledge our grip without putting sensors above the surface. Apple’s method would detect the changes in capacitance between hidden nodes when a device’s shell is put under strain, and trigger a hardware or software reaction when there’s a strong-enough squeeze. The concept is simple enough. Just what Apple would like to do with the patent, if anything, is the real riddle. The patent was originally filed in 2009, and covers just about everything computer- or mobile-based that Apple could produce; any burning desire to use the technique would likely have been satisfied by now. If our future iPhones or Macs ever answer a hug with more than just cold indifference, though, we’ll know why.
Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops, Tablets, Apple
Source: USPTO
A gigantic storm is set to hit the West Coast later today, bringing with it over a foot of rain. It’s what meteorologists call an Atmospheric River—but what is that, exactly? More »
We know better than most that when you’re working to a deadline, constant pop-ups, notifications and pings can be a real pain. Our frustrations might soon become a thing of the past, however, with some help from boffins at the
[Image Credit: Getty Images / Jean Louis Batt]
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Software
Pressure-sensing PC technology knows when you’re busy, blocks notifications accordingly originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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