Hasta La Gadget!

Researchers from Asia and Europe have developed the world’s lightest and thinnest organic circuits, which in the future could be used in a range of healthcare applications.

Lighter than a feather, these ultrathin film-like organic transistor integrated circuits are being developed by a research group led by Professor Takao Someya and Associate Professor Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo, who run an Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology (ERATO) program sponsored by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), in collaboration with Siegfried Bauer’s group at the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, Austria.

The circuits are extremely lightweight, flexible, durable and thin, and conform to any surface. They are just 2 microns thick, just 1/5 that of kitchen wrap, and weighing only 3g/m^2, are 30 times lighter than office paper. They also feature a bend radius of 5 microns, meaning they can be scrunched up into a ball, without breaking. Due to these properties the researchers have dubbed them “imperceptible electronics”, which can be placed on any surface and even worn without restricting the users movement.

The integrated circuits are manufactured on rolls of one micron thick plastic film, making them easily scalable and cheap to produce. And if the circuit is placed on a rubber surface it becomes stretchable, able to withstand up to 233% tensile strain, while retaining full functionality.

“This is a very convenient way of making electronics stretchable because you can fabricate high performance devices in a flat state and then just transfer them over to a stretchable substrate and create something that is very compliant and stretchable just by a simple pick and place process.”

This prototype device is a touch sensor featuring a 12×12 array of sensors on a 4.8 cm x 4.8 cm circuit. It is made up of two layers, an integrated circuit layer and a tactile sensor layer.

With the development of these plastic electronics, the possibility for flexible, thin, large area electronics has been realized. In the future, the group would like to expand the capabilities of these circuits.

“The new flexible touch sensor is the world’s thinnest, lightest and people cannot feel the existence of this device. I believe this development will open up a wide range of new applications, from health monitoring systems, wearable medical instruments, and even robotic skins in the future.”

The results of this research were published in the July 25, 2013 issue of the journal Nature.

This content is provided by DigInfo.tv, AkihabaraNews Official Partner.

Via: University of Tokyo

At first glance it doesn’t look like much but this thing is a reference design of the first 13-inch MacBook. Remember those from 2006?

Read more…

The 2013 Goodwood Festival of Speed was jam-packed with all sorts of racing events, including the infamous hill climb that saw two cars crash. However, those weren’t the only accidents to happen over the week. Lamborghini’s latest concept, called the Parcour, was demoed on the track and actually ended up crashing, damaging the rear end of the car.

The Parcour is an off-road vehicle of sorts that sports the supercar styling you see on many exotic cars, combined with larger wheels and higher road clearance that you see on SUVs. The car looks a little weird at first, but it seems to work for the most part, except for when the car loses control and slams into some hay bales, causing damage to a multi-million dollar prototype.

The Parcour seen in the video below is just one of the two models that have been built, and while the company is downplaying the severity of the damage (saying that it would just need minor repairs and would be back on the road in no time), the car needed to be put on flatbed truck and towed away.

The Parcour was originally unveiled at the Geneva Auto Show earlier this year, and it sports a 550-horsepower, mid-mounted V10 engine that can get the car off-roading pretty easily. The tires don’t look to be anything off-road worthy, but it probably doesn’t take long to switch the wheels and tires out for something a bit more rigid and rugged.

Of course, the crowd’s reaction is pretty priceless. You hear them cringing knowing that an expensive prototype is about to run right into a stack of hay bales, but then they start clapping immediately, either for a genuine sigh of relief that the crash wasn’t worse, or a sarcastic applause of “good job, driver!”.

Lamborghini Parcour off-road concept demoed (and crashed) is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Microsoft has shown off the handiwork of its 3D prototyping for the Xbox One, revealing the stack of rapid-prototyping samples the company went through as it refined the next-gen console’s design. Showing off the 3D prints at the Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 this week, Microsoft discussed its more than 200 mock-ups of the Xbox One controller and “dozens and dozens” of core hardware ideas, as it turned to the latest in prototyping to streamline the process.

“We found that, when people put these [controller designs] in their hands, [they] could tell the difference between a 10th of a millimeter in size” Xbox creative director Carl Ledbetter told Polygon. The team of roughly thirty people started by sketching out possibilities then sent them to the in-house model shop next door, where physical versions of the designs could be created.

The models, Ledbetter says, were then deployed into real-world settings, to see how well they worked. Meanwhile, the engineers tested for exactly how practical they would be, and whether they would accommodate the internal hardware for the Xbox One required.

Some of the designs are more outlandish than others. Although the angular shapes that made it through to the production Xbox One are clear in many of the prototypes, Microsoft’s team also flirted with curves, Stealth Bomber-style planes, and even a suspended “X” design.

The main goal, though, was to get something that worked under the TV and wasn’t too distracting. “How do we make the font look high quality,” Ledbetter said of one of the challenges, “just like the high definition televisions in people’s living rooms?”

Some of the production processes Microsoft settled on are surprisingly advanced. For instance, the colored buttons on the Xbox One controller are injection-inserted to keep them vivid, while two different types of motor are used for rumble effects and completely new springing has been introduced for the sticks compared to the Xbox 360 pad.

Xbox One prototypes show Microsoft’s outlandish 3D printing journey is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A camera that can keep a fast moving object in its sight is very useful. It could be adapted to cover sports or wartime events, or for academic and military purposes. That’s why a group of researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Ishikawa Oku Laboratory are working on a camera system that can automatically keep its eyes on the prize.

The current prototype uses two small mirrors that move independently of each other: one for panning and one for tilting. DigInfo says that the mirrors are controlled “in the order of milliseconds” and the camera can take an image every 1/1000th of a second. Even more impressive, the system can also be used in reverse. Instead of taking an image, it can project an image onto a fast moving object in real time. Imagine being able to tag an escaping prisoner or a wild animal. Or a celebrity.

I wonder if it could track a bullet.

[via DigInfo]