Hasta La Gadget!

Last month, tucked in alongside news of the 1080p Find5, we got word of another, less macho Oppo phone coming to China — the Ulike 2. This Ice Cream Sandwich-based handset went on sale today for the equivalent of $370, and you don’t have to be in love with its ladyphone ways to acknowledge that it at least tries something different. Its front-facing camera rocks a full 5-megapixel resolution, putting the HTC One X+‘s vanity cam to shame, while a countdown timer and a bunch of beautification filters (including face slimming and skin whitening) try to make all that extra detail work in your favor. The other specs are mediocre at best, including the 960 x 540, 4.5-inch LCD and 16GB of non-expandable storage, but Oppo is hardly alone in its views on what women want.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: Engadget Chinese

Yesterday Fujitsu announced in Japan a new cloud based service for women : Hada Memory or Skin Memory, an application that will help Japanese women to track their skin condition and help diagnose any possible problems. By simply taking a picture of your skin or any “dark” area that you may have on your face, Hada Memori will not only track the evolution of your skin color but also send your skin data to professionals and doctors to better help you to fix any potential problems and …

Growing human tissue is old hat, but being able to measure activity inside flesh is harder — any electrical probing tends to damage the cells. But a new breakthrough from Harvard researchers has produced the first “cyborg” tissue, created by embedding functional, biocompatible nanowires into lab-grown flesh. In a process similar to making microchips, the wires and a surrounding organic mesh are etched onto a substrate, which is then dissolved, leaving a flexible mesh. Groups of those meshes are formed into a 3D shape, then seeded with cell cultures, which grow to fill in the lattice to create the final system. Scientists were able to detect signals from heart and nerve cell electro-flesh made this way, allowing them to measure changes in response to certain drugs. In the near-term, that could allow pharmaceutical researchers to better study drug interaction, and one day such tissue might be implanted in a live person, allowing treatment or diagnosis. So, would that make you a cyborg or just bionic? We’ll let others sort that one out.

Filed under: Science, Alt

Harvard scientists grow human cells onto nanowire scaffold to form ‘cyborg’ skin originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After designing some stylish earbuds, onanoff has just released another good looking design in the form of leather MacBook skins. These skins come as a package and will wrap almost all of your MacBook Air in a leather cover.

The MacBook skins look like a good way to protect your precious Mac on the go, if you want to cut down on the weight and bulkiness associated with hard cases. They’re designed to protect your MacBook from daily wear and tear as well as scratches, while adding a colorful touch to your laptop.

The onandoff Skin package is available for the MacBook Air 11 and 13 inch. They include a top and bottom skin, a palm rest skin as well as a screen protector. They’re available in six different colors and sell for $59.95(USD) for the 11 inch and $69.95 for the 13-inch.

[via DesignYouTrust]

A team of researchers at South Korea’s Seoul National University have been busy developing biologically-inspired electronic skin that is capable of “feeling” subtle stimulus such as bouncing water droplets and human heartbeats. The skin’s surface is covered in two interlocked arrays of 50-nanometre-wide polymeric nanofibres that act like hairs on the surface of the skin, coming in contact with one another under the strain of external force. That contact then generates a current to help the skin gauge the changes in pressure, according to New Scientist. The creators of the flexible skin say that sensor response can be repeated up to 10,000 cycles, displaying their output on a computer in real-time.

Electronic skin lets machines sense water droplets and heartbeats, wonder why they were programmed to feel originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Aug 2012 04:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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