Will this new metal ink transform the eBook experience?

Figure 6. (a) Optical image of a conductive pen loaded with a conductive Cu nanosheet ink. (b) Optical image of drawn conductive electronic art. (c) Optical image of a flexible paper display containing an LED array on paper.  A new report from a group of Chinese scientists just might hold the key needed to propel e-reading to a whole new level. In the study, "metal ink was found to exhibit very interesting properties as a printing ink on flexible electronics, especially on paper substrates because it is environment friendly, recyclable, foldable, and lightweight." Figure 5. Simulation images (a1–c1), SEM images of...

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Sandy Hook propels Melbourne man to invent a bullet-proof bookcase

[youtube]http://youtu.be/pCY0kd9KMIg[/youtube] Craig Harwood  and his 11 year-old daughter were watching the events at Sandy Hook elementary school play out on television when she turned to him and said, "'Dad, can't you invent something to stop this from happening?'" That was all Harwood, who was a  a special operations and anti-terrorism police officer, needed to get to work. While the US gun lobby called for teachers to be armed, Mr Harwood thought about how to protect people from gunmen in the terrifying wait for police to arrive. The business partners hit on dFence - a movable bookcase fitted with three anti-ballistic layers that can...

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Brush Writing in the Arts of Japan

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (ca. 662–710), One of the Three Gods of Poetry From the Spring Rain Collection (Harusame shū), vol. 1. Yashima Gakutei, ca. 1820's This is the last weekend for those of you in the New York area to see this incredible exhibition on view. Lucky for the rest of us the The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an online exhibition featuring 185 items. What is brush writing?: The art of brush writing in East Asia both encompasses and transcends the Western aesthetic concept of "calligraphy,"... Japan inherited from China a fascination with the artistic potential of inscribing characters with flexible...

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Code Poetry: Bits and Verse for the Software set

Talk about creative programming. Submissions are now being accepted for the Code Poetry Slam 1.1 At the Slam, finalists presented work ranging from human language poems incorporating concepts and gestures from programming, to poems written entirely in compilable code. They were invited to present their poems in whatever way they saw fit, and performed with various techniques, including poems composed and compiled in an IDE, multimedia audio/visual presentations, and straight readings from a notebook. The slam, sponsored  Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University, looks for "code that is beautiful to read and simultaneously executable." This was the winning  poem from...

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