Willow Glass: ultra-thin glass can ‘wrap’ around devices

A new type of flexible ultra-thin glass has been unveiled by the company that developed Gorilla Glass.

Dubbed Willow Glass, the product can be “wrapped” around a device, said the New York-based developer Corning.

The glass was showcased at the Society for Information Display’s Display Week, an industry trade show in Boston.

Besides smartphones, it could also be used for displays that are not flat, the company said.

But until such “conformable” screens appear on the market, the glass could be used for mobile devices that are constantly becoming slimmer.

“Displays become more pervasive each day and manufacturers strive to make both portable devices and larger displays thinner,” said Dipak Chowdhury, Willow Glass programme director at Corning.

The prototype demonstrated in Boston was as thin as a sheet of paper, and the company said that it can be made to be just 0.05mm thick – thinner than the current 0.2mm or 0.5mm displays.

The firm has already started supplying customers developing new display and touch technology with samples of the product.

Lots of potential outside technology products, of course: interior, textile and jewellery design could benefit (curved glass walls, wearable glass etc?)

(Read more at BBC News – Willow Glass: ultra-thin glass can ‘wrap’ around devices: .)

Cross and bed found in Anglo-Saxon grave shed new light on ‘dark ages’

News in The Guardian of a fascinating discovery:

“The dead are often described as sleeping, but archaeologists in Cambridgeshire have uncovered a bed on which the body of a young Anglo-Saxon woman has lain for more than 1,300 years, a regal gold and garnet cross on her breast.

[…]

Pectoral crosses from the dawn of Christianity in England, and bed burials – where the body was laid on a real bed, now traced only by its iron supports, centuries after the timber rotted – are both extremely rare.

[…]

A gold and garnet pectoral cross of such quality, the most beautiful and sophisticated examples of Anglo-Saxon metalwork like the contemporary jewels found in the Staffordshire Hoard or the Sutton Hoo burial, could only have been owned by a member of an aristocratic or even royal family. Only five have been found, one in the coffin of St Cuthbert. In some contemporary pieces the gems came from as far as India, and the gold from melted down coins from Constantinople.”

(Read more and see a short video at Cross and bed found in Anglo-Saxon grave shed new light on ‘dark ages’ | Science | The Guardian: .)

The last of the glass eye makers

 

In a tiny room in a north London suburb, Jost Haas makes a glass eye.

He holds a glass tube over a bunsen burner, twirling it constantly, blows through the molten glass, and turns it into a sphere.

His patient Dan Light has only one working eye.

Haas uses coloured glass sticks to match the colour of that eye – not just the pattern of the iris, but the red veins of the sclera.

He also has to make the glass eye fit the shape of Dan’s bad eye, and there is only one chance to get it right.

A glass eye is not, as you might think, like a large solid marble. It is a hollow half sphere, a thin shell that fits over the non-working eye, if it is still there. Otherwise it goes over a ball that has been surgically implanted into the eye socket and attached to the eye muscles.

[…]

A false eye maker is known as an ocularist, and ocularists are possibly the world’s most practical artists.

The senior ocularist at Moorfields Eye hospital, Peter Coggins, went to art college but rebelled against the intellectualised language of conceptual art.

The relationship between ocularist and patient is intimate, he says. “Quite a big part of the job is the first appointment when you see the patient, where things can be emotional – there’s a lot of talking and reassuring.

“But you can’t promise to make you something that even your own mother won’t recognise. It’s impossible to do that.”

The Unseeing Eye is on BBC Radio 4 on Friday 24 February 2012 at 1100 GMT Or catch up later via iPlayer

(Read the full story at BBC News – The last of the glass eye makers.)

The Story of the Modern Desk Lamp: Its Invention was Based on British Car Suspensions

When people get bright ideas a light bulb pops up over their head. For British designer George Carwardine, that light bulb was followed by a spring.

Throughout the 1920s inventors tinkered with articulating-arm lamps, experimenting with parallelogram arm structures and counterweights. None of them really caught on until Carwardine, a UK-based freelance car designer and engineer whose specialty was vehicle suspensions, invented the desk lamp we all know today. Carwardine realized he could add suspension mechanisms to lamps, tweaking the springs and pivoting arms to provide balance and obviating the need for counterweights.

Read the full story at: The Story of the Modern Desk Lamp, Part 1: Its Invention was Based on British Car Suspensions – Core77.

The euro’s strange stories

There’s more to designing coins than you think…

The modern euro designs are a bit of a compromise. From the moment they were invented, coins have always been national and political symbols. The kings of Lydia in modern Turkey, who minted the first metal money about 600BC, didn’t do it to facilitate shopping or to heat up the Lydian economy, but to boast of their wealth, power and identity – with the distinctive emblem of a lion stamped on each one.So when the euro currency appeared in 2002, there was a trade-off between the symbols of the new monetary union and those of the different nation states that made it up. The paper notes were to be identical across the zone, decorated with rather dreary, generic images of European architecture – mostly windows, arches and bridges; but the coins, while one side was to display a uniform map of Europe, had space on the other for something that was distinctively national.

The monarchies of Euroland were more or less obliged to pick their king, queen or grand duke for the spare side; the Vatican City – when they chose to mint – the Pope. But the rest – from Austria to Slovenia – were free to opt for a whole range of national emblems or slogans.

Some went for simplicity: Ireland features a harp on every single denomination from the two euro right down to the tiny one cent; Estonia, the dullest of the lot, chose a map of Estonia.

Read the rest (it’s interesting!) at BBC News – A Point of View: The euro’s strange stories.

London 2012: Olympic medals go into production in Wales

Production has started on the medals for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Some 4,700 gold, silver and bronze medals are being made at the Royal Mint’s headquarters in Llantrisant, in Rhondda Cynon Taf.

The process will take about 10 hours for each medal.

The medals depict the Greek goddess of victory, Nike, stepping out of the Parthenon and arriving in the host city.

The Royal Mint has brought together a specially selected team of designers, technicians and craftsmen who have been testing and refining the minting process to ensure every medal produced meets highly exacting specifications.

British artist David Watkins drew up the designs for the Olympic medals, while those for the Paralympics were done by jewellery artist Lin Cheung.

To replicate their designs, the medals are slowly rolled through a 750 degree furnace during a striking process which softens the metal, allowing them to have the designs crafted.

Read the full article and watch the video