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: .)

Europe’s secondhand clothes brings mixed blessings to Africa

An interesting article in The Guardian recently puts a new perspective on the effect of recycling textiles and old clothes

About a third of globally donated clothes make their way via wholesale rag houses to sub-Saharan Africa, where they end up lining the streets or filling small boutiques. Hawkers say Christmas time, when westerners flock to offload clothes to charity shops, brings in the biggest bales. The lucrative industry has even spawned fake charity clothes collectors in the west.

But critics say the billion-dollar trade risks swamping fragile domestic textiles markets, and 12 countries in Africa are among 31 globally that have now banned their import.

(Read the full article here: Europe’s secondhand clothes brings mixed blessings to Africa | World news | guardian.co.uk: .)

Sexist jeans

This washing label was spotted in some jeans by Telegraph journalist Emma Barnett. Read her article for her response to it. What do you think? Funny or sexist?

DJCAD textiles students walk off with £2500 prize

Well done Lucy and Anna, and their partner, medical student Wen Ling Choong!

Two entrepreneurial projects from students at the University of Dundee were today each awarded £2500 after they were named winners of the 2012 Venture Programme competition.

A designer accessory for junior doctors and a new medical device with applications for biopsy and anaesthesia were the winning entries in this year’s competition, which offers up to £5000 seed money for researchers to turn their ideas into commercial applications.

The winners were Muhammad Sadiq, from Pakistan, a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering, for his drug delivery system which features a vibrating needle. He has worked extensively with the Institute for Medical Science and Technology in developing his product.

He shared the £5000 prize with Design Aid+, a team made up of 5th year medic Wen Ling Choong and 3rd year Textiles students Anna Rzepczynski and Lucy Robertson. Their `Essential Accessory+’ has been designed specifically with junior and foundation doctors in mind, giving them a fashionable but very practical carrier for the equipment they need to carry on the ward. It has been designed using NHS-approved infection-proof materials.

The Venture Programme is open to early career and postgraduate researchers at the University and is aimed at those who are interested in developing their research or exploring the commercialisation possibilities for their ideas.

Judging the final session at Enterprise House today were a panel of experts including Kevin Bazley, Senior Manager at Scottish Enterprise; Dr Howard Marriage, Director at Aquila Biomedical Ltd; and Dr Norman Alm, Co-founder and Director of CIRCA Connect and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computing at Dundee University.

The awards were presented by the University Secretary, Dr Jim McGeorge.

Art in the cathedral

 

“An artist from Sunderland has filled a cathedral in Austria with vast wings of fabric and fishing wire after practising with models in her bedroom at home.

The installation at Klagenfurt will hang above the aisle until the end of Lent, with visitors’ comments projected on to it as they approach after filling in a card.

The Kunst in Dom, or Art in the Cathedral, project is the leading public art event in the Austrian region of Carinthia and Helma Rud, a glass and ceramics graduate of Sunderland university, is the youngest artist to be invited to carry out the commission. Austrian herself, she uses the ancient Christian alpha and omega traditon in her title for the piece, wAter+wΩrd.”

(Read more at Sunderland student spreads her wings in Austrian cathedral | UK news | guardian.co.uk: .)

Spider silk spun into violin strings

BBC News – Spider silk spun into violin strings:

A Japanese researcher has used thousands of strands of spider silk to spin a set of violin strings.

The strings are said to have a “soft and profound timbre” relative to traditional gut or steel strings.

That may arise from the way the strings are twisted, resulting in a “packing structure” that leaves practically no space between any of the strands. (…)

Shigeyoshi Osaki of Japan’s Nara Medical University has been interested in the mechanical properties of spider silk for a number of years. (…)

Dr Osaki has perfected methods of obtaining large quantities of this dragline silk from captive-bred spiders and has now turned his attention to the applications of the remarkable material. (…)

Dr Osaki used 300 female Nephila maculata spiders – one of the species of “golden orb-weavers” renowned for their complex webs – to provide the dragline silk.

For each string, Dr Osaki twisted between 3,000 and 5,000 individual strands of silk in one direction to form a bundle. The strings were then prepared from three of these bundles twisted together in the opposite direction.

You can hear a short sample of the violin being played over at the BBC News website.

The language of ties

Radio 4 had a programme on the language of ties last week. As an avowed non-tie wearer (both for physical and ideological reasons), I think the politics of ties are interesting. You can listen to it on iPlayer, or download the podcast. Here’s an interesting snippet especially the bit at the end about the direction of the angles and the difference between American and British ties…

For other people, especially the student revolutionaries of my generation, refusing to wear a tie was not so much a matter of personal convenience, but an ideological statement and a political act: for it meant a deliberate rejection of authority in all its forms.

Che Guevara didn’t wear a tie, nor did Fidel Castro, and Albert Einstein had never really liked them, either. All his life, he had a horror of constraint, be or physical, intellectual or emotional, which he described in the German word “zwang”. For Einstein, as for many of the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, the necktie became the very embodiment and symbol of “zwang”.

There was some justification for this view, well summed up in the phrase “the old school tie”, which was – and in some quarters still is – redolent of snobbery, elitism, connection and privilege.

For ties in their most traditional form, with diagonal stripes or heraldic crests, were closely associated with public schools, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and gentlemen’s clubs such as The Garrick or the Marylebone Cricket Club, better known as the MCC, and they could only be worn by old boys or alumni or members.

Lower down the social scale, ties had become more widespread from the late 19th Century with a massive growth in the number of clerks and bureaucrats and petty officials who were revealingly described as white-collar workers – and in those days, you couldn’t wear a shirt with a white collar unless you were wearing a tie as well. And after World War I, there was a significant proliferation of striped regimental ties that could only be worn by those who had recently been on active service.

Depending on its design, wearing a tie in Britain might mean that you were a humble office worker, or that you belonged to one of the closed worlds that formed part of the establishment.

(I)n the United States, diagonally-striped ties became the widely accepted dress code for professionals and for those who worked on Wall Street. They were produced in many different colours and many different permutations, and they were especially associated with the firm of Brooks Brothers, which by the 1920s was specialising in outfitting professional American men.

In order to distinguish their product from the exclusive British club and regimental ties on which they were modelled, the Brooks Brothers ties were manufactured with the diagonal stripe going the other way, and to this day, striped American and British ties retain this difference.

Read the full article at BBC News – A Point of View: The language of ties

Forget Shoes. What You Need are Kevlar Socks

The somewhat misleadingly-named Swiss Barefoot Company wants you to wear their socks, which are made from kevlar with polyester nubs on the sole, and nothing else

(Read the full story at Core77)

Off to Paris

Here we are about to set off for Paris!

Spider silk at the V&A: A tangled (and exquisite) web they wove

The Economist reports on the rediscovered art of weaving with spider silk. Yes, spider silk. On show at the V&A until June.

IN THESE days of fast (and often disposable) fashion, the idea of taking eight years to manufacture two unwearable garments seems outlandish. Yet this is what Simon Peers, a textile designer, and Nicholas Godley, an entrepreneur, have done. The pair has worked since 2004 on producing spider silk in Madagascar, and has woven two extraordinary pieces of clothing with the unusual fibre.

Their spider-silk shawl and cape go on display today at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The exhibition retraces the history of spider-silk production through books, illustrations and photographs (no spiders, sadly). The phenomenon dates from the early 18th-century, when textile producers began hunting for an alternative to mulberry silkworm. But because of the complexity of the production process, spider silk remained an experiment, with seldom more than a few garments ever produced. The last documented textile made from spider silk, a set of bed hangings, was displayed at the 1900 Paris Exhibition.

via Spider silk at the V&A: A tangled (and exquisite) web they wove | The Economist.