Laser show dress

Hussein Chalayan’s recent show for his Spring 08 collection included a screening of a film shot by Nick Knight. The dresses at the end of the film were made using hundreds of servo motor driven lasers and Swarovski crystals extending the dresses visually into space.



http://twenty1f.com/2007/10/

“Electric Jewelry” for Milady

NOW comes an electric light bulb to displace glowing pearls from earrings! The photograph shows a young woman apparently wearing a large pearl earring, but in reality it is a midget electric bulb run from tiny batteries concealed in ornamental coils around it. The bulb is frosted to produce a soft light. It is particularly effective in contrast with dark hair.










http://twenty1f.com/2007/12/

Coming soon – spider socks

It is a miracle substance - lighter than feathers, stronger than steel, one of the toughest fibres found in nature. Now scientists in Japan have found a way of harnessing the remarkable power of spiders’ webs to make anything from tights and fishing nets to bulletproof vests.

Researchers at Shinshu University have succeeded in injecting spider genes into silkworms to create a thread that is stronger, softer and more durable than conventional silk. A Japanese manufacturer is already experimenting with the thread, and spider socks, stockings and even fishing lines are expected to appear on the market within a few years.

The team, based in the city of Nagano and led by Masao Nakagaki, a professor of insect genetics, has beaten rival scientists from around the world in devising a way of mass-producing spider silk.

Conventional “farming” of spiders proved impossible because of their territorial and cannibalistic nature. Five years ago American geneticists devised a bizarre means of generating spider silk by extruding it from the udders of female goats. But Professor Nakagaki’s technique employs a much more manageable creature - the silkworm, whose shimmering fibres have been used to create cloth for more than 5,000 years.

Silkworm eggs are injected with the genes of Nephila clavata, the golden orb spider, known in Japanese as the courtesan spider because its striking yellow, black and red colouring resembles the gorgeous kimono of an up-market prostitute. The silkworm caterpillars that emerge from the eggs weave cocoons, of which 10 per cent consist of spider proteins. These are spun into silk. Professor Nakagaki hopes to increase the proportion of spider thread material to 50 per cent.

“Dragline silk”, which spiders use to raise and lower themselves and to construct the spokes of their webs, has one of the highest tensile strengths of any natural substance - five times that of a thread of steel of the same thickness. In terms of its ability to absorb impact, it is superior to Kevlar, the plastic fibre used for antistab vests and body armour.

Other applications include tennis rackets and fishing line and nets - unlike nylon thread, which pollutes beaches and threatens sea birds, spider silk will degrade naturally over time. Spider thread could also be used by microsurgeons as sutures after operations. The only company developing commercial applications for the spider silk is Okamoto, a business based in Nara, central Japan, which plans to release extra-thin and durable spider socks by about 2010.

Other cultures have found uses for cobwebs. Polynesian fishermen used the threads of the golden orb spider to make fishing line and communities in Papua New Guinea put webs on their heads to keep off the sun’s rays. During the Second World War, threads from black widow spiders were used as hairs in telescopic gun sights.



http://twenty1f.com/2007/12/

Hexagram shirt

The Hexagram shirt was inspired by and conceived to fit into Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle’s dystopic universe, a novel depicting what the world would have been like during the 1960s, had the Axis won WWII.

In the book, the U.S. west coast is a colony of Japan, whose rule and influence has permeated and dominated Californian society for years. The Book of Changes has become the mainstream method, for Japanese and Californian people alike, to take important decisions in life.

Whenever someone has a choice to make, that person takes out three little coins that are shaken and tossed on a surface several times, the resulting heads and tails data is then translated into one of the 64 hexagrams that comprise the Book of Changes.

In a way, from an absurdist point of view, characters in the book are embracing and surrendering to randomness, almost as if they were saying “Since the ultimate purpose of the universe and my own life is beyond my comprehension, I don’t see how hard, rational cold analysis is in any way a better tool for living than random pieces of wisdom fortuitously thrown at me by the cosmos.” Some of these fictional people would probably be willing to wear a Hexagram shirt.

The shirt itself is a very simple device that allows the 1960s dystopian inhabitant to obtain a hexagram that can be looked up in the Book of Changes. It also works as an active agent of randomness by publicly displaying the hexagram, thus giving onlookers an unsolicited random answer to a question that possibly hasn’t been asked yet. (Which might make some sort of sense in Philip K. Dick’s universe.)

To cast a hexagram, the wearer shakes the sleeves of the shirt (as if he was shaking coins in the traditional I Ching way), this gesture generates a series of clicking noises and random luminescent patterns that ritualistically make way for the final configuration of the hexagram (as shown in the videos.)

Most components* that make up the Hexagram shirt are really old school. Arguably someone could have gathered all the materials and built the shirt in the 1960s, it just uses some clicking-sounding relays, noisy inverters, aluminum foil and electroluminescent sheets.

Daft Punk helmets

1935: Electric Glove for Police Stuns Victims With 1,500 Volts

Modern Mechanix 9-1935: More punch than can be found in a box-glove is contained in a new electric glove invented by Cirilo Diaz of Cuba for use by police while handling rough characters or in quelling riots. Persons contacted by an officer wearing the glove receive a 1,500-volt shock, sufficient to remove all traces of fight. A half-pound battery worn on the belt supplies the power, all wiring being concealed beneath the coat.

Police officials in New York where the device was first demonstrated, were favorably impressed by its effectiveness.

Fashionable Technology Book Launch in New York

FASHIONABLE TECHNOLOGY
THE INTERSECTION OF DESIGN, FASHION, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY by Sabine Seymour
The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, wearables for short, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. The practical application is explained in detail and numerous illustrations serve as clarification. Over 50 well-known designers, research institutes, companies and artists, among them Philips, Burton, MIT Media Lab, XS Labs, New York University, Hussein Chalayan, Cute Circuit or International Fashion Machines are introduced by means of their latest, often still unpublished, project, and a survey of their work to date. Given for the first time is a list of all the relevant information on research institutes, materials, publications etc. A must for all those wishing to know everything about fashionable technology.
http://www.fashionabletechnology.org

Entering into the world of fashion for the 21st century

Nokia Morph flexible communication and sensing device. Concept. 2007
Nokia Design explains that the aim of the Nokia Morph is “to illustrate how a portable personal device can connect its owner to the hidden information in the surrounding physical world and, at the same time, to the massive global data, information, and digital content via the Internet.” Using nanomaterials, the Nokia Morph features a bendable, stretchable surface into which several functions can be embedded, including illumination, superhydrophobicity (the ability to repel large amounts of water) and self-cleaning, energy harvesting, and sensors to detect information in the everyday world at the nanoscale. The device will have two separate units: a communications unit and a sensing unit. As Nokia explains, “The communications unit will be operable in three modes: as a clip-on earpiece or a clip on your clothing; as a standalone device for conferencing; or as a mobile handheld. The sensing unit will also operate in three modes: as a detached bendable screen which can be used as a sensor or a keyboard; as a wearable and bendable sensor unit; or as a detached sensor which can be integrated to other peripheral devices.”


http://twenty1f.com/

A Real Solution for High Gas Prices

Senator Obama discusses the high price of gasoline and offers steps designed to lessen our dependence on foreign oil and bring down prices for good.

"By now, the only thing as predictable as rising gas prices are the short-term political solutions that come along with them. It seems like every year, as soon as headlines start announcing “Pain at the Pump” and Americans start emptying their wallets to fill up their tanks, politicians revert to their Rolodex of responses, from tax rebates and tax holidays to investigations into price gouging by oil companies."



Podcast Transcript

Hello, this is Senator Barack Obama and today is Thursday, May 11, 2006.

The other day I went to the gas station. Gas was $3.08 a gallon in the station where I stopped. It is rough on Americans across the country right now. Chicago has some of the highest gasoline prices in the country. I'm fortunate that I am able to afford spending $50 on a tank of gas; there are a lot of families out there that can't. People who have to drive to work long distances, people who don't have the money to buy more fuel-efficient cars right now and they've seen their standard of living drop substantially as a consequence of higher gas prices.

Now, the only thing as predictable as rising gas prices are the short-term political solutions that usually come along with them. Every year you had the same headlines, "Pain at the Pump" and then Americans start emptying their wallets to fill up their tanks and politicians go through the standard responses: tax rebates and tax holidays, investigating price-gauging bio-oil companies.

None of these proposals are going to do any harm. Some will provide Americans temporary relief at the pump, but, in the long term, we can't keep on relying solely on quick fixes designed to placate an anxious public. We need proactive solutions that are designed to lessen our dependence on foreign oil and bring down prices for good. Washington privately understands this but perhaps because of the influence of the oil companies, some of it having to do with ideology, Washington has just been unwilling to take the hard steps necessary to confront what I consider to be one of the most pressing economic and national security challenges in the 21st century. So, the time for excuses is over. Now's not the moment where we should be afraid of what is going to seem politically difficult or controversial. Now's the time to call for innovation and sacrifice from those institutions that can make a difference: the auto industry, the oil industry, the federal government.

The first place to start is with cars. We've got to build cars that use less gasoline. The auto industry hasn't been asked to raise fuel-economy standards in seventeen years and frankly, lately Republicans and Democrats seem to have stopped asking. Today, we've got no choice. Starting in 2008, we should raise CAFE standards (that's the fuel-efficiency standards on cars) a modest 3 percent a year. If we did that over the next 12 years, by 2020 passenger vehicles would average 40 miles per gallon, light trucks would average 32 miles per gallon. That's not a dramatic increase; it's easily achievable through existing technology and it can be done without compromising passenger safety.

Now, there are going to be transition costs involved in making more fuel-efficient automobiles, especially for Detroit, which has relied heavily on the sale of SUVs for its profits. So I've proposed what I call the "Healthcare for Hybrids" bill, where we'd strike a grand bargain with U.S. auto-makers. We tell them we're going to pickup part of the tab for the retiree healthcare costs, a tab which, by the way, ran 6.7 billion dollars last year but, in exchange, you've got to use the money to invest in transitioning to fuel-efficient cars. So that would be point number one.

Point number two: we should just replace the use of oil altogether as America's fuel of choice. This doesn't mean singing the praises of ethanol, and hoping that it finds its way into our fuel supply on its own. It means taking some serious steps now to put a national bio-fuel infrastructure into place. Already some cars on the road have flexible fuel tanks necessary for them to run on E85, which is a cheaper, cleaner blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. But millions upon millions of cars still don't have these tanks. So its time for auto-makers to install those tanks in every single car that they make and the government can help cover this small cost which currently runs at just around $100 per car. It's also time to start making E85 fueling stations more available to the American public. Currently only 681 out of the 170,000 fueling stations in America offer E85 pumps. That's not acceptable. Every American should have the choice when they pull up to fill up their car with E85. That should be true at any fueling station and the oil companies should stop standing in the way and join us in making this happen. If the big oil companies would devote just one percent of their first quarter profits this year to install E85 pumps, more than 7,000 service stations would be able to serve E85 to motorists who could use it.

Finally, we need to reduce the risk of investing in renewable fuels by providing loan guarantees and venture capital to those entrepreneurs with the best plans to develop cell-bio fuel and we should start creating a market for renewable fuels by ramping up the renewable fuel standard and creating an alternative diesel standard in this country, a national standard, that together would blend 65 billion gallons of renewable fuels into the petroleum supply every year.

If we had taken all these steps decades ago, like Brazil did when the call for energy independence was first issued, we'd be immune right now to the whims of oil-rich dictators and surging gas prices. If we don't take these steps now there's going to be a day when we look back at that $3.05 or $3.15 gasoline as the good old days. At some point there's not going to be a tax rebate that's big enough or a tax holiday that's long enough to solve these problems. The American people shouldn't have to wait for this day to come. When it comes to reducing our dependence of foreign oil, the resources are there, the technology is there, the demand is there. Now we just need a little bit of political will and I hope that you guys will help me provide it.

Thanks for downloading and listening to the podcast. I will talk to you soon. Bye-bye.





http://obama.senate.gov/podcast/060511-a_real_solution/