Introducing, the tie-scarf.

I am always after combos and this is perfect: from Pral&Brok

Award winning Super Shock-Absorbing Trainers

By Darren Quick

It may be a great form of exercise, but running is a high impact pursuit that places great strain on muscles and tendons. The stress it places on the body forces many runners to hang up their shoes and seek alternative, lower impact forms of exercise. Looking to take the pain out of running, a Swiss engineer set about creating a shoe that enabled the runner to land as soft as if running on sand, and to push off as if running in track shoes. The result is the the On Running Shoe – a shoe that incorporates a unique rubber ring into the sole design to provide a soft landing, while offering firmness and stability on push off.

According to the creators of the On running shoe, more than two thirds of runners eventually suffer some kind of minor or major injury. Although existing running shoes are designed to absorb the vertical impact, the foot is exposed to both horizontal and vertical impact when running. It is the horizontal impact that causes the most damage to muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints, and that’s what the On design addresses.

Today’s shoes are also built to stabilize, guide and control the foot in its movement. This means that the runner’s postural muscles become lazy and even degenerate. The idea of the On is to create a support system that actually activates the postural muscles.

The solution was a shock element consisting of a hollow circular piece of rubber that is able to absorb both the vertical and horizontal shock. Then, after landing the runner’s weight pushes the top and bottom of the element together and interlocking teeth on the inside surface of the element lock together. It is this locking that provides firmness for the push off.

Three-time world champion triathlete and six-time Ironman Olivier Bernhard, who was recovering from injury and was looking for a low-impact way to maintain his running fitness, heard about the shoe. He decided to get on board and ran thousands of kilometers helping test and refine the shoe’s design. It appears the extensive testing has paid off with the On Running Shoe taking out the Advansa Overall Award at the recent ispo BrandNew Awards.

The final design of the On Running Shoe will be unveiled at the International Trade Fair for Sports Equipment and Fashion (ispo), which takes place in Munich from February 7-10, 2010.

Silica nanoparticles make wool even better

By Darren Quick

Already regarded as a “wonder fabric” for its lightness, softness, warmth even when wet, and other qualities, scientists from China say they have been able to improve on the natural properties of wool. They say their discovery could give wool a “brain,” placing it among other “smart” fabrics that shake off wrinkles, shrinkage and “breathe” to release perspiration.

Wool’s natural water-repellency also acts as a barrier to enhanced features such as anti-wrinkle, anti-shrinkage finishing and dyeing. This property also hinders its ability to absorb moisture and makes wool garments feel sweaty.

Although scientists have developed treatments that make wool more hydrophilic, or water-absorbing, they may not last long, may damage the fabric, and are not environmentally-friendly.

By coating the wool with an ultrathin silica layer the scientists found they were able to make the wool more water-absorbing without the problems associated with existing treatments. The coating is made from silica nanoparticles 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. The particles altered both the surface roughness and surface energy of the fiber and endowed the wool fabrics with excellent water absorption. The new layer does not affect wool’s color or texture and can withstand dry cleaning, the scientists note.

The study, “Fabricating Superhydrophilic Wool Fabrics,” detailing the scientists’ research appears in ACS’ bi-weekly journal, Langmuir.

FUTURIST, RAY KURZEIL, PREDICTS OUR TECHNOLOGICAL LIFESTYLES BY 2020

By Ray Kurzweil

As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Consider that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago; it now has 350 million users and counting. 

Between now and 2020, the trend will continue, spreading cutting-edge technologies to every corner of the country and beginning to make innovations once consigned to the realm of science fiction real for millions of Americans. Specifically what can we expect? Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand. 

What will drive all this accelerating change is precisely what has driven it this past half-century: the exponential growth in the power of information technology, which approximately doubles for the same cost every year. When I was an MIT undergraduate in 1965, we all shared a computer that took up half a building and cost tens of millions of dollars. The computer in my pocket today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation per dollar since I was a student. 

That incredible force — information technology that moves faster, then faster, then faster still — will power changes in every imaginable realm over the next decade.

Start with the basics. You’ve no doubt noticed that electronic gadgets are getting smaller and smaller; the iPod Shuffle holds 1,000 songs and weighs 0.38 ounces. Your phone is smaller than it was a few years ago and can do much more. By 2020, memory devices will be integrated into our clothing. And the very idea of a “smart phone” will begin to change. Rather than looking at a tiny screen, our glasses will beam images directly to our retinas, creating a high resolution virtual display that hovers in air.

That virtual display will be able to take over our entire visual field of view, putting us in a three-dimensional full immersion virtual reality environment. We’ll watch movies virtually and read virtual books. A lot of our personal and business meetings will take place in these 3D virtual worlds. The design of new virtual environments will be an art form. We’ll even have ways to touch one another virtually.

There are already beginning to be apps available for your iPhone or Android phone that allow you to look at a building and have the display superimpose what stores are inside it; Google Goggles, released last week, is the first free, widely-available version of such software. By 2020 we’ll routinely have pop ups in our visual field of view that give us background about the people and places that we’re looking at.

In other words, your memory will be constantly, instantaneously aided by the information available on the Internet. The two will begin to become indistinguishable.

How about energy? That doesn’t sound like an information technology. Fossil fuels, after all, are an early first industrial revolution, 19th century technology. But we are now applying nanotechnology — the science of essentially reprogramming matter at the level of molecules to create new materials and devices—to the design of renewable energy technologies such as solar energy. As a result, the cost per watt of solar energy is coming down rapidly and the total amount of solar energy is growing exponentially. It has in fact been doubling every two years for the past  20 years and is now only eight doublings away from meeting all of the world’s energy needs.

When I shared this fact with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few weeks ago, he asked, “but is there enough sunlight to double solar energy eight more times?” I responded that we have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to do this. The prime minister announced an Israeli energy initiative the next day at the Israeli Presidential Conference based on our conversation, setting a 10-year goal to create the technologies to completely replace fossil fuels.

It’s not just the gadgets we carry around and the power we use to fuel our lives that are subject to what I call “the law of accelerating returns.” Health and medicine, which used to be a hit or miss process, has now become an information technology.

We now have the software of life (our genes) and the means of upgrading that software. How long do you go without updating the software on your cell phone? Not long: it does it itself every few days or weeks. Yet we are walking around with obsolete software in our bodies that evolved thousands of years ago. Within 10 years, that will change. 

Already today, there are over a thousand projects to change our genes away from disease and toward health, not just in newborns but in mature individuals. The Human Genome Project, which has catalogued our genetic material, was itself a very good example of the law of accelerating returns; the amount of genetic data that is sequenced has doubled every year and the cost has come down by half every year. We can now design health interventions on computers and test them out on biological simulators. These technologies are doubling in power every year and will be a thousand times more powerful in a decade.

By 2020, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging, and toward significant advances in our ability to treat major diseases such as heart disease and cancer — an approach that will be fully mature by 2030. 

We won’t just be able to lengthen our lives; we’ll be able to improve our lifestyles. By 2020, we will be testing drugs that will turn off the fat insulin receptor gene that tells our fat cells to hold on to every calorie. Holding on to every calorie was a good idea thousands of years ago when our genes evolved in the first place. Today it underlies an epidemic of obesity. By 2030, we will have made major strides in our ability to remain alive and healthy – and young – for very long periods of time. At that time, we’ll be adding more than a year every year to our remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in instead of running out.

No, it’s not going to be an entirely brave new world. Some things will look pretty similar in 2020. We’ll still drive cars — although they will have the intelligence to avoid many accidents and self-driving cars will at least be experimented with. All-electric cars will be popular. And in cities, don’t expect subways or buses to go away.

But in more and more ways big and small, hang in there and we’ll all get to see the remarkable century ahead.

Kurzweil is former recipient of the MIT-Lemelson prize, the world’s largest for innovation, and in 1999 was awarded the National Medal of Technology. He is the author of the books “The Singularity is Near” and “The Age of Spiritual Machines.”

TRANFORMABLE TABLE

Via Notcot

Short on space but still need somewhere to sit down and eat? Here’s an innovative solution – the Picture Table is a unique dining table that flips back against the wall and becomes a stylish showcase for your favorite photograph, poster or piece of art.

The Picture Table is designed to be mounted on a side wall. When you have finished dining, the table rotates towards the wall and is fixed in place. It then becomes a large frame for an image that can be changed as often as you like.

The table is attached to the wall with three metal supports and the legs are kept in place with magnets. Posters can be easily removed and replaced and can also be enhanced with framing mat board if desired.

Particularly suitable for small apartments, hotel rooms or coffee shops, the Picture Table measures 130 x 85 x 78cm (51.2” x 33.5” x 30.7”) and is made from beech and balsa wood, plexi glass and stainless steel.

The Picture Table is produced in Italy and was designed by Verena Lang, the founder by IvyDesign. It weighs 20kg (44lbs) and costs EUR1,140 (approx. USD1,368 at time of publication) plus shipping. The company also makes a Mirror Table if you prefer to gaze at your own image!

Customers and designers interact to create 2010’s fashion lines

THE INDEPENDENTFriday, 18 December 2009

A new trend is emerging in the fashion world, likely to influence the way collections are conceived for the year to come: designers are increasingly calling on their followers for help.

Web aficionados Dolce & Gabbana – the Italians have both a gossipy news site, swide.com, and an e-commerce – have repeatedly asked fans for feedback on their creations or even for their own design suggestions. Apparently experiencing designer’s block while working on the upcoming ranges, Stefano Gabbana tweeted: “‘I accept suggestions on women’s collection…..(just 2day) ))),” and both designers have asked fans about their opinion on shoes for the next range via YouTube.

Top model Coco Rocha, who is currently working on her first clothing line, also didn’t hide her lack of inspiration when she released a video on her Oh so Coco blog, asking her followers to suggest names for the range. The post has so far attracted more than 400 responses – the winning submission has not yet been announced.

Both moves are part of a tendency of designers listening to and interacting with their customers, from made-to-measure (Prada) and customization services (Louis Vuitton) to livestreams of their fashion shows (Alexander McQueen) and open calls for them to star in their advertising campaigns (Calvin Klein).

Social media are naturally playing an important part here, with many brands launching new portals to widen their reach. Burberry, for instance, recently introduced the interactive website, theartofthetrench.com, that lets users upload pictures of how they styled their coats – which in turn is likely to influence Burberry designer Christopher Bailey’s creation process.

SLEEK CHIC

Beautiful,clean brand packaging. The devil’s in the bloody detail!  see: www.whynotassociates.com/en/glitz/04.jpg
   

LIPSTICK LOVER

RAW Natural Beauty put out a video to remind potential customers that women consume quite a bit of lipstick in their lifetimes. Seven pounds on average, in fact! or 933.33333333333 tubes.  Would you like some salad with that, madame?

RAW – Natural Beauty – GLOW.com

HAND GESTURAL INTERFACE SCREEN

By Jeff Salton.
The gestural interface used by Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report was based on work by MIT Media Lab’s Hiroshi Ishii, who has already commercialized similar large-scale gestural interface systems. However, such systems comprise many expensive cameras or require the user to wear tracking devices on their fingers. To develop a similar yet cost effective gestural interface system that is within reach of many more people other researchers at MIT have instead been working to develop screens with embedded optical sensors to track the movement of the user’s fingers that could quickly make touch screens seem outdated.

“The goal with this is to be able to incorporate the gestural display into a thin LCD device” – like a mobile phone – “and to be able to do it without wearing gloves or anything like that,” says researcher Matthew Hirsch, a PhD candidate at the Media Lab says.

Hirsch, along with MIT Media Lab professors Ramesh Raskar and Henry Holtzman and visiting researcher Douglas Lanman, have instead been working on a project that uses embedded sensors to turn displays into giant lensless cameras that can recognize hand gestures.  MIT news reports that Paul Debevec, director of the Graphics Laboratory at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, whose doctoral thesis led to the innovative visual effects in the movie The Matrix says: “I like this one [gestural interface] because it’s really integrated into the display. Everyone needs to have a display anyway. And it is much better than just figuring out just where the fingertips are or a kind of motion-capture situation. It’s really a full three-dimensional image of the person’s hand that’s in front of the display.

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