It’s that time of year again – a geek’s best chance to look cool on the cheap. ScotteVest is having its biggest sale of the year with 40% taken straight off the top of some of its coolest stuff. Just remember to enter in this special coupon code – 9SALE40 – when you reach checkout. But the sale is only on through Friday and on limited stock so it’s best to act quickly. Then once you do, you’ll still be able to hold on to all those gadgets that make our digital world possible, but walk around empty-handed and un-encumbered like your only care in the world is looking good. (At least that’s what we tell ourselves when we wear ours.)

You can find their special sale page with all the details here.

One of my pet peeves in life is when my Rock Band wireless guitar runs out of battery juice mid-way through a song. Yes, I’m well aware that isn’t much of a pet-peeve, but hey, it’s annoying. If new research is any indication, I may be able to plug the guitar into my t-shirt and eek out a little more time.

Scientists have successfully turned ordinary fabrics like polyester and cotton into batteries without hindering the flexibility of the fabric. Basically, fabric is dipped into an “ink” of microscopic carbon tubes and what follows is magic:

The idea is the same as that outlined in their work with plain paper; the interwoven fibres of fabrics, like those of paper, are particularly suited to absorbing the nanotube ink, maintaining an electrical connection across the whole area of a garment.

Cloth is simply dipped into a batch of nanotube dye, and is then pressed, to thin and even out the coating.

The fabric maintains its properties even as it is stretched or folded. Even rinsing the samples in water and wringing them out does not change their electronic properties.

“Our approach is easy and low-cost while producing great performance,” Professor Cui told BBC News.

“Fabrics and paper represent two technologies with a thousand-year-old history. We combined ‘high-tech’ – nanotechnology – with traditional ‘low-tech’ to produce new applications.”

The next step is to integrate the approach with materials that store more energy, in order to create more useful batteries. By combining the approach with other electronic materials in the ink, the team believes even wearable solar cells are possible.

Source

The wizards at MIT have developed a flexible lensless camera from a web of light-detecting fibers, which is a nerdy way of saying “clothes that can see”.

From MIT:

Imagine a soldier’s uniform made of a special fabric that allows him to look in all directions and identify threats that are to his side or even behind him. In work that could turn such science fiction into reality, MIT researchers have developed light-detecting fibers that, when weaved into a web, act as a flexible camera. Fabric composed of these fibers could be joined to a computer that could provide information on a small display screen attached to a visor, providing the soldier greater awareness of his surroundings.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Yoel Fink of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), emphasize that while such an application and others like it are still only dreams, work is rapidly progressing on developing fabrics capable of capturing images. In a recent issue of the journal Nanoletters, the team reported what it called a “significant” advance: using such a fiber web to take a rudimentary picture of a smiley face.