The warp and weft of wearable electronics
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Design, Engineering, Materials science, Technology
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Design, Engineering, Materials science, Technology
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Arts, Engineering, Materials science
He was the structural innovator behind Sydney Opera House, founded the world’s leading engineering consultancy, and pioneered the philosophy of “total design” — the equal partnership of engineers, architects and designers in construction. Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup (1895-1988) is now celebrated in this first retrospective of his work, Engineering the World, at London’s Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, part of its Engineering Season. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Arts, Engineering, Materials science, Physics
I’m standing in the spiraling rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and over me dangles a chaotic mess held together by translucent Plexiglas. In the shadow the sculpture casts on the wall, the shapes converge in a pleasing negative blending intention and happenstance – impossible to predict, yet clearly part of a plan. On evidence, this is an artist thinking experimentally, and in multiple dimensions. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Arts, Engineering, Materials science
She hangs dark, immense and pocked with holes in a white room, a beast of many parts languidly revolving in the air. Part leaf, part lever, all magisterial grace, Black Widow is a quintessential Calder mobile — one of the signature inventions of the extraordinary twentieth-century artist-engineer. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Arts, Materials science, Nano-engineering
Did you ever make paper snowflakes as a kid? The kind where you fold a circle of paper several times, cut shapes out, then unfold it to reveal a beautifully symmetrical pattern? This is kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of paper cutting. Now physicist Melina Blees has applied the same technique to the ‘supermaterial’ graphene — strong sheets of carbon a single atom thick. Read more