High
Tech Army Togs - Today’s soldiers are armed with so
many high-tech gadgets that they’re advertised as "an
army of one." Now it looks like one of those high-tech devices
may be the uniform itself. (10/23/02)
Sticky
Feet - A team of scientists may have discovered a way to take
the fiction out of Spidernam’s sci-fi sticking power. (9/6/02)
Elsewhere on the web
Is
that a 700MHz ring you're wearing? - ZDNet UK
National Nanotechnology
Initiative
Flashy
Fibers Reflect All Comers - Chemical & Engineering News
All too often, you eagerly tear open a holiday package and find something you'd
like to wear—but it's arrived in a color you despise.
As this ScienCentral news video reports, a new thread developed for the military
will make holiday disappointment and retail returns things of the past. You'll
be able to change the colors of your clothes to suit yourself, whenever you
please.
Rewiring your wardrobe
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professor Yoel
Fink and his colleagues in the Department
of Material Science have developed an innovative process to combine extremely
thin layers of two materials, a plastic and a glass. The result: a new fiber
that can reflect all the light that hits it, from any direction. Within the
next two years, the U.S. Army plans to weave Fink's new thread into uniforms,
to make an optical bar code that will help our soldiers distinguish friend
from foe on night patrol, or during the smoke and confusion of a fire fight.
(see "High
Tech Army Togs")
But Fink's thread could also enjoy a major commercial future in fashion. You
might leave home for work in a business-like gray or navy, and switch to a
livelier purple or pink in time for your evening out. M.I.T. graduate student
Shandon Hart, who collaborated with Fink on the new thread, envisions clothing
made from the fiber and equipped with a tiny, lightweight battery pack. When
you want to change your suit or dress from, say, black to red, you flick a
switch on the pack to zap the fabric with an electric change. Like a radio
antenna that lengthens or shortens to tune to a frequency, the thread changes
thickness—and your outfit changes color.
At New York's Parsons School
of Design, professors and students alike predict that the new thread will
follow other military wear—khaki, bell bottoms, and most recently, camouflage
prints—onto runways and into high fashion. Timothy M. Gunn, chair of Parsons'
design department, believes that "what professor Fink has done is incredibly
revolutionary. Think what the club scene, celebrity dressing, MTV and the
Oscars will look like." Gunn predicts that the fashion industry "might
start by using the thread in accessories, to change the color of a bag or
a hat or a scarf. For men, I can see it used to make jackets and even possibly
shoes. And imagine how easily you could transform a room—just by changing
something simple like a table cloth."
Gunn's vision may materialize within five years. Yoel Fink has secured patents
and has co-founded OmniGuide,
a Cambridge, Massachusetts start-up to develop his new fiber and make it available
commercially. Its first application probably will be as part of a military
communications network. But given the response among future designers at Parsons,
Fink's thread has enormous potential to be fashion forward.