Can’t be bothered with keys but still need a way to prevent intruders from invading your fortress of solitude? Try a secret knock detector to guard your lair.
Don’t know how to build one? Stephen Hoefer over at Make demonstrates:
However, if you live in a shoebox New York City apartment like some of us, where everyone in the building can hear you knocking, this probably won’t be very helpful.
Scientists in the flexible electronic industry have long promised us products like rubbery circuits that will make portable devices truly unbreakable. So when UK researchers announced they had developed flexible speakers, the latest flexible electronic product to hit headlines, we listened. The ultra thin speakers—appropriately named the Flat, Flexible Loudspeaker (FFL) (pictured left)—is only 0.25mm thick.
The speakers are made of a flexible laminate material that can bend like paper and stick to uneven surfaces—a huge upgrade from the earliest model made primarily of tin foil.
Warwick Audio Technologies, the company commercializing the speakers, claims the newly minted FFLs can produce sounds at 80-105 decibels. The flat design allows sound to travel through the material differently than it does typical boom boxes. When an electrical signal goes through the FFL speakers, it vibrates and sends a rush of air through the whole sound system. So in technical speak, when the air moves through the sheets in bulk mass, planar directional sound waves are created. The resulting sounds are “clearer, crisper, and easier to hear” than traditional speakers.
Put on Paul Lemmens’ made-to-vibrate jacket while you’re watching Slumdog Millionaire, and you’ll feel Jamal’s anxiety as he struggles to find the correct answers. While this jacket won’t mimic the hits in The Wrestler or, thankfully, the bullets in The Matrix, it purports to physically connect viewers to movies by literally sending shivers up their spines.
Philips Electronics unveiled the “motor-studded” jacket at the World Haptics Conference in Salt Lake City in March. It consists of a vibrating device that will let movie buffs empathize with onscreen characters, by letting viewers feel the tense situations when neuroimpulses are sent from their skin to their brains.
The jacket works like this: It’s powered with an array of small motors that send vibrations to 64 actuators spaced throughout the jacket. Controlled by four microprocessors, vibrations are sent to eight actuators spaced evenly down each sleeve and four placed on the front and back of the torso to give the person an illusion that he is being touched all over.
DiscoBlog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's edited by Eliza Strickland, and written by Brett Israel and Andrew Moseman.
Scientists in the flexible electronic industry have long promised us products like 
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