To the left is an image of a transparent film that has carbon nanobuds. These nanobuds are molecular tubes of carbon with ball-like appendages that could turn almost any surface, regardless of its shape, into a sensor! The awesome company that came up with this has also come up with really awesome wearable technologies. Visit Canatu's site and you'll be there until your beer is warm without noticing the time you've spent there! So if we "wearable enthusiasts" think about it, this could be the breakthrough we've been waiting for! Imagine adding touch controls to car consoles and dashboards and even bent around something as thin as earbuds so they could be handy for adding buttons to flexible devices. Typical touchscreens are made by overlaying a display screen with a transparent sheet of indium tin oxide. The problem with this is that it's brittle, so it can't be used on anything but flat surfaces. As this technology has developed, they first had a problem with using carbon … [Read more...]