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The brain is soft and electronics are stiff, which can make combining the two challenging, such as when neuroscientists implant electrodes to measure brain activity and perhaps deliver tiny jolts of electricity for pain relief or other purposes.
Chemical engineer Zhenan Bao is trying to change that. For more than a decade, her lab has been working to make electronics soft and flexible so that they feel and operate almost like a second skin. Along the way, the team has started to focus on making brittle plastics that can conduct electricity more elastic.
Now in Science Advances, Bao's team describes how they took one such brittle plastic and modified it chemically to make it as bendable as a rubber band, while slightly enhancing its electrical conductivity. The result is a soft, flexible electrode that is compatible with our supple and sensitive nerves.
"This flexible electrode opens up many new, exciting possibilities down the road for brain interfaces and other implantable electronics," said Bao, a professor of chemical engineering. "Here, we have a new material with uncompromised electrical performance and high stretchability."
The material is still a laboratory prototype, but the team hopes to develop it as part of their long-term focus on creating flexible materials that interface with the human body.
More information: Yue Wang et al. A highly stretchable, transparent, and conductive polymer, Science Advances (2017). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1602076
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @03:18AM (2 children)
In the early 1930s, Laurens Hammond figured out that the synchronous motors which allowed the clocks he manufactured to be so accurate could also be applied to a musical instrument that never went out of tune.
He developer the Hammond electric[1] organ.
[1] It was only "electronic" in that it used vacuum tubes for amplification.
The tone generation was done with something like a magneto or the reluctor in a modern ignition system.
When you push down a key on a Hammond, you get an explosive attack as the key contact hits the bus bar (a metal-on-metal switch transmitting the signal).
That's part of "The Hammond Sound".
When The Baldwin Company decided to build electronic organs in the early 1950s, they wanted a better approximation of a pipe organ.
Their tone generator used free-running oscillators to create the top octave and blocking oscillators to divide those for the octavely-related frequencies.
Apparently, it was decided that a flip-flop, which divided a frequency by exactly by 2, was too precise and mechanical-sounding.
A flip-flop would also use 2 tubes per division, so maybe that figured into their calculation.
N.B. The blocking oscillator notion would come back to bite them (or, more specifically, the guys who maintained the instruments) as the capacitors in those aged and shifted the L-R-C time constants, yielding awful noises.
They also made a gradual-on key contact which pressed a curved brass strip down onto a carbon track on a phenolic board, making increasingly better contact as the key traveled.
After years of use, the metal would wear a groove into the carbon and the key contact would get noisy and unreliable.
The company developed a replacement such that after wear became a problem, the board with the carbon track could be shifted laterally relative to the brass strip.
In the 1970s, Baldwin came up with a new idea using a Space-Age material.
The moving contact now would make contact with a conductive silastic (silicone "rubber") header.
As the travel of/pressure on the key increased, the conductivity improved, giving the gradual-on effect, again replicating the attack of a pipe organ.
I never heard of those degrading/wearing out.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday March 16 2017, @03:38AM (1 child)
I love the Hammond organ, and I love more that Hammond hated the Leslie Rotating Speaker.
The two go together like pissin' and the wind, and eventually became inseparable.
But like the ending of Metal Gear Solid 4, the combination of the pair mutated into something that neither of their creators could have forseen. You had electric organists ranging from small-church choirs to big time jazz-organists alike using Leslies, and the original purpose of the Leslie was to help small churches simulate the stereophonic effect of large pipe organs. But that mutated into a distinct sound all its own.
America, fuck yeah. [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2017, @05:41AM
"To each his own", said the old woman as she kissed the cow.
When I got through working on my car, I expected to have to clean schmutz off my tools.
When I bought my electronics tools, I never expected to be wiping oil off of them.
You can have Hammonds.
Hammonds have a distinctive sound and some folks prefer that sound (because it's what they heard first).
It doesn't, however, sound anything like a pipe organ.
I typically just say "Hammond"; adding "organ" is a slap in the face to the builders of real organs.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]