Technical Bank

ony on Wednesday unveiled a flexible OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display so thin it can wrap around a 4mm cylinder--roughly the diameter of the average pen or pencil. The 80 micrometers-thick OLED display (about the width of a human hair) can continuously display moving images even while being rolled up, as Sony demonstrated in a video below. The working flexibility is possible because engineers have managed to lose the rigid driver IC chips usually used in the substrate of a screen in exchange for a gate-driver circuit with OTFTs (organic thin-film transistors), according to Sony. The 4.1-inch display, which has a resolution of 432x240 pixels (121 pixels per inch), is not for sale. It's simply a research prototype Sony said it hopes to one day incorporate into products such as screens in mobile devices. Full demonstrations of the screen will be given this week at the SID (Society for Information Display) 2010 International Symposium in Seattle. The...

Not one to rest on its laurels, the Google Chrome team is hard at work on Chrome 6. The official move to the 6.0 designation in the Chromium developer builds officially started a few days ago. The move to a Chrome branch for Chromium means that the final tweaks and polishes on Chrome 5 are almost complete. Chrome 5 is a big release — not only is it blazingly fast, it’s also going to be the first stable release for Mac and Linux users. So what can we expect in Chrome 6? Well, not too much right now. However, Download Squad found a new addition to the latest Chromium developer nightly build: predictive pre-connections. The inclusion of predictive pre-connections means that as soon as you type in a search query in the browser, it goes ahead and opens up a connection to a search engine. Thus your data will transmit faster when you press enter. The second area of this patch is equally cool. It “involves subresources, such as images,” the developer who submitted the patc...

Despite its incredibly low density, aerogel is one of the most powerful materials on the planet. It can support thousands of times its own weight, block out intense heat, cold and sound – yet it is 1,000 times less dense than glass, nearly as transparent and is composed of %99.8 air. The lowest-density silica-based aerogels are even lighter than air. Despite its fragility in certain regards and its incredible lack of density, aerogel has amazing thermal, acoustical  and electrical insulation properties as illustrated by the images here. A single one-pound block can also support half a ton of weight. NASA continues to find new space-based applications for this incredible material. An aerogel window one inch thick has the effective insulative capacity of a ten-inch thick glass window system. While it is still expensive and has other limitations, this material – originally developed nearly a century ago but still undergoing experimentation – could prove to be o...

  You know that when we saw this ad we had to take a second look. The Fly Mouse (or, if you prefer Google Translate's version, "Air Flying Squirrel Lazy Mouse," is a wireless keyboard / mouse for HTPCs and the like. With its QWERTY keyboard, arrow keys, and a built in gyro, you'll be Googleing and YouTubeing up a storm, via the 2.4GHz wireless signal. Available for about $50, get a closer look after the break. And while you're at it, maybe you can explain the guy in the cowboy hat? Posted via web from Madhav Joshi