Tag: bend

Aussie scientists bend light

Posted on March 24, 2015 by - News

aussie minersPhysicists at the Australian National University said they’ve made a material which can put a perfect bend in light.

The device, called a topological insulator, has the potential to aid the telecomms industry to create a computer chip using light.

And Professor Yuri Kivashar, from the university, said the material may also have use in microscopes, aeriel designs and quantum computers.

He said that scientists had searched for similar materials in photonics, but they tended to use large complicated structures.

But his team have used a zig-zag structure to make a prototype of the materials.

The structure makes a coupling that prevents light from travelling through the centre and instead is channelled to the edge of the material. That lets light to be bent around corners without loss of signal.

Apple to make bending a feature

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

bendAfter it released its iPhone 6 which bent in your pocket, the more cynical amongst us thought that Apple might try to make this a “feature”.

Sure enough Apple has won a patent for flexible display tech that allows for layering of components like microphones or speakers

Flexible displays, in and of themselves, are nothing new. What makes this patent different is that it includes support for components — like buttons, microphones, or speakers — that can be mounted around the display and work through it.

So in other words when the phone bends everything else bends with it – exactly the effect when you put a bad structurally designed phone in your skinny jeans and the whole thing bends.

What appears to have happened is that Apple did not just make its bending on its iPhones a feature, it actually took out a patent on it.

According to Patently Apple this flexible display is capable of being bent and acting as a pass-through device that can handle a wide range of functionalities.

Apple envisions people bending or in some way manipulating the screen to touch a button activator below its surface.

By deforming that specific portion of the display, the activity associated with the button would be created. In another example, the flexibility of the display would create a porous layer that would allow for sound waves to pass through. Therefore, speakers and microphones and other components could sit under a screen and work as they do now.

Actually, it does appear that using this technology Apple could build a phone which is all-screen or nearly all-screen in design which will mean the death of the home button.

iPhone6 bends in your pocket

Posted on September 24, 2014 by - News

bendShocked iPhone6 plus users have discovered that the build quality of the iPhone 6 is not quite what they expected.

The Apple fanboys are finding that if they put the phone in their front pockets they develop a slight bend.

The Tame Apple Press has rushed to say that while the rumours are true it clearly takes quite a bit of force and in any event, you would never put an iPhone in your pocket, you would carry it around so others can see it and want to buy it.

According to experts, the problem should not be surprising. Jeremy Irons, a Design Engineer at Creative Engineering said that it should not surprise anyone that the phone bends.  The only thing keeping its shape is the thin aluminium frame that covers the back and reaches around the sides. There is also another very thin piece of steel behind the glass.

This problem did not exist with the previous iPhones, which were thicker and not as long. In material bending, larger cross sectional areas and shorter lengths make things stronger. So the increased length and decreased thickness contribute to the weakness of the new iPhone.

While the iPhone 5S was only seven percent thicker than the iPhone 6 Plus, it was actually 22 percent stronger in bending. When you make something longer, it gets proportionally more bendable, when you make it thinner, it gets a lot more bendable.