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Showing posts with the label clothes

Your Jeans as a Cell Phone? It's Coming

Get ready.  It's coming.  Computers in your clothes. According to newswise.com, Ohio State University researchers have been able to embroider circuits into fabric with 0.1 mm precision—the perfect size to integrate electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing. With this advance, the researchers have taken the next step toward the design of functional textiles—clothes that gather, store, or transmit digital information. With further development, the technology could lead to shirts that act as antennas for your smart phone or tablet, workout clothes that monitor your fitness level, sports equipment that monitors athletes’ performance, a bandage that tells your doctor how well the tissue beneath it is healing—or even a flexible fabric cap that senses activity in the brain. Sound scary?  It does to, to me.  "A revolution is happening in the textile industry,” says John Volakis, director of the ElectroScience Laborator...

Cleaning Out Our Closets Cleans Out Our Souls

What is it with cleaning out our closets? At the beginning of every season, I do it. But I dread it. At first I feel so great, weeding out all the size 14s – and size 8s – so that I can finally see into the very back of my very tiny closet. I pack them in shopping bags and take them to a charitable donation spot but carrying them in, something else sweeps over me. I leave, feeling hollow. Granted, getting rid of baby clothes is very hard. Who doesn't remember when that little head fit inside that bunny hood, instead of headphones now? But it's not just that. I see slices of my life peeling away, ones that will never come back. His favorite striped shirt I had to cut a hole in so he could fit his head through it in preschool. (My husband's family is known for their big heads.) The shoes he wore when he first started walking (thankfully, I knew enough to grab them back from the garbage when we bought him new sneakers.) And his ghost Halloween co...