Motorola has found a way to make the keypad on a cellphone give tactile feedback without wasting space on bulky vibration motors (patent application EP 1503272).
The company鈥檚 answer is to coat the phone鈥檚 buttons with an electroactive polymer 鈥� a soft rubber with carbon nanotubes embedded in it. Applying a voltage induces stresses and strains in the bonds between the nanotubes and the rubber molecules, which can be felt. In Motorola鈥檚 phone, the keys are fed a varying voltage that makes them vibrate gently to give tactile feedback.
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Passports can easily be doctored, says security printer De La Rue of Basingstoke, Hampshire (GB 2404627). All a forger has to do is cut round the laminated photo with a scalpel, apply heat to soften the adhesive, peel off the picture and replace it with another.
De La Rue says injection moulding is the answer. In this process, the photo is stuck loosely to a sheet of the paper used to make the passport鈥檚 pages and placed into a mould. Clear molten polypropylene is then pumped into the mould, permeating the paper and permanently fixing the photo to it. Any attempt to cut out the photo will destroy the backing paper, so forgery will be obvious.
Anyone who has inadvertently bought pillow cases and sheets that don鈥檛 quite match, or grout that is the wrong colour for their floor or wall tiles, will know how unhelpful modern sealed packaging can be.
Now IBM has a plan (US 2005/0033665) to automate retail stock control systems with radio-frequency identification (RFID) or bar-coded tags that describe the colour of the product inside the sealed package. The tags are read and cross-checked by a reader and computer just before the checkout. Any mismatch between items triggers an alarm, and a screen gives the code number for a correctly matching item, together with the aisle and shelf number in the store.
