One of the most common and beloved packing materials now comes in a metal form. Bubble wrap—first invented as three-dimensional wallpaper, believe it or not—started protecting valuables in 1960 and is branded by the Sealed Air company. It’s typically made from polyethylene, where a bubble-shaped side is bonded to a flat side. The new metallic form can offer protection in very, very tight spaces, only a few millimeters thick. So packaging can be made very, very small and much stronger than the plastic variety. Computer and cell phone cases could be made much more thin and sleek. Computer parts could be protected with very little space used. Even helmets would not need to be as bulky. The protection offered is more heat and chemical resistant and more flexible than any other bubble wrap. Making the metallic wrap is surprisingly simple. Afsaneh Rabiei , professor of engineering North Carolina State University, and her team started with a thin sheet of aluminum and used a studded roller to form small indents in the sheet. Instead of capturing air in these indentations, she filled them with a foaming agent like calcium carbonate or titanium hydrate. When such agents are heated they form bubbles within the metal, as you can see here: (more…)
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New Metallic Bubble Wrap: Thinner, Stronger, Better
judgecorp writes “Google has fixed a vulnerability in its Glass device, which made it possible to fool the wearable gadget into joining malicious Wi-Fi networks, through the use of fake QR codes. Google fixed the flaw fast, following a tip-off from researchers — but there are two warnings to take from this. There are other weaknesses in Glass (such as the absence of a lockscreen), and this sort of weakness will increasingly hit as the Internet of Things takes hold and the number of communicating devices multiplies.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The scariest Google Glass hack just got fixed before anyone evil could actually use it, but the details are a little unsettling. Using nothing more than Glass’s camera and a malicious QR code, hackers would have been able to steal total control of the device if you so much as looked at the wrong thing . Read more… 
The British government has announced that it will approve testing of driverless cars on public roads in the United Kingdom before the end of 2013. According to a new 80-page report published on Tuesday entitled “Action for Roads: A network for the 21st century, ” a team at Oxford University and Nissan have already begun work but have only been testing in private areas. The plan comes less than a year after Florida , California , and Nevada have approved similar testing. Michigan is not far behind, either. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
[ Video Link ] Collin Cunningham makes excellent educational videos about electronics. Here’s his latest one, about capacitors. (Via Make )