develop display screens akin made in china

One of today’s modern technological wonders is the flat-panel liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, which is the key component we find inside televisions, computer monitors, smartphones, and an ever-proliferating range of gadgets that display information electronically.What most people don’t realize is how complex and sophisticated the manufacturing process is. The entire world’s supply is made within two time zones in East Asia. Unless, of course, the factory proposed by Foxconn for Wisconsin actually gets built.

Liquid crystal display (LCD) screens are manufactured by assembling a sandwich of two thin sheets of glass.On one of the sheets are transistor “cells” formed by first depositing a layer of indium tin oxide (ITO), an unusual metal alloy that you can actually see through.That’s how you can get electrical signals to the middle of a screen.Then you deposit a layer of silicon, followed by a process that builds millions of precisely shaped transistor parts.This patterning step is repeated to build up tiny little cells, one for each dot (known as a pixel) on the screen.Each step has to be precisely aligned to the previous one within a few microns.Remember, the average human hair is 40 microns in diameter.

LCD fabs have to maintain strict standards of cleanliness inside.Any dust particles in the air could cause defects in the finished displays – tiny dark spots or uneven intensities on your screen.That means the air is passed through elaborate filtration systems and pushed downwards from the ceiling constantly.Workers have to wear special clean room protective clothing and scrub before entering to minimize dust particles or other contamination.People are the largest source of particles, from shedding dead skin cells, dust from cosmetic powders, or smoke particles exhaled from the lungs of workers who smoke.Clean rooms are rated by the number of particles per cubic meter of air.A class 100 cleanroom has less than 100 particles less than 0.3 microns in diameter per cubic meter of air, Class 10 has less than 10 particles, and so on. Fab 9 has hundeds of thousands of square meters of Class 100 cleanroom, and many critical areas like photolithography are Class 10.In comparison, the air in Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA is roughly Class 8,000,000, and probably gets substantially worse when an MBTA bus passes through.

Since most display manufacturing has to be done in a cleanroom and handling the glass requires such precision, the factory is heavily automated.As you watch the glass come in, it is placed into giant cassettes by robot handlers, and the cassettes are moved around throughout the factory.At each step, robots lift a piece of glass out of the cassette, and position it for the processing machines.Some of the machines, like the ones that deposit silicon or ITO, orient the glass vertically, and put them inside an enormous vacuum chamber where all the air is first pumped out before they can go to work.And then they somehow manage to deposit micrometer thin layers that are extremely uniform.It is a miracle that any of this stuff actually works.

Chinese researchers from Nanjing University in China have developed a way to place displays on human skin that are flexible, safe, and don’t require a lot of power to run. They are even working out a way to power the devices using energy produced form the human body! The technology will certainly have implications for the field of wearable devices by allowing already existing flexible medical devices to display relevant biomedical information.

The initial stretchable light-emitting devices called alternating-current electroluminescent (ACEL) displays that can be stuck on skin or other surfaces like a temporary tattoo. However, the displays require relatively high voltages to achieve sufficient brightness, which could create safety concerns. They also drain a lot of power.

However, researchers lead by Desheng Kong and his colleagues wanted to develop an ACEL that could operate at lower voltages and thus be safer for human skin. They came up with a stretchable High-Permittivity Nanocomposites for Epidermal Alternating-Current Electroluminescent Displays.

During a demo for Thailand Medical News, a volunteer had a screen stuck to his skin that displayed the time. It looks like the technology can be easily shrunk down for much higher resolution displays that can provide live data from on-body medical devices, healthcare trackers, and that can even be used in hospitals to display readings directly on patients.

In only the near future, one can Imagine a runner who doesn’t need to carry a stopwatch or cell phone to check her time: She could just gaze at the glowing stopwatch display on the back of her hand. Such human-machine interfaces are no longer science fiction, but they still have a way to go before becoming mainstream.

The Chinese scientists have developed to make their device sandwiched in an electroluminescent layer, made of light-emitting microparticles dispersed in a stretchable dielectric material, between two flexible silver nanowire electrodes. The device contained a new type of dielectric material, in the form of ceramic nanoparticles embedded in a rubbery polymer, that increased the brightness compared with existing ACEL displays. They used this material to make a four-digit stopwatch display, which they mounted onto a volunteer’s hand. At low voltages, the stretchable display was sufficiently bright to be seen under indoor lighting. The bright stretchable display could find a broad range of applications in smart wearables, soft robotics and human-machine interfaces, t

The authors acknowledge funding from National Key Research and Development Program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

Reference: Stretchable High-Permittivity Nanocomposites for Epidermal Alternating-Current Electroluminescent Displays ,Yunlei Zhou, Chaoshan Zhao ,Jiachen Wang, Yanzhen Li, Chenxin Li, Hangyu Zhu, Shuxuan Feng, Shitai Cao, Desheng Kong* ACS Materials Lett. 2019, 1, 5, 511-518,Publication Date:October 4, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsmaterialslett.9b00376

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in China has developed what it is calling a skin-like triboelectric nanogenerator (STENG). In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes the nanogenerator they built and offer suggestions for its use.

Prior research led to the construction of TENG devices that generate electricity by pressing materials together and taking them apart, creating an electrostatic charge. In this new effort, the researchers put an S in front of the name of their TENG device to highlight its similarity to human skin.

As an end product, the STENG could be used to adhere to skin or clothing to generate electricity powering small devices such as phones or music players. Because it can be made in a variety of shapes, it could also be used in other configurations, such as inside of a shoe, where it could generate electricity by taking advantage of the foot pressure against the insole. The researchers note that it could also potentially be used in applications that involve tapping, or even in self-powered robots.

Researchers in Japan say they have developed an ultra-thin, lightweight e-skin that is stuckto the chest area using water spray and can be worn for a week at a time.

The technology was developed by Takao Someya, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering. It has yet to undergo clinical trials, but Someya says he has started working with partners to develop manufacturing processes.

(DNPCF), to be worn on the back of the user’s hand. Designed for older people or those with who have difficulty using a smartphone, it will show heartbeat data transmitted by the e-skin in the form of large and easily understood graphics. It can also display simple emojis — including a heart and a rainbow — sent by friends and relatives from a smartphone, to help older people feel connected to their loved ones.

Someya and his team started developing e-skin for robots in the early 2000s. And other research from theirlab is being developed for the marketplace through two spin-off companies — Signtle, for medical applications, and Xenoma, for smart clothing.

Paul, we’ve actually never met. You are in town from China. I’m hoping you’re going to tell me why.paul mozurYeah, so I’ve been reporting in and around China for about 12 years. And there’s always been a lot of control. I think people are aware of that. They’re aware there’s censorship. They’re aware that people can be followed, and there is a certain amount of surveillance. But in the past five years, things have really changed and taken a much more dramatic and darker turn, really, when it comes to, especially, surveillance. And that coincides with the rise of Xi Jinping. China’s president who came into power about five years ago has really doubled down on control. And he has been not shy at all about using technology to exert that control. And there’s a lot of things that are invisible in how that works, but one of the very few visible symptoms are the cameras. There were always some cameras in China, but recently, past couple of years, the cameras have just gone in in this dramatic way. Some of them look like these baroque modernist sculptures or something. It’s like four cameras stretching off of a different pole, or you have a camera hanging from a tree. There’s these almost hidden cameras in the subway cars, these little holes. And if you look closely at them, you say, oh, my God, that’s actually a lens. I counted the cameras on my way to work one day, which is a two-subway-stop ride. And I passed, I think, 250 cameras.michael barbaroWow.paul mozurYeah.michael barbaroIn what kind of places? Where are you seeing them?paul mozurAll kinds of places. Every intersection will have dozens of cameras to catch people’s license plates as they drive by. About every 50 yards, you’ll have a camera on a pole that’s a dome camera that can zoom in and grab their faces or follow somebody if you have to. And when you walk down stairs, there’s these high-powered facial recognition cameras aimed at your face, with the idea of trying to figure out who you are as you walk by.michael barbaroAnd who’s on the other side of those cameras?paul mozurYeah, it’s what I always wonder. We don’t always know. And this is the thing about China, is that it is an autocratic system with very little transparency. For the most part, what we assume is a newly empowered police force is using these to try to learn as much as they can about the population and track them.michael barbaroBut to the degree that there’s a rationale for this, what is it?paul mozurSecurity. Safety. We want to make sure that if something bad were to happen in our neighborhood, we could protect ourselves. But in some recent reporting, what we discovered is the true breathtaking ways in which the police are already assembling lists of faces of people that they’re worried about, and even using it to mark people based on ethnicity and race, and track them and keep a record. It’s as if you were just counting only one group of people as they went around a city and keeping tabs so that you can go back and see which person that was. And in America, this would be horrendously unconstitutional. But in China, it had been happening for almost two years without anybody even noticing.michael barbaroAnd why would China want to do that? Why would it track a group of people by race through cameras and this classification system?paul mozurRight. So China has had this long issue with a Muslim minority known as the Uighurs, who live out in western China, this massive province, a fifth the size of China’s landmass, called Xinjiang. It’s mostly desert and really high mountains. It’s the old Silk Road. And these people have lived there for more than 1,000 years in these tiny little oasis cities around the desert. And China has occupied their land for several hundred years now. And as China has occupied it, for the most part, until maybe the past 50 or 60 years, it’s mostly just been a far-flung place. But under the Chinese Communist Party, they’ve really solidified power. And they’ve started to change the demographics. So they’ve created all these passive incentives to move Han Chinese into this region.michael barbaroTo basically make it less Muslim? More Chinese?paul mozurExactly. And so, 50 or 60 years ago, there were almost no Chinese, and it was all Uighurs. Now it’s 50 percent Chinese, 50 percent Uighur. And that’s created all of these conflicts.

But everything really changed in 2009. What happens is, there’s violence in this small factory in southern China. And it turns out that there was a rumor that these two Uighur factory workers raped a Chinese woman, and then when the ethnic Chinese confront the Uighur population at the factory, a big fight breaks out, where, ultimately, two Uighurs end up beaten to death.archived recording[SHOUTING]paul mozurAnd there’s a video of this on YouTube, and it goes around.archived recording[SPEAKING MANDARIN]paul mozurAnd in a tinderbox like Xinjiang, where you have all of these other tensions there, it becomes one of the main causes for this massive outburst of rioting and anger in the capital of Urumqi.

On the subway, for instance, you start to see more checkpoints. The police just sit out where people are transferring, and they just stop people at random, and they scan their ID card, just like what happened in Xinjiang. And one of the things our reporting showed is that it’s not just Uighurs they’re looking for in these cities. They’re making lists of people’s faces depending on what kind of group they are. So they are making lists of the mentally ill. They’re making lists of people with a past history of drug use. They’re making lists of people who would petition the government or complain about the government. But they also have lists of every single person registered to live in that city. So the idea isn’t just to track these small groups. It’s to track everyone, with the idea that if somebody were to get out of line, then you know everything about them to begin with.michael barbaroSo this is about every single person in China?paul mozurYes.[music]michael barbaroI’m struck that all of this is happening at the same time that China is becoming a world power whose influence is growing so much overseas, because those things don’t quite seem to be consistent. In fact, they seem to be very contradictory.paul mozurRight. And I think they’ve basically proved that wrong, that you can have censorship and you can have a closed society, in some ways, and a controlled society, but also have a booming tech sector. And this is the first time in probably 30 years that we’ve had an autocratic state alongside the United States at the cutting edge of technology. So if you think about it, democracies have dominated technological creation since the fall of the Berlin Wall, effectively. Now China’s coming along, and they’re making technologies, but these technologies are suited for their purposes. And in a lot of cases, those purposes have some authoritarian component to them, or some point of control to them. Very intentional control. And in fact, as they’ve risen, they’ve used all of this as a selling point. So think to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. This is China’s coming-out party as a new superpower.[music]paul mozurThey’ve outfitted the capital with tons of security to make sure it goes well, to make sure there’s no protests, but also to make sure there’s no attacks or anything. And so they load up the city with 300,000 cameras that the government was controlling.michael barbaroBecause, of course, this is a moment where you actually do want a lot of security.paul mozurYeah, exactly. Yeah. So they really pulled out all the stops.

But then what they did when all these international leaders arrived to see the Olympics is they took them into the back rooms where you could see all these cameras operating. They show the screens. They show, this is how our policing system works.michael barbaroSo who is in there?paul mozurSo we don’t know everybody that visited. But what we do know is that countries like Ecuador sent delegations — places that might be struggling with democracy or even already being led by strongmen, who have come to check this out. And there’s screens up with video footage from these thousands and thousands of cameras. And they can see how the Chinese security forces can see everything. They look at it, and they say, well, this is pretty powerful. I wonder if we could get this. And that’s where it starts. And so now what we’re seeing is those technologies are beginning to flow to the world. And so all of a sudden, on the streets of Quito, you see the same cameras that you would see in Shanghai. And that’s not just happening there. That’s happening in Venezuela. That’s happening in Bolivia. That’s happening in Angola. That’s happening in Pakistan. It’s happening around the world.michael barbaroPaul, what do you make of this global spread of surveillance, starting in China? What does it tell you about the changes you’ve seen in China in recent years and where all this is headed?paul mozurIt tells me that, I think, the Chinese government believes it has created a different model and a new model, and they want to propagate it. They want to spread it. And they want to give other countries the ability to do what they’ve done and, in that way, influence the world. So this is — governance by data, governance by mass surveillance, is, in a way, the Chinese model now, and they want to bring it to the world. And what this encourages is authoritarianism, because it uses technology unapologetically to consolidate power by understanding what everybody’s doing and where they are at any given moment. And I think it’s an important moment for democracies like the United States, because they need to recognize this is happening, but also say, well, what does the United States stand for in all this? Do they stand for data collection, as well, without telling anybody? Do you stand for something else? Because the United States at this point is so lost in its own debates —michael barbaroRight. So do we stand in contrast to that?paul mozurRight. Exactly. And that’s the thing — as I write about this from China, it’s unclear where the United States stands in all of it.michael barbaroIn a world where this model that you’re describing is spreading around the world, how exactly does China benefit from that? Because there are fewer and fewer places where a democratic government without surveillance challenges it?paul mozurI think the idea is if you give the people you’re dealing with these systems, you increase their power. And that means the people you’re dealing with are more likely to keep dealing with you and be the ones in power. So there’s a sort of perpetuation. But I think there’s also just a broader sense of the more countries around the world that do this, the more it’s deemed acceptable by the world, and the more that they have reliable partners who are following what they’re doing and reliant on them and allow them to push how governance works. And so in a way, they become the axle, and all of these different places become the spokes in this wheel, the new version of global governance, a new alternative to the messy democracies of the past.michael barbaroGovernance by data.paul mozurGovernance by data and surveillance.michael barbaroPaul, thank you very much.paul mozurThanks.michael barbaroOn Sunday, The Times reported that the Trump administration has decided not to confront China over its repressive treatment of the Uighurs, for fear that it could disrupt the final stages of a major trade deal between the two countries. The administration had considered imposing economic sanctions on Chinese officials involved in the repression, but has since backed away from that plan. In Part 2, we’ll hear from one Uighur man living in the U.S. who is trying to fight for his family in the camps in China.

On Sunday, fighting between Israel and Gaza escalated into the worst combat since the full-blown war between them in 2014. Four Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian rocket and missile attacks, prompting Israel to take aim at individual militants in Gaza, killing at least nine of them and as many civilians.archived recording (benjamin netanyahu)[SPEAKING HEBREW]michael barbaroDuring a news conference, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promised massive attacks against the militants in Gaza.archived recording (benjamin netanyahu)[SPEAKING HEBREW]michael barbaroThe Palestinian rocket attacks mostly struck civilian targets in southern Israel with no military value, including a building that houses a kindergarten and the oncology department of a medical center. The violence is the latest in a long-running series of clashes that have produced temporary ceasefires that are quickly broken. And President Trump on Sunday said that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should not testify before Congress, setting up another confrontation with congressional Democrats, who have requested Mueller’s appearance. In a tweet, the president said that Mueller’s report was conclusive and that Americans do not need to hear from him again. “No redos for the Dems,” he wrote. Because Mueller was appointed by the Department of Justice, which answers to the president, it appears that Trump has the authority to prevent Mueller from testifying.

The next time you’re exercising, imagine checking your time and other statistics on a display screen that’s attached to your skin, instead of on a device that you could accidentally drop. Scientists at two Chinese universities have devised this kind of stretchable, low-voltage luminescent screen (ACS Materials Lett., doi: 10.1021/acsmaterialslett.9b00376).

Three types of flexible thin optoelectronics—LEDs with deformable conductors, organic LEDs and alternating-current electroluminescent (ACEL) devices—have been investigated as possible underlying technologies for stretchable, wearable displays. Previous efforts to develop ACEL displays, however, have led to devices with comparatively high operating voltages, which present safety concerns to humans.

The researchers at Nanjing University and Lanzhou University of Technology in China got around the voltage demands by creating high-permittivity ceramic nanoparticles and incorporating them into a flexible elastomer base. The resulting display operates at voltages of 10 to 35 volts.

To transform the luminescent composite sheet into a stopwatch, the Chinese team sprayed a pattern of silver nanowires onto a glass substrate and transferred it to a flexible elastomer sheet. The four-digit stopwatch display maintained its luminance levels even when deformed under a large tensile strain of roughly 40%. A silicone-based adhesive held the display onto the skin of a human volunteer, and the stopwatch kept on ticking away the seconds even while the volunteer’s hand opened and closed.

to emphasize the role of the center as a public venue, it has been developed by playze & schmidhuber as a continuation of the surrounding waterfront landscape and is therefore an integral part of the public park. connecting pathways, bridges and streets have been woven into a topography leading to the many entrances of the building, blurring the boundary between the park and the new intervention.

it was never the intention to demonstrate the capabilities of digital tools by means of this project, nevertheless, this building couldn’t have been designed, developed, produced and built without the help of cutting-edge digital technology. in order to cope with the complexity of the spatial allocation and coordination of the structure, curtainwall, secondary structure and ceramic skin, a tailor-made computer script had to be coded. the script automatically generated a 3D model of the structure and façade, as well as production drawings for the respective contractors.

The development could benefit billionaire investor William Ackman, who has placed a $1 billion bet that Herbalife’s stock price will eventually fall to zero under regulatory scrutiny for what he has called a pyramid scheme. Operators of pyramid schemes typically try to make money by recruiting new members, who pay fees, rather than relying only on the sale of goods.

Chinese officials said on Thursday that they are investigating whether Nu Skin Enterprises is operating an illegal pyramid scheme after a Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, said that the U.S.-based company was using sales tactics “akin to brainwashing.” Nu Skin, which makes anti-aging skin-care and nutritional products, said in a statement on Thursday that “we are aware that Chinese regulators have now initiated investigations to review issues raised by recent news reports.” Nu Skin’s stock plummeted 26.4 percent on Thursday to close at $84.80 on the New York Stock Exchange.

GM hopes that by using a sales and marketing model akin to ones that worked well for Tesla (TSLA.O) and Apple (AAPL.O) in China, it will be able to channel any energy and excitement the imports generate back into GM"s existing models in the country.

Then there are the executive VIPs, successful professionally and busy, while the third group includes young and sporty drivers who are taking performance cars to racing tracks.

ZERO GRAVITY has invested a great deal of time and resources in the development of the anti-aging Perfectio device. In order to prove the power and effectiveness of all ZERO GRAVITY products, independent clinical studies were conducted, most notably and recently by Princeton Research Division in Princeton, New Jersey.

Shadow play probably developed from "par" shows with narrative scenes painted on a large cloth and the story further related through song. As the shows were mostly performed at night the par was illuminated with an oil lamp or candles. Shadow puppet theatre likely originated in Central Asia-China or in India in the 1st millennium BCE.

In Plato"s allegory of the cave (circa 380 BCE), Socrates described a kind of shadow play with figures made out of stone, wood, or other materials, presented to prisoners who in all of their life could see nothing more than the shadows on the wall in front of them. This was an imaginative illustration of ideas about (false or limited) the relations between knowledge, education and a truthful understanding of reality. Plato compared a wall that screens off the people who carry the figures to the kind of partitions used by puppet (marionette) players to hide behind.ancient Greece that Socrates/Plato could refer to.

French showman François Dominique Séraphin first presented his shadow spectacle in a hôtel particulier in Versailles in 1771. He would go on to perform at the Palace of Versailles in front of royalty. In 1784 Séraphin moved to Paris, performing his shows at his permanent theatre in the newly opened Palais-Royal from 8 September 1784. The performances would adapt to the political changes and survived the French Revolution. Séraphin developed the use of clockwork mechanisms to automate the show. His nephew took over the show after Séraphin"s death in 1800 and it was continued by his heirs until the theatre closed in 1870.

"Puppeteering". Free China Journal. 1 January 1986. Retrieved 28 December 2021. The origins of Taiwan shadow puppetry trace back to the 17th or early 18th Centuries. When General Koxinga (1624–1662) expelled Dutch occupation forces from Taiwan, growing numbers of settlers crossed the Strait to the island. Among them were shadow puppeteers from Chaochow in Kwangtung Province. And in the interstices of time, their artform took root and gradually developed into an indispensable element of rural life in southern Taiwan. The early troupes of shadow puppeteers concentrated in the Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung areas. According to contemporary shadow-puppet master Chang Tien-pao, his grandfather once told him that in the waning years of the Ching Dynasty (1644–1911), there were forty-odd puppet troupes in Kangshan, and thirty-odd in the single village of Hsialiao, both in Kaohsiung County—an astounding popularity.