Word: soft
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...Vinson, 64, of Prince George, Va., who took up flying at 50. Vinson takes her three grandkids, ages 4 to 13, aloft regularly. From toddlerhood, they have loved it. "Years later," Vinson says, "my granddaughter would talk about flying right through clouds and how they were not solid but soft like smoke." The first time Gary Spoor, 48, took up Garrett, 4, the boy was transfixed. "Look, Grandpa," he called, "there's a train! Look--cows!" "It makes me feel 10 feet tall to bring that kind of joy to him," says the power-line superintendent from Kansas City...
...snowboard-loving British inventors Richard Palmer and Phil Green, both 39, and their new material, d3o, which can perform a few high-speed tricks of its own. d3o's molecules flow as an athlete moves, but on impact they bind together instantaneously to absorb shock, then unlock to become soft and elastic once again. "It's a protective system that changes shape with you, so it doesn't restrict you at all and by stiffening spreads the load and reduces tendency to bruising," says Green, a materials scientist and d3o's research director...
Globe uses d3o in skateboard shoes. Spyder is making a slalom suit with d3o for the U.S. and Canadian Olympic teams. Swiss company Ribcap is putting d3o into soft ski caps. d3o management is also discussing military opportunities. And as d3o becomes cheaper to produce, it could be used in cars, soundproofing and police and paramedic gear. Then there are football, baseball, rugby, polo, cricket. The prospects for d3o and its "intelligent molecules" suddenly look endless...
Maggie Orth is tired of high-tech gadgets encased in hard, shiny plastic. Instead, she weaves metals into soft fabrics to create everything from a jacket that plays music to a cocktail dress that lights up like a firefly. "Injection-molded plastic is not my cup of tea," says Orth, whose Seattle firm International Fashion Machines just released a line of fuzzy light switches--small cloth pompons that turn on or off with a squeeze, thanks to conductive fibers woven into them...
...Psychedelia was supposed to induce a trance-like state with or without drugs?try the effect of the many videos and light shows, like Brits Mark Boyle and Joan Hills' Beyond Image and Son of Beyond Image (1969). With a soundtrack by British progressive rockers Soft Machine, it features projections of colored oil floating on water. Or how about German-born Gustav Metzger's Liquid Crystal Projections (1965/2005), a chill-out room with moving images of colored blobs flung onto the walls?why not turn up, drop in and tune out? tel: (49-69) 2998820; www.schirn-kunsthalle.de