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German researchers create smudge repellent coating from candle soot
While they're working on the lack of feedback, and need for exposed skin problems for touch screens, that other gripe -- dirty smudges -- could soon be wiped-out permanently. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz obviously had enough of sleeve-cleaning their devices and created a coating that could usher in a smudge-free world. The discovery comes after the team applied candle soot to glass and then coated it in silica to keep it in place. The glass is then heated to a bratwurst-baking 600 ºC for calcination, which makes the soot transparent -- somewhat handy for screens. To test, different oils and solvents were applied, but the glass' superamphiphobic properties soon fended them off. A resilient coating sounds a little more straight-forward than what Apple recently applied to patent, but until either of these see the light of day, you'd better keep that Brasso close by.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Blacksmith
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirty-second in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself. Blacksmiths are known for being brawny folk -- hammering pieces of metal together is not easy work after all. But in World of Warcraft, even the smallest gnome or scrawniest elf can be a great blacksmith. Azeroth is a land where even the smallest people can wield the biggest of axes, so it would follow that they could craft them too, as well as any other sort of armor or weapon that they could imagine.Typically, however, even in Azeroth, blacksmiths are, by and large, members of a class that can use plate mail and heavy weapons, such as a warrior, a death knight, or a paladin, just as tailors are usually spellcasters of some kind. So even if a blacksmith appears scrawny on the outside, he or she is very likely still quite brawny on the inside. Underneath that elf's pretty skin are muscles of steel!Being a blacksmith implies a state of mind as much as it does a state of body, however. Working with metals is not something for the light hearted. The weight, the heat, and all the soot are not for people who like to keep their clothes clean at all times, for instance. It's also not a very socially-oriented profession, requiring long hours spent hammering away at something until it reaches perfection, often using lots of material in the learning process before you finally get one right. Blacksmiths of lore tend to be patient and hardy people, tempered and perfected by their work, like good, hard steel.
