Slashdot Mirror
Nanotechnology-Powered Wiper-Less Windshield
fab writes "Italian car designer Leonardo Fioravanti (who worked for Pininfarina for a number of years) has developed a car prototype without windshield wipers. This amazing technological feat is made possible thanks to the use of 4 layers of glass modified using nanotechnology. The first layer filters the sun and repels the water. The second layer, using 'nano-dust' is able to push dirt to the side. The third layer acts as a sensor that activates the second layer when it detects dirt, while the fourth layer is a conductor of electricity to power this complex mechanism. I haven't been able to find an English article, but there is always a google powered translation of the Italian article."
Is this any stronger than a standard windshield, or will the rogue baseball do it in?
Maybe I'm stupid, and being your typical /.er I didn't RTFA, but how does a second layer deal with dirt? Is the first layer permeable? That's just... weird.
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You beat me to it. I am really curious whether it will work for motorcycle visors, side mirrors, and maybe the windows on my office so they don't dry all spotted with dirt :)
Good point and funny reply, and this seems to be a good spot to reveal one of the great secrets of auto maintenance: you can sharpen your windshield wipers and make them last many times longer. All you need is a small piece of fine sandpaper. Get the wiper blade wet (if it's not already), fold the sandpaper into a V shape, and pull it along the edge a number of times. You want to take off the stiff and cracked edge and expose a fresh layer of rubber. I get extra years out of blades this way, though YMMV.
I use a little gadget I bought at a flea market for a dime decades ago, a little piece of sheet aluminum that's mostly handle to hold an inch-long groove like two sides of an inside-out triangular file. Forget the "100 mile-per-gallon carburetor," it's the windshield wiper blade sharpener that's my candidate for great suppressed invention.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
The real news is that Google just dropped an almost perfect machine translation of an Italian article and nobody noticed. I surfed all over the articles website amazed buy one article after another, not by their content, but by the translation. Hasn't anybody else noticed? Perhaps it is a fruition of Google scanning and comparing those thousands of U.N. Documents they said they would use a year or two ago.
"Where have all the good people gone?" - Jack Johnson