As any cyclist will know, riding the roads can leave you very twitchy. Helmets are essential, of course, but students at California State University have looked at the issue of safety from a very different angle. Noticing that rodents use their whiskers to determine if they can pass through a gap, they reversed the idea and developed a set of four luminescent ‘whiskers’ to attach to the front of a bike, with the idea that it would force motorists to think twice about whether they could safely drive past. Called VibriSee, it hasn’t made its way into production yet, but we’ve got a fe-line it could one day be as big a boost to road safety as cat’s eyes.
