A News of the Weird Classic (May 1998)

British mechanical engineer John Tyrer told an audience at the annual meeting of the Institute of Physics in Brighton, England, in March (1998) that he and his colleagues were using lasers to design a more comfortable bra. "A breast imposes various load distributions ... and vibrational problems as the woman walks," he said, and he criticized the "strap design" that "transmits the load to the wrong places." According to Tyrer, the technology, "Electron Speckle Pattern Interfermometry," analyzes the way a three-dimensional surface (like a bra) changes when a force is applied to it.