Category Archives: Other Stuff
Just last week, the people of Lebanon broke the world record for the world’s largest hand-painted canvas, leaving hand-prints on 4,355 square meters of fabric. With the record broken and jotted down in the Guinness Book of World Records, the organizers of the event were left scratching their chins thinking of a good way to get rid of the humongous canvas and finally came up with an innovative idea to recycle it and give it a new purpose in life, turning it all into 5,000 environment –friendly shopping bags. These bags can be used as reusable alternatives to one-time-use plastic bags.
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There is never an ideal office temperature. If on employee feels the temperature just right, you’re sure to find another down the corridor whining about just how hot it is! Designers Beau Trincia, and Nash Hurley and Taylor Keep of VITAL Environments have come up with an ingenious way for personal temperature control in office spaces that not only makes working comfortable but also helps save up on energy costs, called “Comfort-On-Demand”! Using pressure-sensitive pads under office desks and on their surfaces to warm up, personal fans with adjustable nozzles and radiant chilling sails to cool, employees can turn up the heat or cool down their personal working spaces using a smartphone app. This could help offices save up on unnecessary cooling and heating costs.
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Japan’s being having terrific problems with coping up with the energy requirements these days, after Fukushima pulling out the plug due to the recent natural disasters that struck the eastern nation. To keep up with the energy crisis, Japanese firms are urging their employees to keep their formal attire home, instead showing up for work in comfortable Hawaiian shirts and sandals! Employers feel that by doing so, offices can cut down on energy use by turning of air conditioning from time to time, given that the employees will be a lot more comfortable in clothing like this.
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Rumor has it, that the University of Missouri has come up with cutting edge solar panels, that could probably make the shiny new array you’ve just set up on your roof into a museum artifact. Missouri professor, Patrick Pinhero, claims to have come up with a device that uses a thin sheet of tiny antennas that collect as much energy as possible, as opposed to the 20% conversion efficiency our current solar panels brag about. Pinhero’s technology does not necessarily need to be exposed to bright sunshine to generate energy. Leaving it near a near-infrared light source can also have it generating substantial amounts of electricity!
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We’ve known turbines to be hooked up to free-flowing streams of water, supplying energy to electricity grids. We’ve never had turbines being hooked up to arteries to generate energy from the flow of blood before though. Engineers at Switzerland’s University of Bern are busy hammering into place tiny and miniscule turbines capable of being fitted in human arteries that will produce 800 microwatts of electricity, more than enough to power up an average pacemaker, keeping your heart ticking healthily. The device could also help power up neurostimulators, blood-pressure sensors, and other implanted medical devices, working as a revolutionary means of energy to keep in good health.
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We’ve seen cars, homes and electricity grids powered by energy from the wind, not watches! Designer Julien Moise’s wrist-watch design uses wind energy to power up. Sporting a clear blue display, to read the time, the wearer simply needs to blow air on the propeller-like mechanism surrounding the watch-face. The energy is used to show the time with a short visual sequence. This design grabbed our attention simply due to the fact that unlike almost every other time-keeping device we’ve come across or used, this one takes the cake in being different and unique, using a never-thought-of-before means to power up!
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It’s about time our generous feathered friends live a luxurious lifestyle too. Chickens toil hard to lay those eggs that we devour in multitudes. Here’s a chicken coop that let’s chickens lay eggs in style and live comfortably, called the Chicken Co-op. A self-contained ‘modernist chicken coop’ of sorts, perfect for the modern urban farmer who loves his eggs fresh out of a chickens backside, this one fits right into your apartment-block lifestyle, without you having to move to a country-side home just to have chickens lay fresh eggs every day. And the best part, this one uses green energy to power up, equipping solar panels to soak in the sun and power a fan that keeps them chicks cool.
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The Oregon Department of Transportation recently received a nodding-headed approval from the Clackamas County for a massive renewable energy generation system that will lie alongside the northbound Interstate 5 highway just south of Wilsonville. The project, compromising of a solar array that will generate a whopping 1.9 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy each year will juice up resting facilities northbound as well as southbound and power the lighting on the highway too, all with renewable energy from the sun.
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We’ve seen solar powered remote-controlled cars being built and raced by students before. This time however, the students of Savanna High School in Anaheim and Oak Park High School in Oak Park decided to race 16-foot, single-seat canoes powered only by the sun at the Solar Cup competition sponsored by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and local water agencies. The Savanna High School and Oak Park High School teams crossed the finish line before the remaining 38 schools, winning top honors for their seven month long effort put into building these solar powered vessels and finally having them raced.
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Keeping the energy crisis in Africa in mind, Samsung has planned for a forum in Kenya scheduled to be held this week in regards to launching notebooks, tablets, appliances, and other electronics build to perfection specifically for use in the continent. Given that electricity is scarce in parts of Africa, the Samsung mini-netbook type NC215S computer could work just great, using solar energy to juice up. Currently in its conceptual stages, the device however wasn’t mentioned of at the press conference for the upcoming event. Samsung does however, plans to have its notebooks, tablets, appliances, and other electronics surface in the African electronic market on a wider scale.
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