Mobile technology has yet not been widely used as a low cost and impactful medium to address the dangerous co-epidemic of HIV and multi-drug resistant TB. We live at a time when mobile devices are changing people’s lives around the globe. Text-messaging, which can be received at no cost in South Africa, has the potential to serve as a powerful communication channel for spreading life saving information throughout the country. This idea is being implemented by the iTEACH program in South Africa by tapping the mobile device to broadcast healthcare information. Women in local sewing hubs integrate flexible solar kits in the locally made African cloth to make a blanket. The patients use the blanket during the day to stay warm. Sunlight charges the unit in three hours, creating 6 watt-hours of energy stored in a rechargeable battery. At night, Portable Light powers a cell phone and provides ten hours of bright white light to facilitate the night time home care treatment established by the iTEACH Program.
[Treehugger]
Visualize a chilly winter; you’re wrapped in double overcoats, a muffler, a winter head wear, almost numb with the chill and still looking for a way to fight the cold. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Now you have a reason to thank designer Yiran Qian for bringing his collection that he calls ‘endless warm’. Solar energy has always been used in many ways, but this is the simplest form by which solar energy can be trapped and put to use, for a simple function of keeping you warm. The woolen head gear is made of wool but has these grey colored solar films that traps the heat from the sun and keeps you warm even when you’re out. This also comes with winter gloves. Now you can feel the warmth even in bitter cold!
With toughness comparable to any plastic, and the natural beauty of hardwoods and Bamboo, hand-crafted ipod and iphone cases are surely the most environmentally friendly, not to mention distinctive, gadget covers on the market today. Wood is the most abundant renewable material on the planet. Vers cases take advantage of hardwoods such as Walnut and Cherry, combined with the quick growing grass Bamboo, to create a desirable and sustainable product that will protect any ipod or iphone from day-to-day wear and tear.
The era of artificial air purifiers is now passé. Not only are they synthetic, but many a times use up a lot of energy. I’m sure you hate that fact and do feel helpless about wanting to conserve the environment, but never found a solution. Oxygen of Green presents a design of the future where they get you a natural air purifier table for your living room. Looks wise, it gets straight A’s for sure. And utility wise, even more! The concept implements a green patch at the center of your table that will generate a good amount of oxygen which naturally purifies the air. The best part is that these plants grow without soil, so there won’t be a mess too. This sleek and stylish low table is a must have in today’s time when maintaining a good ecological balance is our prime concerns.
If you are classy enough to own a Louis Vuitton bag, then you should also be classy enough to think about the environment. If you are as inspired as Mark Farina, then you can upgrade your bag with a solar panel to charge your Louis Vuitton LV888 cellphone. What he did was use a flexible solar panel kit from Voltaic. The company has even posted a do-it-yourself instruction from Mark on upgrading the bag.
Eco-friendly can also be design-friendly. That is apparent with Vers who has launched their series of eco-friendly hand-crafted wood cases for iPods and iPhones. It looks quite attractive and is made of a combination of Walnut, Cherry and Bamboo making them a favorite choice for environment lovers. Each wood comes with its own qualities. For instance, the bamboo offers the wood case toughness as compared to plastic. Wood cases for iPhone, iPod touch and iPod classic costs $40 and will cost $5 lesser for iPod nano.
[Coolest-gadgets]
There was talk about a company using recycled plastic for gowns for graduates. Now slowly there arises in the horizon a need for environmentally friendly attire. Even accessories for that matter – every way that the air can breathe again and so can our posterity. This is an interesting concept called the wearable and on-the-go power generation from XS Labs, a team of researcher and artists founded by Joanna Berzowska. This team is dedicated to develop innovative methods and applications in electronic textiles and responsive garments. Their new project is called ‘Captain Electric and Battery Boy‘ to help generate power via body and garment movements which can be used to transform or change the garments as response to internal and external stimulus.
Forest fires have caused a lot of havoc, misery and distress over the years for people who have been victims. Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) has thought of an idea to run an electric circuit from the power generated by trees as they feel it should be enough to run wireless sensors that could be used to detect environmental conditions or forest fires and could also be used to gauge a tree’s health. This study is a follow up of last year’s study by a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that found plants generate a voltage of up to 200 millivolts when one electrode is placed in a plant and the other in the surrounding soil. The team ran a circuit solely off tree power recently and proved their point. The study took a new shape when one of the researchers, Carlton Himes , used nails on the trees and connected a voltmeter to find that big leaf maples generate a steady voltage of up to a few hundred millivolts. The team then developed a boost converter that takes a low incoming voltage and stores it to produce a greater output. The circuit is built from parts measuring 130 nanometers and consumes on average just 10 nanowatts of power during operation.
Imagine wearing a dress and where you can listen to it. For conceptual artist, this is the next generation entertainment hub – or let’s hope so, since it is going to be made of recycled cassette tapes. Alyce Santoro came up with the idea to transform used tapes into beautiful and durable fabric called Sonic Fabric. So what she did is make shimmery dresses, sparkly umbrellas and sleek ties. Aside from the funky style of it, it can also help you listen to music. It emits a garbled, underwater-like sound when you run a tape head over it, and has even been “played” by Phish percussionist John Fishman during a concert in Las Vegas.
This is so much fun! In the olden days, fairs in India used to have something like this. Plumber Paul Cesewski just stumbled upon this idea now. It is a mobile, human-powered ferris wheel. He took all of three months to design and three months welding at night after work and his nearly 2000-pound, 22-foot-tall Star Wheel is as a pedal-powered, interactive sculpture. Each of the three chairs located within the larger, 20-spoke wheel is equipped with a seatbelt and a bicycle drivetrain. What you do is as you pedal, you pull the chair around a fixed sprocket which means more people, more fun. When he first made a Ferris wheel, there were only two seats and no outer wheel and so they couldn’t move around, but stay stationary. But then in 2004 he got grant from Burning Man and made it like a moving wheel. It is so much fun to go around in this huge wheel – you don’t need cars anymore! And he says “I would love to take it through a city or ride it in a parade…but the biggest problem is the power lines.” How nice!
