Latest Inventions

posted by admin on Jan 22

The New NEFF CircoSteam oven is certainly looking like a healthy option in the kitchen!

We all cook with steam on the hob, usually in great towers - but steam cooking in an oven is really going to change the way we prepare healthy food!  I have only just found someone who owns one and it’s the first time I had heard of them!

The appliance is basically a compact oven - like a combination microwave if you like - that offers to steam your food without all the steam escaping around your kitchen!

Why Steam?
It is well known through the world of healthy eating and weight loss, that steamed food is better for you in terms of the nutrients it keeps and the lack of other ingredients like cooking oil needed to help cook it.

Baking, roasting and frying usually include some preparation with fats or oils which are absorbed by the food, as well as being heated so high and sometimes for a considerable time that they dry out and or become soaked in fatty materials.

Boiling is seen as a cooking practice that removes or destroys valuable vitamins and minerals from the food.  The food is thrown around the pan under a lot of pressure and reduces many fleshy ingredients to a mush - think of over-cooked sprouts!

And all these alternatives can result in the food you are cooking being completely destroyed if cooked too long - either burnt to a crisp or reduced to a slush.

Benefits Of A Steam Oven:
Well, not so with a steam oven.  None of the above is true at all with steam cooking and the list that follows highlights the benefits:

• Nutrients remain in the food during cooking
• The food retains all of it’s moisture during cooking
• You don’t need fats or oils to cook with steam
• You can’t burn your food when steam cooking
• You can’t turn food into a mush when steam cooking
• You can never overcook food you are cooking with steam

There are also further advantages of a steam oven over the regular stack of pans and commercial steamers:

• Steam cookers retain all the steam inside themselves rather than filling your kitchen
• These combination cookers take up no more space on your counter - it’s built in to your microwave ’space’
• The huge internal size allows more food to be steamed at the same time - so the whole meal could be steamed rather than just the vegetables.
• There are about 50 pre-programmed settings for everything you are likely to cook - so it’s so easy to use.

So, if you are considering a new small oven or combination microwave - then take a look at this alternative.  And just so you know - it received an A rating for energy use - so can reduce your energy bills while you reduce your waistline too!

posted by admin on Jan 19

Biofuels hit hard criticism when they were competing with human crops, but things might change…..

People are starting to look at waste materials and invasive plants as potential sources of biofuel - rather than using what could have been food for humans.

With the world population soaring and food shortages the world over - it was time to move biofuels forward so to utilise a more sustainable and non-competitive source - and 2 such examples have recently been publicised.

Bracken:
This plant grows virtually everywhere.  Whether it’s in open fields, heathlands, moorlands and mountains.  It is also a worldwide genera and has the widest distribution of any other fern.

Nobody likes it growing on their land (apart from National Parks) as it is very dominant in the landscape and nothing really eats it either (as it is carcinogenic) - so it just spreads across a landscape stealing the light from any other young or low-lying plants.  And a it won’t let grass grow beneath it - the mountains sides and valleys can’t be used for grazing as there is nothing for the sheep or cattle to eat and farmers pay a lot of money to get it cut and removed from their land every year as it is.

It turns the land into a very green wasteland in terms of human needs - and at one time the British Government had an eradication program in place to deal with it’s excessive growth!

However, it is actually because it grows itself very well, and grows back every year - even if cut back when fully grown, it seems like the perfect crop to start working on for sustainable fuels.

The only problem is of course that it usually grows in places that are not easy to get to with modern farm machinery.

Old Yeast:
We all know that there is always going to be whisky in Scotland - so what can we do with all the natural waste materials?

As with the bracken - waste materials from whisky plants costs a lot of money to dispose of - so why not find a way to either use that waste, or find a way to sell it as a product.

Distillery waste (yeasty materials) will be fed into an anaerobic digester to create methane gas - a biogas.  The idea is that if all the distilleries in the area do this - they could power themselves without the need to draw on other energy sources from elsewhere. 

I know it isn’t going to power homes and other businesses - or the whole country, but if these large commercial buildings can fully power themselves using their own waste products, then less energy will have to be created from other sources and shipped or piped to them.

The Future:
Can you imagine if warehouses could generate their own energy from all the waste cardboard they get through, or supermarkets could create biogas from all the food they throw away being bio-digested. 

Even huge offices and sky-scrapers could be creating biogas from all the waste created by their workers - basically, they would be powering themselves!

New technologies are allowing smaller scale operations which were just not viable in the past - they just were not cost effective before we understood how our waste was affecting the environment.  But now companies have to be more environmentally responsible and to also pay to process and dispose of their own waste - they are starting to think about spending that money on alternative services - green services.

And, there must still be plenty of waste products that could be used for fuel or energy - just waiting to be discovered.  Certain things are always going to be needed by people - so why not use the left-overs constructively?

posted by admin on Jan 11

I don’t think there is one in large scale use - so why not?

I was just thinking about how we all ‘have’ to have large electrical delivered these days.  You can’t just walk into a store and wheel out a huge wall-mounted widescreen TV these days - or your American style ice-making tall fridge-freezer anymore - it all has to be delivered.

As does anything you order online - and this is really an expanding market, so why haven’t these large electrical companies come up with a re-usable tough outer casing to deliver these things to us in rather then acres and acres or cardboard?

Existing Packaging:
Now, we all know that a new fridge, oven or TV come packaged in so much outer packaging that it takes hours to get all the parts out and all the waste materials disposed of - I mean the box my new upright fridge freezer came with so much rubbish, that it had to be disposed of at the local amenity site rather than with normal waste - so another road journey was needed.

And I am well aware that such items need a certain amount of packaging to make a safe journey from the depot to your home - but what if this could be replaced by a better - more inclusive - delivery service.

For example, rather than all the polystyrene and plastic currently being used - what if it was just protected from dust in the warehouse - and a stronger outer casing used only for actual delivery.

That way, when you order a new washing machine, they slip your lightly packaged machine into the new outer casing and ship that off to your home as normal.  The delivery drivers would then move this whole package into your home, remove the outer casing and leave you with a perfectly working electrical - but without the usual piles of cardboard and plastic.

They wheel away the empty outer back to the delivery lorry, where it folds in half and stacks with the other empty cases, ready to be used again tomorrow for another washing machine.

New Packaging:
I know that all white goods and TVs are different shapes and sizes but these new cases are slightly adjustable on the inside so you only need 5 or 6 outer sizes - I mean single ovens, washers, driers and fitted fridges and freezers are all roughly the same shape aren’t they? 

Fasteners and supports inside could be moved up or down for a snug fit and then set back to standard when stored.  And they would store well as they are the same shape at the back and front - so storing in a ‘nest’ would be easy.

Being made of recycled and recyclable materials, they would be eco friendly; being modern technology, they would be unbelievably light - yet strong; and being re-usable and easy to store, they could save manufacturers and delivery firms a whole lot of money.

I know that there are a few small scale deliveries in reusable cartons - so why not scale it up?

posted by admin on Dec 28

Why is so much money still be spent on inventions for our pleasure rather than our survival?

There is plenty of talk about the range of new products and technologies that we need to be inventing in the next few decades to make sure that we lower carbon emissions and get energy from water - yet money is still being spent on inventing another mobile phone application to help you call the restaurant down the road without using a phone book!

Or inventing a talking, dancing giant hamster for kids to play with?

Should the world start looking at more pressing inventions, and stop funding things ‘for fun’ or just ‘to find out what so-and-so does’?

Yes, Because…..

There could be a massive argument that without funding of alternative energy sources or a reduction in the emissions from current energy practices - there won’t really be a captive audience left to buy that hamster!

If the scientific facts floating about at the moment about the effects of our emissions and our other activities, then there are going to be some major changes to the way we view ‘normal’.

People can get quite frustrated with the governments or science bodies when they hear about apparently pointless studies and inventions.  People want to see things being achieved that will change their lives - not finding the elusive Higgs -Boson!

No, Because…..

So many things have been invented for one purpose - but then changed slightly to do something completely different - and what if that new thing was the best invention ever?

I know this money all comes from us somewhere down the line (as does all funding) but the more people there are tinkering with this and that - the more chance they will find something great.

We all know the story of Post-It notes and the like, where it’s all a big mistake, but maybe we are looking at the environment in the wrong way and we need a scientist to accidentally turn up with the answer to everything!

posted by admin on Dec 10

According to current reports from the US - yes you can…….

Obviously the paper is only a small part of the whole energy source, but could lead the way forward in making energy without mining and disposing of tonnes and tonnes of dangerous and wasteful metals.

Reports from Stanford University suggest that by coating plain copier paper with a carbon and lithium mix could actually power many electrical goods, but research is still in the early stages.

How Is It Done?
Testing so far has allowed for rolled sheets of paper to be painted with a carbon ‘ink’ to form a nanotube structure.  The many inter-connected fibres found in paper could be the key to it’s use - and of course it is bendable, can be folded and manipulated into a whole host of shapes (think origami!) that means it could be better manipulated than many common metals used today and it is much, much, lighter!

Once the structure is prepared, the whole thing is lowered into a lithium solution where electrolytes react to create the electrical current.  Nanotube technology is only small scale at the moment - but with the potential that paper offers, these could be scaled up.

Energy Efficient:
With all the component parts of the battery being one and the same will allow for better energy efficiency as there will be less energy wasted moving it around inside the product - the whole thing is electrical.  I mean, you can even cut the paper in half and it will still work - but at 50% of the output of the original!

They are not currently cost effective though, and paper batteries the size required to power a lightbulb are currently way out of kilter with the cost of other power sources.

But, this small step could lead up to things that noone ever expected - just think of the Internet itself - the technology just ran away with itself!

The Future?
With the potential for larger sizes, and the fact that these batteries can release energy much faster than standard batteries, there is talk of the technology being used to power cars for example - although there has been no actual research into this at the moment.

Similarly there has been talk of pacemakers running on these non-toxic fuel cells - but nothing on paper.

Also, with the structure of paper the same over huge dimensions - it is possible that a whole wall could be painted with the carbon ink and used as an energy store rather than a multitude of smaller devices.  And certain cloths are very similar in structure to paper so could be used as well.

I am not sure that I would want a whole wall or a set of curtains in my home filled with electrical energy, but for factories and other workplaces or vehicles, this could be just the thing!