posted by admin on Jan 17

Welcome to another year of Latest Inventions Blog Carnivals.

Hopefully there will be plenty of great gadgets and new technology coming to the surface in 2011, some for industry and medicine – and plenty more for just fun and games!

So, lets get straight to it with a great post on something my brother is very interested in – 3DTV! So join Aviva Jorstad with his thorough review on the subject: 3DTV – Just Hype or The Next Big Thing?.

And another thorough article here talks about medical technology trends which I found very interesting to overview, especially with reference to how technology and information can be used today in ways that most people wouldn’t have expected! So read up on Ken Martin’s post: Top 10 Trends in Mobile Medical Technology.

Now, if your business involves heavy security and you are wondering what is leading the way in computer forensics security then listen to the suggestions of Engelbert Hudson. His list article called Top 25 Startups Revolutionizing Computer Forensics & Security can help you see what is out there and who is doing it!

Next up, Carrie Oakley spends quite some time detailing virtually everthing you need to know about using the Kindle for reading, publishing and just saving money,in: 50 Awesome Blog Posts for the Kindle Addict.

Staying on small gadgets – not only has the tablet computer made it in a big way to free you up from a desk – but now we are looking at making our desktops smaller so if you do have to have a pc at home all day – at least it won’t be a great big eyesore! Join Thomas Bale here for an introduction to the new thinking for nettops as they are being called! Nettop HTPC Comparison | Tomology.co.uk.

If you are interested in health and nutrition and you have kids yourself, are a teacher, volunteer or just an interested adult – here are some great games to help you make healthier decisions day to day – and I have played a few of these myself! So use Gladys Greene’s great little article with links to 25 Useful Online Games for Health Educators (or people like me….).

And finally – staying on a medical angle – here is a very well laid out list article showing all the great android apps you could use if you were in the medical profession – or just wanted to know biological stuff! Join Camille Hensley with her 25 Android Apps Every Nurse Needs!

And there it is – something for everyone this month!

posted by admin on Dec 16

So, here we are again – looking at the thoughts of the future in our Carnival.

It’s that time of year again where the newest gadgets and the latest gifts are all anyone is thinking about! You barely have time to fit everything in before the whole country seems to come to a standstill for those 2 magic days.

Have you missed the last post – have you brought that last gift and managed to find that last selection box in the store?

Oh, well – there is always next year to get it right!

But for now – lets take a look at some of the gadget reviews and other technological info that others want to share…….

So lets begin with 2 short review articles; the first is from Steve Faber on the New Yamaha RX-A2000 and RX-A3000 the First With HQV Vida Video Processing. And second up is the amazing news of when 3D Camcorders Hit the Streets written by Jamil Karim.

Add to this a very thorough laptop review by Mitch Archuleta where he covers all the stats for those thinking that the New Year should mean a new laptop! Read up on the Lenovo ThinkPad T410 Review.

Kids love the unknown and outer space – so why not fuel their interest (and expand on your own) with a selection of great books on Space! Bridget Nicholson has put together a great selection ranging from one side of the universe to the other! Take a peek at her 100 All-Time Greatest Popular Science Books!

Then we have a Kindle dilemma! Where salientknight looks at the pro’s and cons of his shiny new Kindle when he takes it on the road with him: Will you sign my Kindle?!

Stepping into the future now with a field or science that is still developing – Nano foods. This very nicely displayed and comprehensive article titled The Future of Food: 10 Scary Facts About “Nano Foods” compiled by Edward Phillips should certainly open your eyes to what the food industry are working on for your Thanksgiving Dinner 2011!

And of course: Apps for dessert! Nice pair here with Android versus Blackberry. Tyra Ronan is up first with the 25 Blackberry apps: Top 25 BlackBerry Apps for Public Health Professionalsand AndrosenDsouza gives us the 25 Android apps: Top 25 Google Android Apps for Public Health Professionals!

So, there is is – the end of another year – and the promise of more great inventions for 2011…..

posted by admin on Dec 11

There are always ways to make something work more ‘lifestyle friendly’ – in tune with the way we use things.

The most obvious one of this type of invention was the ‘snooze’ button on your alarm.  Rather than having to manually reset your alarm after it goes off if you want to sleep a bit longer, you just hit snooze and it goes off again in 5 or 10 minutes instead.

There are plenty more opportunities out there that could really save us not only time – but lives too!

Most security or safety appliances and features on the market are there to save lives – but as a result, they make life that little bit more difficult – for example self-closing, heavy fire doors.  I’m not denying that they save lives and need to be in place in schools, offices and other large establishments – but when you need to move furniture or whatever, back and forth several times in close succession – there is the temptation to wedge them open instead.

Needless to say this also happens if heating or air-conditioning isn’t working or at it’s best and a variety of other reason no doubt – but it makes having the fire doors totally useless if they are wedged open when there actually is a fire in the building.

What’s The Answer?
The answer is a safety device that allows the fire door to be wedged open securely – but in such a way that if the fire alarms are set off or there are more than so many smoke particles in the air – then they close automatically.

So they are safely wedged open for practicality – but just as safe in the case of their intended use – and thankfully; they are already on the market.

However, I would love to see other ‘temporary’ measures in place on other items that ‘get in peoples way’ or are easier than other current methods.

For example – why can’t you have a 30 minute pause button on your kitchen smoke alarm?  When I cook meals, I get so worried that I am going to set off the smoke alarm that I wish there was a way to give me 30 minutes grace rather than have it scare the life out of me and my neighbours – or set off sprinklers in the building!

No doubt many people are tempted to take out the batteries of their smoke alarms if they set them off to often or they are ‘over-sensitive’ to smoke – and just like the fire door example – this is when they put themselves at risk.  As we know how easy it is to forget to put the batteries back in as the device is usually high up on the ceiling!

Bearing in mind that you are nearly always in your home cooking the dinner when you burn it – you can see that it is burning and deal with the situation – rather than having to struggle to switch off the alarm as well as move burning hot food from the oven!

After the 30 minutes grace – the smoke alarm becomes active again without you having to do anything.  So you are safe again immediately rather than having to remember to put your alarm back together again straight after cooking.

Other Easy Inventions:
I bet you can think of loads of things you can put a ‘pause’ on to make your life easier – like the bedroom/bathroom/other room heater for example if you don’t have central heating. 

Rather than have to fiddle around with a socket timer in each room - why can’t there be a 4/6/8 hour ‘on hold’ button on it?  When you go to bed, you hit whichever button you need and the heater goes off for that amount of time – hopefully coming back on in time to get the room cosy for when you wake up.  I mean, you know how long you are going to sleep for!

I suppose it’s a bit like the old fashioned teas-maid machine that you could set to wake you up to the smell of coffee!  But there are no new versions of it?  Some washing machines have a pause button on them so you can have your clothes washed in the short lead up time to you coming home – that way your clothes haven’t been sitting in the machine all day wet!

Or what about the opposite inventions for turning stuff off after a length of time.  You can already set your TV to go off after a set period of time – if you intend to fall asleep watching it – so why not the same set up on your lamp, your heater, your radio or whatever else you want to stay on for just that bit longer!

What if you just need another 30 minutes to finish running that upgrade on your laptop – but you need to go into a meeting and don’t want to leave your machine on for hours?  Or those cakes in the oven still need another 10 minutes but you have to go pick up the kids from school!

Think of the eco friendly potential as well here – it’s not just about making our lives easier in general, we could be saving energy and money all over the place as well as making sure that we stay safe!

Sometimes you just need to freeze time – and this could be the way to do it! 

posted by admin on Nov 22

Why can’t people invent cheap (and energy-free) versions of everything we own!

I was recently reading about a fantastic new invention in the fight against poverty and world hunger!

It’s a refrigerator which consists of two pottery bowls and some wet sand, would you believe it.

So, I ask myself – why have I got some great big electricity-drinking white machine in my kitchen instead of a couple of these pots?

Why was my laptop £400 when others are only a fraction of that; why is my everything so much more expensive and energy-consuming when there are cheaper, more practical alternatives around?

The Pots:
For around £25 apparently you can buy these Zeer pots for 2 families – so why aren’t we using them back home?

You make 2 pots – one to fit inside the other – and then mount them on a stand.  You fill the gap between the pots with wet sand – and hey presto: you can help lengthen the lifespan of a tomato or a carrot for example by up to 10 times!

That’s right – from 2 days to 20 days! 

Ironically – how often do you see a shelf life or 3 weeks on a packet of fresh tomatoes you buy from the store here?  Hardly ever – and we have fancy top-of-the-range electrical goods!

Other Goods:
So, why can’t we carry on this ‘inventing’ process for everything that we own – but make it available to everyone – not just people in developing countries.

I agree that they should get the technology first and at as low a cost as possible – but to be honest – I would rather use a large pot-based fridge for most of my food than the 24/7 electrical one I have at the moment!

Any ideas for an energy-free hairdryer or toaster?

posted by admin on Sep 7

What if I told you that you had to seriously change what you ate to limit your carbon emissions and reduce world hunger?

It seems as though this may well be the way that the world is leaning with all this worry about rising population numbers, world hunger, less fertile land for farming, rising sea levels, water shortages and our continuing drive for more!

So, should grasshopper farms go into overdrive and the cucumber be forced into extinction?

The Small Idea:
No longer should things be big.  Big is bad for the planet at the moment and small is good – so why shouldn’t this apply to food?

Humans (and other plants and animals) have to eat to stay alive – I mean without proteins and fats, our bodies would fall apart: dry skin, poor digestion, low muscle, less energy, and on and on.  But we have gone past the bare bones ‘survival’ stage and we now eat for the fun of it (ironically sometimes causing all the above symptoms from our excesses).

However, what with all the global concerns at the moment – and the drive for local and sustainable foods; why not take it 1 step further?

In the same way that some people think that that we buy to much technology and console games, clothes and other belongings – some people think that we are eating too much ‘empty food’.

The idea being that cucumbers, for example, contain virtually nothing worth eating: being 95% water with some Vitamin C.  Now apart from a few ‘holistic’ benefits like bowel cleansing and lowering cholesterol (if you eat enough) they are virtually pointless in terms of nutrition. 

So why do we waste valuable land, fertilisers and water growing them when people are starving to death from lack of food?  Rather than growing these fruits that make a salad ‘crispy’ and are a dieters dream – shouldn’t we be using the land and resources to grow wheat or something more substantial?

Bugs, Bugs, And More Bugs:
Similarly, there isn’t really much going for the humble cow anymore either!  It grazes on land that could be used for growing cereals, it’s supplementary foods are grown on fields that could be used for growing cereals and it is farting out methane into an already globally warmed atmosphere.

Step up the new cow, the cow of 2010: the grasshopper!

You may think that this is all ridiculous – but there is the virtually the same amount of protein weight for weight in grasshoppers as there is in ground beef!  Would you notice the difference in your (only 60%) beef burgers anyway?

Needless to say you can farm these insects in tiny tubs stacked up in big warehouses – all on the same spot.  Compare this to millions of cows wandering all over Argentina where there used to be rainforest!

The UN have taken this on board themselves – as they think that it is a great way forward for food security in developing countries.  With an estimated 1000 insect species already on the menu around the world – this (they think) could well be the way forward for guaranteeing good nutrition levels for millions of people who can’t get cheap grains anymore as we are using them for eco friendly fuels!

So, will you be opting for that cricket stir fry or that red ant ravioli?