posted by admin on May 15

Think that solar panels look unsightly – and you have a heritage home?

Well, worry no more – there is an eco invention that is right up your street! It’s one of the eco inventions that I think all eco advances should be:

It doesn’t take any extra effort from you than fitting a normal ‘solar panel’
It doesn’t create any extra work from you or your family to run
It doesn’t mean that you have to ‘put up’ with a second rate service
It doesn’t mean that you have to lower your standards of appearance or behaviour

The reason that these photovoltaic panels don’t do any of the above is because they are in the shape of and have the appearance of actual roof tiles. Yes – they are sheets of ‘slate’ virtually identical to actual slate tiles!

What a fantastic idea – why didn’t we think of it sooner?

No Extra Effort:
These photovoltaics are so easy to incorporate into your roof that they won’t cause you any more strife than fitting normal pv panels.

Well obviously you won’t be fitting them – an experienced and qualified fitter will do that for you – but I mean they won’t need excessive paperwork to be completed; won’t need extra support scaffolding once in place – and they can’t really ‘fall off’ either.

No Extra Work:
You don’t need to pay to much attention to them either. You don’t need to remember to turn them off when you leave the home (like your lights and electricals); you won’t need to ration their use (like turning off the tap while tooth-brushing); and you won’t need to remember to wash them out before recycling them.

They run themselves with no effort what so ever – just put your feet up and watch a movie!

Same Standards:
Unlike turning down the heating and wearing more jumpers, eating less meat, wearing your clothes more times, using less petrol and not flushing the toilet after every ‘number 1′ – using these photovoltaic slate panels doesn’t affect anything at all in your life.

Just like all alternative energy sources – the power that they generate will be backed up with mains electricity should you have any problems – I mean we all know that it isn’t sunny everyday! So don’t fret about a cloudy day – as the combination of energy sources is seemless. You won’t even know when your kettle is boiling on sunshine and when it needs fossil fuels!

Same (Or Better) Appearance:
And as with few eco alternatives – these slates are actually improving the appearance of your home while you are striving to be ‘green’. You haven’t got giant shiny panels on your south facing – and possibly – street facing roof. The appearance and value of your home should be unaffected by installing these.

And this is particulalry important if your home is a listed building, or you don’t want to distract from its cute cottage or castle appearance with standard solar panels.

Rather than growing broad beans up your front wall and a pile of different colour recycing bins and boxes filling up your front garden – these eco inventions will be all but invisible on your home.

That’s how eco friendly inventions should be!

Visit www.solarslate-ltd.com for more details…..

posted by admin on Feb 22

How about something unusual to give as a gift – 60,000 years of their history!

A simple and painless swab on the inside of a mouth is all it takes to find out where you ancesters came from soon after they started on the journey of a lifetime!

So instead of buying the lastest DS game for your nephew, or the newest version of the iPad for your godson – why not let them see something far more interesting and unusual: their family’s past!

Genographic Studies.
It is currently believed that all humans alive today were originally from the exact same place in Africa.

It is also believed that around 60,000 years ago, these early humans decided to move to new pastures, and set off on what turned out to be the journey of mankind.

They may have originally been just looking for better food or water supplies not far from their family, but the journey didn’t stop, and humans spread across virtually the whole globe – changing as they went.

Some set up permanent homes in river mouths or forests and others kept travelling, until we get to today – with many thousands of different cultures, languages and individual traits and preferences alive on almost every continent.

So which path did your family take?

Take The Test!
It is now very easy and relatively cheap to get a detailed history of your past. Where your ancesters have been – or still are – and which branches of your family gave you most of your personal genes today.

Whether you think you know your past – you are from an isolated community – or you have absolutely no idea what your past will hold – you can all take part in this unique not-for-profit and internationally shared research project.

Your initial test is totally separate from the International Study and so you can receive your results and keep them to yourself forever – you are not obliged to share anything about yourself.

However, if you do want to be a part of the larger project – any data you give will be treated anonymously and securely as with any other personal details.

Obviously, offering your results to the wider science community may well have benefits to us all in terms of understanding human evolution, migration, settlement and cultural distinctions.

And it could also give you a chance to learn about other cultures and communities around the world – for example, if you find out your ancestors came through Turkey or Asia etc, you may be inclined to read more about those areas – maybe even inspiring you to travel……. and to learn!

More information about the project can be found on the National Geographic Site in many different languages and answering a myriad of related questions – go to their link: Genome Study to find out more……

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos

posted by admin on Feb 4

Forget coins and notes – there is a new way to pay…….

It has long been known that you can pay for things – like the London underground – with swipe cards (Oyster Cards) and that you can use your cell phone to pay for car parks if you are caught short in the city – but using your cell phone as a swipe card to pay for a McDonalds!

It really is something new – and expanding.

In the same way that Augmented Reality (AR) was pitched to offer you all sorts of information regarding where you are and what you are looking at – this new technology – known as NFC (near-field communication) is paving a new path in the wireless technology field.

What Is NFC?
Well, to sum it up you could say that NFC is a way for your cell to be told about everything that is close to you – basically your cell becomes one of your senses.

Technology inside your phone can identify who you are – and so ‘charge’ you directly for services like transport and fast food – or entry to museums etc.

But also, this technology inside other things can tell you what they want you to hear. By this I mean that a poster advertising a vacation could register that your cell just ‘walked’ past their poster and send you text with a discount code if you wanted to book through them – or a retail outlet could text you as you pass their store telling you of a great sale or promotion that you might have otherwise missed.

They could also be used by businesses as an identity card – or ‘clocking in’ device for their workers. Rather than cards, machines and guards, they might just make you enter the building through a certain door and the receivers identify you and show you as inside.

Convenient Or Conniving?
I can see both sides of this technology. Firstly, the convenience of not having to worry about having enough money on you all the time is great, and so is the potential for identifying you at work rather than having to complete forms or log in and out.

However, the intrusion of promotions, adverts and other such information would be most annoying. Imagine a stroll around town on your lunch break – it’s bad enough seeing all the adverts and posters all over the place, let alone having them all send messages to your cell! It would almost make you want to leave your cell in the office rendering your ‘identity wherabouts’ gadget useless for that purpose.

Regardless of what you think about it, it has already been implemented in many stores and transport systems across the globe, with many large technology and cell phone companies already pledging to install ‘this and that’ by ‘so and so’.

Japanese commuters have been using a similar technology (but a more basic version) for over 5 years for trains, taxis and fast food!

However, so far it only works by very close contact, but technology could allow these electrical messages to travel further – like the store promotion example.

The Future:
It looks like you won’t have to buy a new cell either as many models will be able to be upgraded – and it may well be available in cheaper models as it becomes more popular.

However, as with all identity cards, credit cards and of course cash – we can leave them at work, lose them or have them stolen. So is making a cell phone even more valuable a good idea?

Cell swipe technology only works with a debit system – so the funds have to be prepaid or instantly charged. Needless to say they could be used as ‘cash’ when stolen at a nearby store or restaurant without the cashier being any the wiser.

And, if these chips were to contain personal information as well, then they may well become a victim of their own success. It would be as disasterous as losing your laptop.

People may even start to carry 2 cells: 1 for paying and one for all other uses – so if it was stolen or lost, they wouldn’t loose all their data and contacts too!

Maybe they will invent a ‘cell buddy’ that cleared all data off the phone if it was taken further than 5 meters from the cell (as would only happen if the owner no longer had their cell with them). Or a way to de-activate the chip in some way when it was next used after being stolen or lost.

Anyway – I’m sure these little niggles will be smoothed out……..

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 Oct 2

Imagine seeing a crack in a 5000 year old building that’s only 1 cm wide!

Technology could well have advanced right now to the point of being able to map any structure (young or old) – or any size (from Rosslyn Chapel to the whole of Angkor Wat) – all down to the scale of a dot every half a centimetre!

It could be a great way not only to study such antiquities and historical sites in immense detail – but also a way to spot any flaws, damage, non-contemporary repairs or alterations.

However, it could also be the perfect way to keep an exact record of such structures incase they are lost to use forever – like the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan which were destroyed recently as a result of war.  And this destruction was actually the reason for setting up the non-profit company who developed and applied this technology: CyArk.

They hope that with such detailed images – humanity could help recreate or at least have a perfect ‘hard copy’ of the architecture, design and sheer scale of some of the Worlds great wonders.

Who Are They?
CyArk was formed when retiree engineer Ben Kacyra thought up another use for his laser-mapping tool which he had previously invented for engineering and industrial purposes.

He sold that invention in 2001 and now works with his wife to image ancient buildings rather than new-builds.

In the not-to-distant future, they hope to be able to superimpose real graphics on top of these geospatial images to create a perfect digital models for everyone to access online.

How They Work:
Well, it’s not just a matter of moving around the world taking pictures of everything of any interest at all, or anything over a certain age – they have a plan.

Firstly, they assess possible sites of international importance, it significance to human culture, human interest and the risk of losing the site, then set to work.

They use a variety of data recording equipment including scanning, specialist photography and other traditional surveying techniques to get as much information about the site as possible – all of which can be used and combined in such a way as to create an amazing digital 3D image!

Obviously once stored in CyArks archives, they can be used again and again – and by anyone!

How Does It Work?
Basically, their equipment is based on using portable 3D laser scanners – which create a unique high resolution image – consisting of up to 100,000,000 bits of data!

The pulsing lasers collect returning beams to create a floating map of the structure – with a recorded dot almost every .5cm of the structures surface.  It also records the colour and brightness of the surface as well – which can then be displayed as false colour.

This allows the resulting image to show which materials a structure is made from, the different or replacement materials used through the ages – and most importantly whether there are any faults or cracks within a structure that may not yet be visible to the eye, allowing remedial works to be considered and implemented as necessary.

You can take a look at some of their already collated data and images online on their website: CyArk and see for yourself what this technology can do today.

And maybe give you an ides of what it could do in the future!