Latest Inventions

posted by admin on May 27

Every Olympic Games host seems to think it’s a great idea to have one - so why not the UK?

Infact - they haven’t stopped at just the one - they have created a pair of the little things: Wenlock and Mandeville! 

The story goes (and yes, they have a story) that they were drops of molten metal that fell during a welding activity of one of the stadiums, were welded into ‘toys’ for an appropriately happy family - and then ran off on rainbows to cheer up the whole world!

Apparently, the whole event can’t be televised and promoted by just using the Olympic Games logo or wording - we need these very shiny cycloptic aliens with taxicab lights on their heads to do it instead!

So after nearly 2 years of artistic collaboration and (apparently) 40 focus groups worth of discussion - all in top secret - they were revealed to the nation on a rather slapdash early evening chat show!

As always, the celebrity who has been put in charge of promoting them has plenty to say about the meaning behind this tiny part of one mascot and that tiny part of the other - but to everyone else - they are just 2 cartoon characters!  Whether the bracelets mean so-and-so on the left wrist (heaven forbid they were on the right wrist), or the shape of their feet represent something-or-other, the public probably don’t really mind.

All they care about is the money spent on such a trivial thing when the country is in financial strife as it is.  And they are still reeling after the disastrous and unwelcome original 2012 logo was unveiled - and estimated to have cost around £400,000!

So, the Mascots: Are they fun?  Are they worth the money?  Will they make more people visit the UK and it’s events?

Apparently their main aim is at children - to help the younger generations to relate better to the Games, rather than it being viewed as a more ‘adult’ event - and seeing as millions of kids in the UK will be affected by the Games, the events and the influx of thousands upon thousands of tourists into their towns - I suppose we have got to soften the blow a little bit!

And I suppose as there are 2 of them - you can have a ‘favourite’ one, or just make your parents buy 2 toys instead of just the one!  Great for a pair of novelty slippers!

Well, we need to make some money to pay for the Games, so this wasn’t a bad marketing ploy!

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 Dec 13

Just like the UNESCO Heritage Sites are saved for future generations - now the Tango will live on too!

Since 2001 the United Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) have been recognizing living traditions that cannot always be held or preserved physically such as dancing and certain rituals as worth preserving for the future. 

These intangible heritages are vital for family groups across the world. The knowledge of these acts is passed down from family to family; father to son and mother to daughter.

They represent a part of the community, a part of their lifestyle that just cannot be simply copied by others - it needs to be felt. And how can someone know what to feel, if they have not learnt from someone who already knows.

What Else Is Worth Saving?
Such things already on the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) include China’s Dragon Boat Festival, Lace Making in Croatia and the Indonesian Batik.  There are many other virtually unheard of traditions, festivals, musical and dance related events from around the world that are vitally important to those countries, and those communities, no matter how large or small they are.

The UNESCO listings offer documents, photographic slideshows and video footage of all these events in action, to show readers why it is so important to preserve.  And it’s not just the actions that make them unique, it’s the history, the meaning and the passion that brings them alive they are literally embodied by the participants.

What Can You Do?
So, what UNESCO hopes to do, is to make sure that they work with communities and countries to ensure that maximum participation is encouraged to ensure that these traditions are learnt for generations to come.  They need to keep an interest in these cultures - not just for the people themselves, but for visitors from across the world to enjoy.

What better way to learn the Tango than from an Argentinian Dancer actually living in Argentina?

posted by admin on May 23

Would You Spend $155,000 to keep your dog forever?

Well, news has it that an American couple did just that!  5 years ago, they decided that they loved on of their pets so much, that they were willing to pay to have it’s DNA cryogenically frozen so that when the technology had improved enough - that they could get their little bundle of joy to walk again!

And the technology was improved last year - and so now they have a little puppy which is exactly the same genetically as their first one!  It was the first single-birth commercially cloned puppy in the world.

But why stop there?

There are plans afoot to clone animals that have been dead for some time - and in the case of the woolly mammoth - 40,000 years of it!

Cases in Japan recently have allowed scientists to clone mice that have been ‘dead for 16 years’ - so why not other extinct animals?

San Diego zoo have been busy with cloning - but with live animals.  They are not just cloning something normal like a sheep from a sheep - a la Dolly from the UK, they are cloning an endangered animal and crossing the species barrier by allowing the eggs to develop inside a bog standard domestic cow!

They basically made it possible for 2 south-east Asian oxes (Banteng) to be born through a cow mum.  Therefore paving the way for an elephant to give birth to a baby mammoth!

The Mammoth Task:
In December 2008, 70% of the mammoth genome was published from frozen specimens which had ‘fallen out’ of the permafrost in remote parts of Russia.  Obviously there is still 30% missing - but expert say that this won’t take long to overcome.

Basically, experts are claiming that the cloning of a mammoth will happen - it is just a matter of when!  The technology exists to re-create long dead animals - someone just needs to foot the bill.

They have several ways to clone the mammoth (or Tasmanian Tiger, or Dodo, etc..) and all depend on the getting the frozen cells to replicate and grow inside another animals womb.

They don’t actually need any sperm or mammoth eggs to perform this cloning (although that is a viable option) as they can electrically or chemically stimulate any cell into dividing sexually - so one dead mammoth can offer them goodness knows how many attempts at this!  All they need is the DNA - and this is found in every (non-sexual) cell of every living animal.  It’s just not always 100% there in long dead ones!

And Then?
Obviously, they need an animal from a similar taxonomic group and of a similar size, but everything else is a bit of guess work!

They also have no real idea of what they will need to don once the animal is born - as they have no ‘real’ mammoth breast milk to use - in-fact no idea at all about what it should contain - other than basing it on it’s only realistically useful relative - the elephant.

Another potential ethical issue at this point would be that there is only one - or a very small group, and possibly they are all the exact same animal genetically.  Needless to say, this won’t create a viable ‘herd’ or ‘flock’ of clones.  They would be just ’something to look at’.

We are also going to be bringing them back into a world that they no longer live in!  Yes, it is possible that humans were the main reason for their decline and extinction in the first place - but how do we know that they will survive in a new and changing world when we get them back?

Some people don’t even want beavers to be re-introduced into their neighbourhoods - so who is going to want a few giant hairy elephants roaming about their woods?

And are we not in a recession, with environmental issues all around us and medicine in desperate needs of funds?  Children starving, wildlife made extinct and forests being destroyed?

Would spending a fortune on raising the mammoth be a wise choice right now?

posted by admin on Feb 4

We are currently very low on fertile soil - and it can affect us all.

With more than 6 billion people in the world today relying on crops grown on less than 11% of the worlds surface - things are getting a bit tight!

Soil erosion and degradation are common in most countries due to misuse of land (as with monoculture and large machinery compaction) or due to ignorance - or desperation (where individual farmers are damaging the environment by clearing woodlands, farming on hillsides or growing the ‘wrong’ crops for that land).

For years, scientists have been trying to improve farming techniques to retain and improve existing soils to cope with our need for food - even more important for communities in the marginal areas where the land could become barren in just a few short years of mismanagement.

Well, it’s possible that the Amazon may hold the answer!

Terra Preta do Indio:
Archaeologists working in the Amazon rain-forest have managed to identify a large number of sites with unusually fertile soils - and have begun to find out why. Ever since the 50’s this soil has been known, but other issues were more pressing. However now it’s uses are vital to many people.

A normal patch of soil in the Amazon Basin is able to sustain plant life (ie - the rain-forest itself), but it only holds it’s nutrients at the very surface and it a delicate ecosystem. It normally has a very thin layer of organic matter from dead leaves, etc and up to about 8 inches of topsoil. All this is very sensitive and is held together by the lives of the vegetation and wildlife: If the forest is cleared, the soil will be washed away by the rain in just a few short years.

However, more recently it’s been found that this Terra Preta is so much more and can be farmed for many years without losing it’s fertility - centuries in fact! This soil is only found where human settlements have been, so it is definitely a man-made resource.

Why is is so special?
The organic matter is still on top from plant waste, but underneath there is up to 6.5 feet of fertile top soil!

These people have managed to create vast deposits of carbon-enriched earth either on purpose for farming or just as a side-effect of another aspect of their lives - scientists are not quite sure about it’s origins.

These deposits are normally about 2-3 acres in size - although some are up to 40 acres - and they include charcoal, food refuse and other waste materials including broken pottery. The layers and layers of these ‘ingredients’ have increased the average carbon content of the land from between 30-150 tons per hectare to between 150-500 tons per hectare.

Worldwide significance.
Scientists have managed to re-create this type of soil in laboratories and have found it to sustain many crops successfully including rice, corn, manioc and beans.

The key to this soil is the charcoal. Tests have found that by adding crumbled charcoal and condensed smoke into damaged tropical soils had a profound affect on fertility. Microbes that keep soil healthy tend to attach themselves to the charcoal rather than being washed away with the rains - literally keeping the soil alive with nutrients.

It is possible that other tropical communities across the world could use the technique to help re-fertilise their own soils - adding back in the carbon and the minerals that have been lost. It’s like a compost heap on a grand scale.

And it could save lives!