Latest Inventions

posted by admin on Jul 30

London is shaping up for a greener future after the first day of its latest ‘Green Scheme’.

The idea is that many other European cities are bicycle friendly, and thousands of people use bikes all the time when in town - and having stood outside of Amsterdam Train Station on a week day, I have seen the sheer numbers involved!

So, London have taken the initiative and offered a ‘bicycle hire’ scheme to get people on to 2 wheels without the expense of buying a bike outright and worrying about storing your own bike in small flats on chained to fences overnight!

The Scheme:
At the moment you have to sign up to the scheme in advance for this - so you can’t just put a £1 in the meter like a shopping trolley and ride off!  You pay for access to all the bikes for a 24 hour period, and then pay your time-based hire charges on top.

Once signed with the scheme, the organisers (Transport for London and operator Serco) send you out a key (for £3) which will allow you to unlock any of the bikes on the street - currently there are 500 available cycles, stored at 315 docking stations across the city - including places like 32 docking stations in Westminster, 14 in Camden and many across the Royal Parks.

Currently you control your account online, and are charged for using the bike (up to £1 a day) and then the period of time you use the bike for - basically, when you release a bike using your key, your account gets debited as per the charges you can read online.  The first 30 minutes of a ride are always free but you can be charged up to £50 for a full 24 hour period (and a further £150 if you keep it longer than that!).

So if you buy a years membership at the current price of £45, and plan to ride for less than 30 minutes at a time (which is free), you will be paying around 12p a day to ride to and from work every day. 

For casual riders, they are hoping to allow people to pay for bikes at paypoints in the future - (at £1 to use the bikes during a 24 hour period and then hire charge on top) but they are starting with accounts only at the moment - and so far over 12,000 people have signed up!

The Benefits:
You can arrive in London on the train and then just hop on a bike instead of waiting for buses or going underground with everyone else!  You could cut your journey times massively in the rush hour!  When you arrive at the docking station closest to your workplace, you just park it up and leave it there.  No chaining up - no worries!

Alternatively, you could use the bikes for a day-trip to the city, and casually ride around back streets, through Hyde Park, out to Kew Gardens or London Zoo.  You just dock the bike whenever you have finished and head off home.

You can of course just hop on and off whenever you want and use as many bikes as you want through the day - so park up after arriving at your destination - maybe a museum, then after that you can hop on another bike and stop somewhere for lunch, then hop on another bike to go to a West End Show in the evening!  As long as you dock each bike securely in the docking station - that is your hire period over with, and someone else can hire the bike while you are feasting on some gourmet food or singing along to Dirty Dancing!

The Problems:
Well, as you may have calculated - 500 bikes: 12,000 people.  Let’s hope they all don’t want to ride at the same time!

Needless to say, there will always be teething problems when a new scheme starts up - and the main one will be that the operators don’t know when people will be using the bikes - and for how long, so they need to see what happens over the first few weeks.

So, there is a possibility of there not being a bike at the docking station closest to you when you arrive!  And the possibility of there being no free docking station for you to drop of your bike into after use!

There are maps showing the closest alternative docking stations and up to 15 ‘free’ minutes to cycle to it - but that could mean up to 45 minutes before you are back where you started (15 minutes to cycle there and 30 minutes to walk back to where you wanted to be!).

There will be staff at most of the main docking station over this first week, but other than that you are on your own, so if you card doesn’t work, your bike is faulty or you travel to a second docking station to find it full or empty too - you might need to make a call.

The Result:
I think that this could be a great scheme if they keep it as members only - as if they start letting anyone hire the bikes without signing up first - you will get problems.  Just as people make up fake names and addresses to get freebies, I think those same people will damage these bikes (activists have already stuck stickers over some of the bikes) or not return them (like the 4 shopping trolleys in my local park!).

However, the green potential is fantastic - and I would love to see big cities more pedestrian and cycle friendly. I’m fed up of having to walk around miles of metal barricades to cross a road, or standing in the rain waiting for the traffic lights to change, or even risk my life cycling among lorries and coaches in tiny streets. 

People and bikes should get the straight routes and priority lights - ad I hope that this is a step in that direction!

posted by admin on Jul 6

I mean, is biodegradable plastic such a good invention after all?

It always seems like an invention suddenly comes along and you think ‘wow, that is absolutely fantastic!’ - until you think it through for a bit longer.

Well this is exactly like that.

The invention is still a great idea - but the implications of it could actually have worse effects than before it was invented!

Why?  Well let’s follow through the life cycle of a plastic bottle and see what happens - but first - what is biodegradable plastic all about?

The Invention:
Regular plastics are made of polymers that can take literally for ever to break down.  They will do though - at varying rates - depending on the type of plastic they are it can be months or years before they start to break apart.

Now, we all know that plastics will never actually really ‘biodegrade’ in the sense of breaking down into total natural products that can be used again by organisms - but the word is used for the relatively fast breakdown of an entire container or sheet of plastic.

Now, this plastic is made to contain certain other particles that will help to induce and encourage the ‘natural’ breakdown of the item.  Just like burying a plastic carrier bag in damp mud will help it to weaken and fall apart.

So, anyway - they have come up with 2 types - Hydro-Biodegradable Plastics (HBP) and Oxo-Biodegradable Plastics (OBP) - and they work either by the chemical actions of hydrolysis or oxidation respectively to reduce the overall bulk of the product.

This then renders it into small enough pieces that natural bio-degradation can start to act on the remaining parts, reducing the product to it’s chemical components much faster than normal.
 
The Problem:
Normal plastics have been designed to be virtually indestructible, therefore you can use a plastic bottle over and over and over again. Even if you can recycle it - it is still as strong as it was before.

This was the original problem, meaning that plastic products never broke down:

Old Plastic Bottle: Brought new with product inside - product used up - container cleaned - container reused to carry another product - and another - and another -and another - then the container is recycled to start all over.

However, now this means that all new plastic will only have a short shelf life - too short for some - in fact, it is already making regular plastic fall apart as well!

New Plastic Bottle:  Brought new with product inside - product used up - container cleaned - container thrown in compost heap to degrade - the end!

So, how is it affecting new bottles?  Well - biodegradable plastics shouldn’t ever be recycled as it will compromise the quality and durability of new mixed plastics - basically it is starting to make recycled products less reliable!

If you buy a product in a biodegradable container, you must dispose of it after use - this means more plastic is being produced and thrown away than ever before!

At least with the regular plastic, you could reuse your toiletries bottles when travelling, use old pots and tubs for planting and store water and food over and over again.

Not with this new invention!  You will just have to keep replacing your containers and as a result, dispose of more plastic than ever!  And in fact, there are governments who are really getting angry about these new plastics and is trying to get them eliminated!

The Answer?
Well, we still need the regular plastic and we still want the biodegradable plastics!

Can they both co-exist or has 1 got to go?

I suppose it all depends on the person using it as to how beneficial each type is - to them and the planet.  Can you trust people not to recycle the new type - and can you trust people to recycle the old type?

Is it better to have lots of old plastic going around and around  - or only new plastic, but a higher production rate?

Well, maybe financially - it was a better invention after all!

posted by admin on May 5

If you can, then you better start making plans to spend the £50,000 prize money!

Or, better still invent a plane that can fulfil the maneuverability guidelines required to win £100,000 instead - although this might take a little longer at the drawing board!

For years humans have dreamed of the idea of human powered flight - although the old ‘wings strapped to the arms’ is a definite no-no!   As you would expect though, Leonardo de Vinci had a try at designing a plane or 2 along with dozens of other not-so-successful attempts over the following centuries.

With still not a hope of staying in the air for more than a micro-second, in the mid-20th century - the Kremer Prize was put to the invention world by the Royal Aeronautical Society of Great Britain.  There main aim was to spur on the hope of man-powered flight with large amounts of cash!

First Prize:
From the creation of the awards to the first prize being collected was a very long 18 years - and there were still another 5 prizes to be won.

This first prize (£50,000) was won by a plane weighing 32kg with a 29 meter wingspan called the Gossamer Condor in 1977 - and it had had to fly a specific figure-of-eight course at a height of over 10 feet from the ground.

The second prize for distance (£100,000) was won by the same team in 1979 but with their modified plane - the Gossamer Albatross - clocking up an average speed of 18 miles per hour (29km/h).

The third prize was for speed (£20,000) was won in 1983 by a team from MIT - but this still leaves 3 prizes totalling £150,000!

Remaining Prizes:
So, do you think you could see yourself winning 1 of the remaining prizes?  Could you invent the best human-powered plane ever to take to the skies?

I mean now would be the perfect time to perfect a mode of transport that uses no fossil fuels and emits not an ounce of carbon (apart from in the poor peddler’s breath!).

Well?
The prizes you need to aim for are needless to say - not the easiest ones - as they have already been claimed, so what you are left with are the following:

A) 26 Mile Marathon Course In Under An Hour (£50,000)

B) Sporting Aircraft Challenge - stressing maneuverability (100,000)

C) Local School Challenge - for under 18’s (various prizes awarded annually)   

Still think you are up for the challenge?
It would be amazing to think of the multiple advantages to science of the creation of a way to harness human energy and turn it into a forward force.  Obviously the power need not be used for flight, but could be transferred to power just about anything.

Technological advances in these new inventions could lead virtually anywhere - and that is what these awards are trying to promote.

And - if you are not so keen on inventing planes, then take a look at the Sikorsky Prize instead - and build yourself a human powered helicopter instead!  This would win you and your team a tasty $250,000! 

Good Luck!

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 16

Welcome to the final Blog Carnival of 2009 - And Best Wishes for the New Year!

Let’s begin with the very thorough and interesting article by Mary Jones who details 25 Everyday Technologies That Came from NASA. Neat!

And welcome back to a regular writer on e-books - Marco Gustafsson with his article this time on the Cool-er EBook Reader: Intuitive Marketing or Blatant Copying?.

The third article is about the planet - and lists lectures that could change the way you think about biology, technology and the world itself - let Linda Jones share with you 50 Fascinating Lectures on the Future of the Planet.

A little story about the Eco Rally that took place earlier this year by 00FF00 has some great info and some nice photos too! So, read here about The Revolve Eco Rally

And finally, the obligatory ‘Apps’ listing article this month is from Carolyn Friedman who tells us about the Top 20 iPhone Apps for Business Travelers but is joined by a very in-depth article on just 1 particular app - John presents us with his article on A Bird-finding App for iPhone and iPod Touch

See you in 2010!