A startup called DrinkSavvy is creating drinkware that changes color when date rape drugs are present, going from clear to red.
Lucius Fox
Chief Executive Officer of Wayne Enterprises
See on Scoop.it - The future of medicine and healthMoldable, Injectable Sponges Left: A fully collapsed square-shaped cryogel rapidly regains its original memorized shape, size, and volume upon hydration. Right: Photos show the placement of a cryogel inside a 1-mL syringe, and the recovery of a square gel after injection through a normal 16-gauge needle. Courtesy of Sidi Bencherif
A new class of gel-based sponges can be molded to any shape, soak up drugs or stem cells, shrink down and be injected into the body, where they inflate to their original size and leak out their contents. They work kind of like those “dinosaur egg” sponges you can get at museum gift shops, where contact with water inflates little pellets into soft dino-shapes. Only they’ll be inside your body.
Bioengineers at Harvard and Caltech designed the sponges, which are primarily made from alginate, a gel made from algae. They can be molded into any shape or size and contain large pores, which allow liquids and large molecules to pass through. The pores can also hold cells, proteins and small-molecule drugs, which can then pass into the body when the alginate starts to break down.
See on popsci.com
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New laundry detergent makes your clothes remove pollution from the air
In an unusual collaboration of form and function, scientists from the University of Sheffield and designers from the London College of Fashion have teamed up to create a liquid laundry additive, CatClo (Catalytic Clothing), that turns your clothes into pollution magnets using the magic of nanotechnology.
The laundry additive coats your clothes with minuscule particles of titanium dioxide, which, when exposed to daylight, attract nitrogen oxides — a major source of pollution — from the air. You only have to use CatClo once per clothing item, the developers say, as “nanoparticles of titanium dioxide grip onto fabrics very tightly.” The additive can remove 5 grams of nitrogen dioxide a day — the same amount as emitted daily by an average family car, says the University of Sheffield’s Tony Ryan — and the pollutants wash off your clothes the next time you do the laundry. “Not a bad haul for simply getting dressed in the morning,” says Clay Dillow at PopSci.
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Solomon Elorm Allavi founder of Syecomp Business Services: …an entrepreneur with proactive solutions bedeviling agricultural growth in Ghana, he utilises the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology with the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) tools-Garmin Etrex GPS and Trimble GPS and Digitized Base Map, to provide an array of farmland surveying and mapping services. His clients include smallholder rice farmers, horticultural farmers, food processing companies, individual farmers and corporate clients.
Despite the fact that global issues are incredibly complicated, people tend to break them down into easy-to-understand, black and white terms. But is a new generation prepared to embrace nuance?
Microsoft researcher David Heckerman helped stop junk mail headaches. Now, he’s using some of the same techniques he helped pioneer to fight HIV.
James Dyson, Inventor & Chief Engineer of Dyson, in conversation with Shoshana Berger, Development Editor of WIRED.
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