When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself--for a whole week. [...] It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.
An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis
on Dec 19, 2011 -
51 comments
A robber is cornered in a dead-end alley: He turns to face the police officer pursuing him, ready to fight. He pauses. The officer’s left forearm is encased in ballistic nylon, and half a million volts arc menacingly between electrodes on his wrist. A green laser target lands on the robber’s chest. He puts his hands up; it’s a fight he can’t win.
[more inside]
posted by dirtylittlecity
on May 31, 2011 -
132 comments
Today, Mexico announced new, tighter tariffs on American goods,
including restrictions on U.S. chewing gum. Some say it's
because of Teamsters, but the hatred of American chewing gum may harken back to a 19th century military coup. Exiled after numerous attempts to rule Mexico as a military dictator, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (yes, that
General Santa Anna) spent part of his time in exile in -- of all places --
Staten Island. Santa Anna planned to fund his new army with a secret asset: he intended to sell
chicle to the Americans. Although the General thought it had more uses, inventor Thomas Adams found the stuff
fun to chew on. A few years later, Adams flavored his gum, inventing
Black Jack Gum, the oldest continually-made chewing gum in the United States. Sadly, due to recent tariffs, General Santa Anna's army-building Black Jack chewing gum will now cost 20% more to export to Mexico.
posted by AzraelBrown
on Aug 18, 2010 -
16 comments
The Menstruation Machine: an invention created by artist Hiromi Ozaki. "As a female designer I had one big problem I wanted to solve. "It’s 2010, so why are humans still menstruating?" "Fitted with a blood dispensing mechanism and lower-abdomen-stimulating electrodes, the Menstruation Machine is a device which simulates the pain and bleeding of an average 5 day menstruation process of a human (As a female designer I have done my best to simulate my own, at least)." Also:
Menstruation Machine - Takashi's Take is a music video about a boy ‘Takashi’, who builds the menstruation machine in an attempt to dress up as a female, biologically as well as aesthetically, to fulfill his desire to understand what it might feel like to be a truely 'girly' girl. He determinedly wears the machine to hang out with his kawaii friend in Tokyo, but…"
posted by Fizz
on Aug 14, 2010 -
83 comments
How do you diagnose anemia in a third-world country without electricity? Use the salad-spinner-based
thirty dollar centrifuge, developed by Rice undergraduate students Lila Kerr and Lauren Theis.
posted by jjray
on May 4, 2010 -
25 comments
Nothing succeeds like failure. [H]istory shows that breakthroughs often spring not from carefully laid plans, but from mischance or even sheer, ridiculous accidents. A stovetop spill heralded vulcanized rubber; the potency of uranium was revealed when a rock was left in a drawer among photographic plates. And great research seldom follows an unswerving path. At RCA in Princeton in the 1950s, David Sarnoff exhorted his team to invent a flat television that could hang on a wall. “There were an enormous number of failures,” says Princeton historian of science Michael Gordin — and instead of TVs, the world got the Seiko digital watch in 1973.
posted by caddis
on Apr 9, 2010 -
38 comments
Let me introduce you to the
Lifesaver bottle. This very compact design (in both a
bottle and a
jerrycan form) allows someone to get clean drinking water in seconds. Their filters can last up to 20000 liters in the jerrycan form and 6000 in the bottle form. The price for this technology? $150 for the bottle and $400 for the top shelf jerrycan.
[more inside]
posted by DoublePlus
on Apr 2, 2010 -
72 comments
Finally, finally - Zubbles are available for pre-order! Inventor
Tim Kehoe has been searching for
the elusive colored bubble for a long time. Through his experimentation he's stained his eyes a deep blue, along with his car, his kitchen, and his bathtub (he's also permanently stained the family dog). But in 2005, after 11 years and over $500,000 in funding, Kehoe successfully created a colored bubble that wouldn't stain. His invention,
Zubbles, was given the "Best of What's New, Grand Award" from Popular Science.
[more inside]
posted by avoision
on Jun 26, 2009 -
71 comments
Drummer and vocalist
Jimmy Carl Black, "the Indian of the group", who appeared on more Mothers of Invention
records than you could shake a stick at, has passed away. Here's Jimmy drumming with The Mothers of Invention
live on French TV 1968,
live on BBC TV 1968, singing with
The Muffin Men, 2002, and on one of his last gigs, singing Capt. Beefheart's
Dropout Boogie in June 2008, in his duo with mad banjo wizard Eugene Chadbourne which they called
The Jack and Jim Show.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Nov 3, 2008 -
49 comments
Fortunes are rarely won by playing it safe. On the contrary, the biggest fortunes have been won by those willing to step outside the box and change the way the game is played. Following are
twenty-five business innovators of the past, present, and future whose stories are different in many respects, but all point to the same truth: Ingenuity, improvisation, and daring are more important than following the rules (even though you might find yourself on the wrong side of the law once in a while). Via Fortune.
[more inside]
posted by infini
on Aug 2, 2008 -
31 comments
Thomas A. Edison did not simply invent; he created the invention industry. He not only inspired the American Industrial Revolution, he provided the model for modern R&D concepts. Perhaps his greatest success beyond his legacy of innovation and invention is the introduction of team-based research. The
Edison Innovation Foundation is using
Edison's Invention Factory to educate the next generation of inventors.
posted by netbros
on Jul 29, 2008 -
23 comments
Madman or genius? Well... madman. But being confined to an asylum (with one of his symptoms described as "manic invention") didn't keep
Karl Hans Janke from developing elaborate theories of
atomic energy, flight,
space travel and the history of humanity, creating over 4,000 complex drawings and even models over 40 years of incarceration for paranoid schizophrenia.
[more inside]
posted by Shepherd
on Jun 2, 2008 -
4 comments
Dean Kamen's Artificial "Luke" Arm - Segway inventor reinvents the prosthetic arm: "I've been able to do stuff with this that I haven't, seriously haven't, done in 26 years... uh, pick up a banana, peel a banana and eat it without it squishening... I can't wait to get one of these in a real environment, a home environment, and actually my wife can't either. She's going, oh yeah, I got lots of stuff for you to do."
posted by kliuless
on Feb 19, 2008 -
59 comments
Enertia is producing "innovative new homes of remarkable strength, economy, and beauty, brought to life by an elegant new architecture and the discovery of a new source of pollution-free energy." The design took first prize in the
Modern Marvels/Invent Now competition (
previously). In an
interview, the inventor, Michael Sykes, says "he was inspired by the way the earth’s own atmosphere keeps the planet at a relatively constant comfortable temperature despite the frigidity of space." He also notes that his wife calls herself a "homemaker," natch.
posted by pithy comment
on May 17, 2007 -
17 comments
Wanna get nuked? the
Active Denial System [just say no?] was launched yesterday - its a microwave ray gun that makes people feel like they're going to catch fire. Wasn't there a ray gun at a certain point in a
book we trashed a while earlier?
posted by infini
on Jan 25, 2007 -
46 comments
Meet the man who "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history" -
Thomas Midgley, Jr. Midgley invented leaded gasoline in 1921 to
stop cars from knocking. In the process, he created a huge new industry, increased by 500 times the atmospheric lead levels, and
was part of a multi-decade coverup of lead's effects that put the tobacco industry to shame [note: article is both terrific and very long] and still
continues today. Just a few years later, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, and, with
a dramatic demonstration of their safety, usured in an era of
cheap air conditioning and social change, as well as
ozone depletion. In the end,
he was killed by one of his inventions, though it was neither lead nor CFCs that were responsible. He is sometimes
remembered fondly, he is more often
vilified.
posted by blahblahblah
on Oct 19, 2006 -
30 comments
Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions:
science,
invention,
space travel,
colonisation,
immortality,
water
shortage,
flooding,
nanotech,
techno-apocalypse,
extinction,
mental health,
smart machines,
robots, mind uploading,
AI,
Asia,
economics,
demographics,
goverance,
cities.
What is your prediction?
posted by MetaMonkey
on Oct 5, 2006 -
54 comments
Get A-Life - an interesting read on
artificial life and
evolutionary computation, from the
game of life (
playable applet), through
core wars,
tierra and on to
genetic programming. This approach has recently borne fruit to genetic programming
pioneer and inventor of the
scratchcard,
John Koza, who last year
patented his invention machine, actually a
1000 machine beowulf cluster running his software, which has itself created several
inventions which have been granted patents.
[See also:
BBC Biotopia artificial life experiment, another
odd BBC evolution game,
Artificial Life Possibilities: A Star Trek Perspective]
posted by MetaMonkey
on May 3, 2006 -
14 comments
