Good Thinking

For some people, skateboarding is more a way of life than just a sport. Surely this is the case with former skateboarding world champion, French-born Pierre André Senizergues, who is about to build a skateboarder's dream house, located in Malibu, California. Dubbed PAS House, the dwelling is meant to be a tribute to the skateboarding lifestyle, thus virtually all the walls, furniture and appliances in the house will be either 'skateable' or skateboard-themed. Think of it like a private habitable skate ramp. Read More

According to a 2009 estimate by the U.S. Society of Civil Engineers, more than one in four U.S. bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. While newer “smart” bridges have embedded wired networks of sensors to monitor their structural integrity, the high cost of installing such systems on existing bridges is simply unaffordable for strained city, state and federal budgets. Now University of Maryland electrical engineering researcher Mehdi Kalantari has developed a tiny wireless sensor that monitors and transmits minute-by-minute data on a bridge’s structural integrity that he estimates is one-hundredth the cost of a wired network approach. Read More

With diseases such as Foot and Mouth, TB, and of course Mad Cow still presenting a danger to cattle, it’s of the utmost importance that farmers monitor the health of their animals, and immediately proceed to isolate any that might be showing symptoms. If you have a herd of over 500 cows, however, keeping track of individuals can be rather tricky. That’s why scientists at England’s Newcastle University have developed electronic ears tags, that they’re trying out on a herd of test cattle. Read More

Students from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany have created a flexible housing solution that makes the most of its minimal interior space in a very unusual way. Dubbed "Roll it", this cylinder-shaped home changes its purpose depending on its orientation - roll the the work space 180 degrees and it becomes a bed, the kitchen becomes a bathroom and you even get some exercise in the mouse wheel-like center section when you decide to "move house". Read More

So, is that really Johnnie Walker Blue that you’re drinking, or is it perhaps actually Johnny Woker Bloo? Counterfeit Scotch whiskeys are more common than you might think, with the Scotch Whiskey Association reportedly handling between 60 to 70 active cases of counterfeiting at any one time. While there are lab tests that can identify the fakes, not every bar owner or restaurateur has the time or funds for those. Fortunately for them, scientists from Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde have devised a quicker, simpler, less costly system. Read More

One of the great things about the internet is the fact that everyday people can share what they know with the entire world, so if they’ve had a particularly good or bad experience with a business or product, they can notify everyone via customer review websites. The flip-side of that, however, is that business owners can plant fake reviews on those same sites, that either praise their own business or slam their competition. Well, confused consumers can now take heart – researchers from Cornell University have developed software that is able to identify phony reviews with close to 90 percent accuracy. Read More

The ingenious Cargoshell shipping container concept is about to be tested for ISO certification, finally enabling deployment. The composite Cargoshell is both light and collapsible. Though containerisation has streamlined global trade, it remains inefficient. The current steel containers use the same space whether they are empty or full, and waste valuable resources globally being transported and stored empty. A Cargoshell can be broken down by one person in 30 minutes, to a quarter of its original volume. Read More

The U.S. EPA estimated that servers and data centers were responsible for up to 1.5 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption, or roughly 0.5 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, in 2007. With companies such as Apple and Google strongly pushing the move to cloud computing, that figure is likely to increase significantly in the coming decade. Since a lot of energy is consumed keeping the computer systems cool, colder climates are seen as more favorable sites for data centers. But a new paper from Microsoft Research proposes a different approach that would see servers, dubbed Data Furnaces, distributed to office buildings and homes where they would act as a primary heat source. Read More

Cyclists have been enjoying the benefits of gears for over a hundred years now but the wheelchair-bound have been stuck with the single 1:1 speed ratio on manual wheelchairs come flat ground or hilly since their invention centuries ago. Now Scott Daigle, a graduate engineering student at the University of Illinois, is addressing this oversight with IntelliWheels AGS (Automatic Gear-Shift), an automated system that detects how the wheelchair is being pushed and changes gears accordingly. Read More