5 Uses Of Silica Gel Packets That You Never Knew

Silica Gel packs are kept in containers
to avoid their contents from
degradation (chemical or otherwise) by
controlling the moisture content of the
environment. So its natural that the
packs can come in handy for quite a lot
of things.
1. Storing seeds
If you want to keep your seed storage
safe from moisture and degradation just
stick a couple of silica gel packs in with
them and they’ll be as dry as a desert
when you check them.

2. Keep your tools from
rusting
Rusting is basically the iron oxidizing
when it reacts with the air and water in
the atmosphere. Just stick a silica gel
pack in your tool box and you’re good
to go.

3. Keep that musty smell
away from books
If you crowd your book collection around
silica gel packs or vice versa you will
keep away the musty smell from your
library.

4. Make Christmas
Ornaments last
Christmas ornaments have a pretty short
lifespan. Silica gel packs can extend it.

5. Drying flowers
If you want to dry flowers quickly, suck
up their moisture with silica gel packs.

This Device Lets You Perform Eye Exams With a Smartphone

The World Health Organisation
estimates that there are 39 million
people suffering from blindness in the
world. An estimated 80% of these
people are thought to have blindness
that could be avoided if treatment is
administered. Most of these people
reside in third world countries. To help
identify visual impairments and warn
people Peek Vision has developed Peek
Retina, a device that connects to
smartphone cameras and recognizes
defects in the retina.
It all started when Dr Andrew
Bastawrous from the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine moved
to Kenya. He set up high tech
equipment to treat patients but found
that the treatment wasn’t reaching
those that needed it the most because
they couldn’t afford it. So he developed
PeekRetina with Peek Vision. It’s a clip
on costing $5 that modifies a
smartphone camera to take high quality
photos of the retina.
He estimates that about a 1000 people
can be examined in a week by one
person with a smartphone. The
Photographs (categorized by locations
on a map) are uploaded to a
server that is accessible to doctors
around the world. Then doctors contact
tribal leaders near those places to
inform them that treatment is on the
way.
Cataracts, Glaucoma and even diseases
like Malaria can be diagnosed from an
examination of the retina. The device
has been tested for months in
Botswana, Mali and Kenya and
is currently being funded through a
campaign on Indiegogo .
Dr Bastawrous, in a TED Talk he
delivered, said that some patients, like
one Mama Wangari, had been blind for
twenty years and through treatment
costing $40, was able to see her
grandchildren for the first time. His final
worlds were, “I think it says a lot about
us as a human race if we’ve developed
cures and we don’t deliver them…but
now we can.”

This Plane Can Take You Anywhere in the World Within Four Hours

The British Aerospace Company Reaction
Engines Limited is currently working on
an engine that will allow a plane to go
to any destination on earth in 4 hours.
The plane will be able to carry 300
passengers. Oh, and it will also be
able to fly to space.

watch video here

The engine installed in the plane is
called SABRE. The novelty of this engine
is that it employs a revolutionary
precooler. The contraption swallows air
and cools it at an alarming rate of 400
Mega Watts. This will allow the air to
cool more than a 1000 degrees
Celsius in a single one hundred and
fiftieth of a second. The air will be
cooled to -150 degrees Celsius in the
precooler, which contains condensed
helium in thin pipes, before entering
the engine.

The engine will be used in two planes,
one called LAPCAT will be used to
transport passengers from Sydney in
Australia to Brussels in Belgium in two
to four hours. The second plane is
called Skylon and is part of a joint
project with the European Space Agency
to grant cheaper and easier access to
space.

Skylon would cost $1.1 Billion apiece,
be 82 meters in length and would get
rid of windows completely. This maybe
a bummer to some folks but altogether,
this will provide for innovation. The
airline industry is looking to experiment
with wraparound view screens that will
show changing scenery, maybe that
would be better than staring out the
window trying to get a good look of
what just passed by.
SABRE will begin testing in 2019.

Meet Belty, A Smart Belt That Tells You When You’re Getting Fat

We’ve all had the sensation of having
eaten too much. It’s the point where
your stomach actually does begin to
swell. At that point you either stop or
foolishly continue in an effort to stuff
more in. Many who tend to go for the
latter loosen their belts. But wouldn’t
it be great if we didn’t have to do that
and continue on the road to obesity
unhindered?
Well there’s something called Belty that
was unveiled at the Consumer
Electronics Show (CES) on Sunday by a
French Startup called Emiota.
I
The belt is not just for people who love
to eat, it’s basically marketed as a
fitness belt that adjusts to your belly
size throughout the day. It tracks how
much food you’ve eaten, how much
exercise you’ve been doing and all
other physical activity throughout the
day. It does this through an app that is
connected to the in built gyroscope,
accelerometer and a bunch of other
sensors installed in the belt.

The belt is of course also equipped
with motors to tighten and loosen the
belt whenever needed. No pricing
details or release dates are known but
a representative from Emiota did say
that the belt is a high end product/
luxury item so it will be pricy.

Student Invents ‘Pretty’ Faucet That Saves Water By Making Beautiful Patterns

Simin Qui is a design student at
London’s Royal College of Art. He has
invented what he calls a ‘Swirl Faucet’.
He used a double turbine to give the
water a rotational velocity as it falls. It
creates beautiful and complex patterns
out of falling water and becomes a
work of art. It’ll make your daily
bathroom rituals a little more
interesting that’s for sure.

What’s more interesting and ingenious
is that these beautiful patterns slow
down the water by 15%. This let’s less
water through the drain as you wash
up.
Three different nozzle designs allow the
user to choose how they’d like to
conserve water. The faucet is also
operated with a touch button on top
making its design smooth and
continuous.
The faucet won an IF design concept
award in 2014.

Internet Archive Releases Over 2,300 Classic MS-DOS Games That Can Be Played In Browser

Internet Archive is a non profit digital
library with the goal of providing free
access to all knowledge to everyone on
the planet. Based in San Francisco, the
archive houses everything from
television programmes to research
papers to ancient texts. Recently, over
2300 MS-DOS games, most of which
were played in the 80s or the 90s,
were released online for free at the
Archive.
Games like The Oregon Trail,
Commander Keen and the very first
Prince of Persia hold a special spot in
the hearts of kids that grew up in the
last decades of the last century. This is
why the aforementioned news set the
internet on fire.
Carmen San Di
The question, where in the world is
Carmen San Diego has an answer :
archive.org.
Commander Keen awaits your arrival.
This game and literally thousands of
others are waiting to give the young at
heart a healthy dose of nostalgia.
Games like Castle Wolfenstein might
make a Playstation 4 owner snigger
and an Xbox One owner smug but the
oldies hold that spark that the most
rich graphics games like God of War
can’t ignite.
Who can forget the thrill of the old first
person shooters?
Or the rage of losing a life in Prince of
Persia?
Who needs Need For Speed when Cross
Country Canada can take you to hi
octane speeds in bits (literally).
Gears of War has nothing on this oldie.
And if you don’t care to download
them, these titles are all available
online to play for free.

World’s First 3D Printed Villas and Residential Buildings Constructed In China

On March 29, 2014, Shanghai became
home to ten 3D printed houses made of
concrete. Each was 200 square meters
and cost about $4800. The company
behind this feat, WinSun Decoration
Design Engineering Co, has now
produced another first, a full 5 story
residential building and a villa
measuring about 1,100 square meters
in total with external and internal
decorations and it’s completely 3D
printed.

WinSun has been operating for over a
decade now (its their twelfth year in
business) and already they have 98
patents for building materials. They’ve
been experimenting with 3D printing for
quite a while. In 2004 and 2005 they
built a spray nozzle 3D printing system
with automatic material feeding. Then
they printed a wall in 2008.
 Now
they’re building villas and soon they’ll
be replicating skyscrapers. The villa
itself was produced for the Taiwanese
owned real estate firm, Tomson Group.
It was constructed for a total of 1
million yuan ($161000) and ten more
have been pre-ordered.