Health
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Background: Sometimes, you want to drink a beverage, but it’s too hot. The issue: You could just wait for it to cool off naturally, but who has time for that! And if you were drinking from an insulated thermos, this cooling-off process could take hours. Proposal: The basic idea is simple: an ultra-long curly straw…
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The issue: Dental floss has a serious problem with unnecessary waste: each length of dental floss has a “dead zone” at the ends that is used to wrap around fingers. This unused region is thrown away without ever having been actually used as dental floss (Figure 1). Proposal: Instead of wrapping the dental floss around…
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Background: When baking a pizza in an oven, it’s it’s easy to remove the pizza from the oven and instantly start devouring it. The issue: Unfortunately, molten cheese (Fig. 1) cannot coexist with human tissue, so this causes severe burns to the impatient pizza-eater. Proposal: We can prevent further occurrences of this culinary tragedy by…
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Background: Print news has unfortunately been dealt a mortal blow by a combination of the Internet and mobile phones. But there’s still one way to take advantage of the physical nature of printed news—a way that cannot be replicated by news on a phone! Proposal: We can bring printed newspapers and promote a healthy lifestyle…
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The issue: It’s often hard to keep track of the quantity of snack food that one can eat. For example, if you eat a single “fun size” candy bar every hour at work (maybe you work somewhere with a collective candy bowl), you’ll accumulate 3200 additional calories over the course of an 8-hour 5-day work…
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Background: Health care is expensive—but it could be cheaper, if labor were cheaper (apparently somewhere between half and two-thirds of costs go to salaries). The issue: Unfortunately, doctors and nurses will probably remain relatively expensive—but what if we can recruit cheap labor to do some of the tasks that normally require a highly-trained medical professional?…
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Background: People occasionally forget to lock the door before leaving the house, or leave a stove on by accident, or any number of other things. “Internet of Things” aficionados often suggest that you could, say, turn on and off your stove from your phone, but now someone on the Internet thousands of miles away can…
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Background: A lot of kitchen tools have a non-electric version that is hand-cranked: for example, a coffee grinder, ice-cream maker, mixer, or salad-spinner. Additional common hand-powered items include the can opener and pepper mill. The issue: Unfortunately, many of these tools are slow and inefficient to operate by hand. However, if there were some way…
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Background: Most methods of catching fish—with the notable exception of bare-hand catfish noodling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noodling)—do not involve direct contact with the to-be-fished aquatic life. Proposal: In order to both: make humans more attuned to nature and to promote a fishing method that discourages overfishing… …the following “baleen fishing attachment mesh” is proposed. This “baleen mesh” is a…
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Background: Even the most un-choosy eater cares at least somewhat about the visual appearance of food. A food item that looks “off” somehow will trigger a natural aversion to spoiled food. Proposal: This aversion to bizarre looking food can be used to help people maintain a healthy diet! The process is as follows: certain foods…
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