Household
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Background: A “three-way light switch” (i.e. two switches that control the same light) is useful when there are multiple places that need to control a single light, such as at both the top and the bottom of a staircase. The issue: Unfortunately, three-way switches are often out of sync with the actual state of the…
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Background: Sometimes, if you are groggily taking a shower in the morning without paying much attention, you may forget whether or not you’ve already washed your hair (Figure 1). The issue: You can, of course, always wash your hair again, but then you wasted both time AND shampoo. What if the bottle itself could…
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Background: Refrigeration is a great way to preserve foods. But chilling and/or freezing foods can have adverse effects on taste. What if there was a way to stop time for the food WITHOUT chilling it? Proposal: Luckily, physics provides a solution: as an object moves more quickly through space, it experiences the effects of time…
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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: The Indiana Jones movies (especially #1 and #3) have taught that it’s a serious liability for an adventurer to acquire a phobia against any animal that may be seen in the course of adventuring (e.g., snakes, rats). Proposal: In order to avoid these problems, we can easily desensitize a future adventure to dangerous animals…
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Background: You’ve probably heard of a “washer-dryer” combination, an existing one-stop-shop appliance for cleaning clothes. What if we extended this philosophy to other categories of home appliances? Proposal: Sometimes, a frozen food requires a lengthy defrosting period. So if you want to eat that item, you must laboriously: Remove the item from the freezer Place…
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Background: The humble door-locking deadbolt has suffered from a severe failure of innovation and imagination in the last 100 years. Specifically: most deadbolts have exactly two positions (Figure 1): Open (door can be opened from either side) Closed (door requires a key to open from the outside or a switch to be operated from the…
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The issue: In many houses, certain rooms—especially kitchens and living rooms—have a half dozen or more light switches that control a wide array of lights and other accessories. Often, even after many years, the house’s occupant never learns which switch is which. Proposal: Instead of just randomly picking a switch to toggle until the correct…
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Background: This is an alternate version of the previous table-related idea (see link here), which involved hanging a table from the ceiling. The issue: Sometimes, you’re sitting at a table, and the table legs get in the way. So annoying! See Figure 1 to be reminded of this calamity. Fig. 1: The presence of this…
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The issue: Cell phones occasionally fall out of a person’s pockets and get forgotten. This is especially easy to do when sitting on a sofa or in a movie theater seat. If the phone could detect that it had been dropped into sofa cushions, it could notify you before it was too late to find…
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