Household
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Background: Every year, a large number of children accidentally poison themselves by drinking household chemicals. Cleaning products and pesticides (Figure 1) represent the cause of ~15% of poisoning cases in children under the age of 6, according to the National Capital Poison Center. The issue: To a child who is illiterate and unfamiliar with conventional…
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Background: It’s difficult to move heavy furniture around, so furniture is usually positioned for general use, even if there are specific setups that would be better for rare situations. For example, your home might have a room that would be best configured in one way for watching movies, but a different way for a Thanksgiving…
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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: 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 “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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