This WASP is making 3D printed houses from mud!
If you live in rural Australia, you know all about mud-dauber wasps. Incredibly industrious, they spend the summer months finding wet soil, clay or mud and then using it to make their egg sacs… all over your walls! The sacs are tough and protect the eggs from predators until they hatch. The WASP in this […]
Flying cars… science fact or science fiction?
We’ve done a few posts on autonomous vehicles, drones, flying ‘cars’ and even the world’s safest small airplane, exploring the future of transport. But what is the reality? Will any of these ever play a part in urban life? In this article, two leading academics from The Queensland University of Technology, one of the worlds great […]
Why Apple Should Buy Tesla and Make Elon Musk CEO
It may be true that there will only ever be one Steve Jobs. It may also turn out to be equally true that there will only ever be one Elon Musk. Jobs was and Musk is, a great innovator – both people who truly ‘think outside of the square’, who ask ‘why not’ when everyone […]
Self-Cleaning clothes anyone?
Innovation has bought massive changes to our lives and to Earth itself in the last century. But none has caught my enthusiasm more than the invention of self-cleaning clothes! If this goes mainstream, it seems the day has come when we can finally be free from the bondage of laundry. If there is one task that has been […]
Blind Mum-to-be gets to ‘See’ Unborn Son
Tatiana listens to her unborn son’s heartbeat during her ultrasound procedure. Love is blind. This is especially true for blind mum-to-be, Tatiana Guerra. Arriving for her ultrasound procedure, Tatiana expected only to hear the heartbeat of her unborn son, Murilo. Despite not being able to see an image of him in her womb as sighted mothers would, […]
How to store 360 terabytes for around 14 billion years!
OK, right now, most of us may not need to store 360 terabytes of data. And the tax office here in Australia only requires you to keep your files for a maximum of seven years. But this technology may just find a use in your home regardless. Imagine having an inter-generational record of people and events […]
True DSLR quality just got better, faster and much cheaper
As any photographer will tell you, the biggest challenge with DSLR photography is bulk. The camera body is bulky but you then need to add the lens. And if you’re a serious photographer, you may have three or fours lenses. So now you have a camera bag to tote them all in. And then when […]
Self-Balancing Wheelchair That Climbs and Descends Stairs Automatically
It’s not the first ever developed wheelchair in history, but it definitely is the best answer to one of the disabled people’s major concerns. Stairs are the number one enemy of wheelchair users. And though ramps are made for them, not all places and buildings are equipped with it. Sometimes even, existing structures are built in a way that […]
Breakthrough creates a metal roof cooler than the surrounding air!
One of the really big myths is that metal roofs make a house hotter than other roof types. Anyone who has spent time on a tile roof knows that every roof – with the exception of thatched and green roofs, gets hellishly hot. And that heat radiates straight into your roof space and then continues into […]
3D printed prosthetics have arrived… and they’re affordable!
Close to three years ago I wrote a post about one man’s quest to print a working 3D prosthetic hand. It was basic but it worked and definitely fell into the category of a miracle (in my humble opinion). It looked like this: Basic perhaps, but life changing for the recipient! In the three years since, 3D […]
