The 17 Ingeniously Designed Products You Need In Your Life

 

 

These products are awesome simply because they were designed that way. All them are really amazing, and they will help you get through your day.     http://whattodowhenyour-bored.com

The bare chair

 

 

 

Posted: 21 May 2015 10:32 AM PDT

We zip-line through life stopping only to click pictures of nature’s abundant beauty for our Instagram. No one pauses to stare at the sunset anymore. Or sit amongst towering trees. The Leano chair is the perfect accessory for people who want to encourage the wanderlust within them. Just simply a wooden frame and fabric, it’s a lovely recliner stripped down to the bare essentials, finally occupying the same amount of space as a closed umbrella, when packed.

It’s so minimal, it puts the Air in Chair!

Designer: Nik Lorbeg

Inventors choose to reveal their secret sauce before patent approval

 

January 15, 2015 Georgia Institute of Technology Common wisdom and prior economic research suggest that an inventor filing a patent would want to keep the technical know-how secret as long as possible. But a new study of nearly 2 million patents shows that inventors are not as concerned with secrecy as previously thought. Researchers found that since 2000, most inventors when given the choice opted to disclose information about their patents before patent approval -- even small inventors -- and this disclosure correlates with more valuable patents. Common wisdom and prior economic research suggest that an inventor filing a patent would want to keep the technical know-how secret as long as possible. But a new study of nearly 2 million patents shows that inventors are not as concerned with secrecy as previously thought. Researchers found that since 2000, most inventors when given the choice opted to disclose information about their patents before patent approval -- even small inventors -- and this disclosure correlates with more valuable patents. "Do inventors really value the secrecy that economists assumed they did based on the prior literature? Our findings are that overwhelmingly, and in every category that we can test, inventors don't," said Stuart Graham, study co-author and assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Scheller College of Business. Graham was the first-ever chief economist appointed at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), serving in the U.S. Department of Commerce while on leave from Georgia Tech from 2010 to 2013. The study, co-authored with Deepak Hegde (New York University), will be published January 16 in the journal Science, and was sponsored in part by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. During the congressional debate over the AIPA, prominent inventors raised concerns that reduced secrecy would harm not only small inventors, but undermine the inventive spirit throughout the world. So a loophole was included in the AIPA, allowing inventors to maintain secrecy of their patent applications if they were not also filing for parallel foreign patent protection on the same invention. The change in the law created an opportunity for Graham and his colleague Deepak Hegde, an assistant professor of management and organizations at NYU's Stern School of Business, to examine which inventors were choosing to opt into the secrecy loophole, and whether their patents differed in important ways. They examined 1.8 million granted patents filed at the USPTO from 1995 to 2005 and analyzed the disclosure preferences of the inventors. Their analysis found that, among those not seeking foreign protection, about 85 percent of inventors filing a patent since 2000 chose to disclose information about their patents prior to their approval. "Overwhelmingly, those inventors patenting only in the U.S. are choosing 18 month disclosure," co-author Hegde said. The patents examined in the study are called utility patents, which are available on new and useful processes, machines, manufactured articles, or compositions, and protect technologies like software, laptops, medical devices, and drugs. These are the commonest type of patent with more than 570,000 filed at the USPTO in 2013, each containing technical information. When the AIPA was passed, one of the biggest complaints was that the publication requirement would hurt U.S. small inventors, but the researchers found that individuals and small companies still opted for disclosure during the study period. "Small U.S. inventors are not choosing the secrecy route," Graham said. "When they patent only in the U.S., they are choosing secrecy in only about 15 percent of the cases, not statistically different than the rate among all other types of inventors." Another major complaint of the AIPA was that disclosing patent secrets would stop the engine of innovation in the United States and that society would get less meaningful inventions. Contrary to these arguments, the researchers found that patents born out of secrecy were overall less valuable than those that opted for disclosure. "When we examine indicators of patent value, we find consistent evidence that the least-valuable and least-impactful patents are those that opted for pre-grant secrecy," Hegde said. The authors point out that more patent information, provided to society earlier, could be socially beneficial. Publishing patent information earlier may provide a head start for other innovators, and may help society avoid unnecessary duplicative research spending, the researchers said. "We have limited resources in our society that we can invest in innovation and invention," Graham said. "To the extent that we can more efficiently choose projects and avoid wasteful, redundant efforts, then that's good for us as a society." Future work will involve pinpointing why inventors are choosing not to keep their patent information secret until grant. Some possible answers are that disclosure acts as an early signal to competitors to not innovate in that technology space, or announces to potential licensees that a technology is coming to the marketplace and may be available as an input for someone else's manufacturing or engineering process. "This study is a first window into what inventors are really doing. The next question is why are they doing it?" Graham said. "It remains for us to figure out why inventors seeking to maximize the value of their inventions are not particularly interested in pre-patent secrecy." Story Source: The above story is based on materials provided by Georgia Institute of Technology. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: S. Graham, D. Hegde. Disclosing patents' secrets. Science, 2015; 347 (6219): 236 DOI: 10.1126/science.1262080

21 Innovative Inventions

 

source : www.randompicdumps.com

Make your own solar backpack

 

credit: Kajnjaps

Solar backpacks are a great thing to have whether you hit the trails every weekend or run around the city all week. The exterior solar panels generate electricity for charging your gadgets with clean energy, while the backpack totes all your stuff. There are plenty of these on the market, a few we've covered here, but if you already have a favorite backpack or messenger bag, why go DIY and make it into a solar backpack?

Instructables user Kajnjaps gave us permission to share this project with you. He says, "In this instructable I'll show you how to build a detachable solar panel and battery charger for your backpack. This can power or charge all your gadgets (cell phone, mp3 player...) while on the road. HAMs can use it to power small QRP transmitters and receivers on a field day etc."

 

 

Inspired by a music box, Stanford bioengineer creates $5 chemistry set

 

Home » About » News & Updates » Inspired by a music box, Stanford bioengineer creates $5 chemistry set

Manu Prakash won a contest to develop the 21st-century chemistry set. His version, based on a toy music box, is small, robust, programmable and costs $5. It can inspire young scientists and also address developing-world problems such as water quality and health.

When Manu Prakash was young he had a thing about flames. He's not encouraging all kids to follow his fiery lead – he did burn one hand pretty badly – but he thinks kids should explore more when it comes to learning about science. That's the idea behind his programmable, toy-like device that won a competition to "reimagine the chemistry set for the 21st century."

The Science Play and Research Kit Competition (SPARK) was jointly sponsored by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public. Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, will receive a $50,000 award toward further developing his prototype into a low-cost product, which he thinks can have widespread use both in the developing world and as a creative toy for kids.

"In one part of our lab we've been focusing on frugal science and democratizing scientific tools to get them out to people around the world who will use them," Prakash said. "I'd started thinking about this connection between science education and global health. The things that you make for kids to explore science are also exactly the kind of things that you need in the field because they need to be robust and they need to be highly versatile."

 

From music to chemistry

The idea for this device started not with flames or even chemistry, but with a music box that Prakash's wife brought home from a gift exchange at work one Christmas. It used a tiny hand crank to pull a paper ribbon through a set of pins on concentric disks. When one of the pins hit a hole in the paper, the disk and pin rotated, causing another pin to pluck a metal strip to make a sound. One of the tapes in his lab has holes set up to play the song "Happy Birthday."

Stanford graduate student George Korir holds a programmable microfluidics kit built on music box parts. (Kurt Hickman / Stanford News Service)

In his toy-filled office, Prakash played with this music box and got the idea that the rotating pins could also be used to pump fluids through tiny channels or to control valves and droplet generators in a programmable fashion. "Punch-card paper tapes like this have been used to program computers and fabric looms, so why not chemistry?" he said.

After talking with graduate student George Korir, Prakash started working with him on a way of pairing the hand-cranked toy with a small silicon chip containing tiny channels for manipulating fluids. These chips, called microfluidics chips, are increasingly common in research labs, but require expensive equipment and electricity to run. The expense and equipment required is a bottleneck in adapting the technology for science education and global health, Prakash said.

What Prakash and Korir invented is inexpensive, hand-powered, self-contained and programmable. "It's important to bring open-ended tools for discovery to a broad spectrum of users without dumbing down the tools," Prakash said.

 

Programmable and portable

Like the music box, the prototype includes a hand-cranked wheel and paper tape with periodic holes punched by the user. When a pin encounters a hole in the tape it flips and activates a pump that releases a single drop from a channel. In the simplest design, 15 independent pumps, valves and droplet generators can all be controlled simultaneously.

Prakash and Korir didn't set out to make a kit for kids. Their idea was that a portable, programmable chemistry kit could be used around the world to test water quality, provide affordable medical diagnostic tests, assess soil chemistry for agriculture or serve as a snake bite venom test kit. It could even be used in modern labs to carry out experiments on a very small scale.

Although the original prototype was made from music box parts, Prakash and Korir have many versions in which the crank and pins (they call this part the actuator) were printed on a 3-D printer. They say the actuator, the paper tape and the silicon chip can all be modified to meet different uses, and can be made from inexpensive, durable materials costing less than $5.

For example, if someone wants to test water quality he might create a chip with channels that combine the water with chemicals that detect contaminants, pH, or the presence of microorganisms. Another kit might force droplets through a twisting pattern to mix chemicals within the drops. Holes in the paper tape can be punched to release drops from different channels in a set sequence or to open and close valves that combine chemicals or keep them separate. Prakash said each chip can be rinsed out and reused with a new batch of chemicals.

A kit for kids might come with several chips containing different types of channels and with a few pre-punched tapes. The chemicals never leave the chip and thus are never exposed. Prakash said he envisions youngsters eventually punching their own holes to program new experiments.

 

Sparking inspiration

This kind of open-ended creativity is what the competition sponsors intended. They cite a concern about classic chemistry sets that inspired a generation of scientists being reduced to rote toys that don't spark the same excitement and wonder.

Prakash said inspiring kids to be interested in science is directly tied to solving developing-world problems. "Science education in developing countries doesn't exist and that's probably one of the reasons why we don't have enough doctors and scientists," he said. "It's not just about resources. It's about people not realizing that this is something they want to invest their life in."

Korir was born and raised in Kenya. "If we were curious and wanted to explore, for example to find out what was out there in the muddy water, or to find out why some water tastes different than other water, we had no way to do that," he said. "Having something that you could use to ask these questions would open up the space to kids but also to other people all over the world. It really democratizes chemistry."

Prakash is affiliated with both Stanford Bio-X, which encourages interdisciplinary research between biological sciences and engineering, and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. This project and other "frugal science" from his lab marry those two affiliations by creating low-cost engineering tools that can be used for health care or environmental applications. He recently announced development of a 50-cent microscope called Foldscope that can be folded like origami out of paper.

With the prize money, Prakash and Korir hope to continue working toward a product that other groups, including researchers and citizen scientists, can then modify and program for a wide range of uses, both educational and scientific. "When you go out in the field you feel like, 'If I'm not making a product, then I'm not getting out to people in even the smallest possible way,'" Prakash said.

For more Stanford experts on bioengineering and other topics, visit Stanford Experts.