Sayan’s BlogWorld

Elizabeth Hausler explains to Global X that she was finishing her Ph.D. in engineering at Berkeley when an earthquake hit India and killed 20,000 people. That’s when she realized that “it’s not the earthquake that kills people, it’s the building collapsing.”

She looked for a solution and launched Build Change to build earthquake-resistant houses in developing countries and change construction practices permanently so that homeowners in seismically active developing countries can sleep at night.

The article here and its accompanying video describe this invention as, “…a taut membrane fitted with a pair of magnets that oscillate between metal coils. Prototypes have generated 40 milliwatts in 10-mph slivers of wind, making his device 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines…”

I spent some time watching the talk Dr. Bussard gave at Google sometime ago- it was very interesting both from a scientific point of view and a political point of view. It seems all that is required to solve most of the world’s problems is political will and stepping away from narrow egotistical views.

Here is what Slashdot says in a post: Dr Bussard, the man behind the Bussard Collector and inventor of the Polywell fusion device, passed away last Sunday in the morning. He leaves behind him a legacy of EM fusion devices, and a team determined to continue his efforts. The news of funding extension for the construction of his WB-7 fusion devices made it to slashdot months ago (as well as his talk at google). They may be a serious candidate in the run to bring commercial fusion, and may work at lower scales than other projects. Let’s hope the project continues in good shape despite his departure.

Here is a short animation of the basic working of a Polywell design IEC (Inertial Electrostatic Confinement) fusion device studied by Dr. Bussard’s team:

TechCrunch reports that this technology is so revolutionary that Adobe snapped up co-inventor Shai Avidan on a moments notice. Check out the video to see how neat this is…

Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen Fund speaks on the importance of patient listening and dignity in social development related businesses. Here is her talk on TED.com

Farmingsolutions.org website has a touching story of the success of farmers’ self-help group in India. How they overcame all odds to work themselves out of poverty with sustainable agriculture at the same time caused a social revolution.

The website AfriGadget documents precisely what its tagline says. This is the website to check out if you are interested in seeing how people solve real life problems with limited resources. An African version of the Indian HoneyBee network may prove helpful.

ScienceDaily reports on a just invented process to make a high-energy liquid bio-fuel from fructose. This is all fine and good but we need to ask ourselves honestly… do we really need to convert corn into fuel and animal feed when a quarter of the world is underfed?

Arstechnica has an article here about how scientists first copied the lizard / gecko feet stickiness then improved on it.

BBC had earlier reported here that scientists had finally managed to figure out what really make lizards stick to walls…

So if you want to stick something to your non-stick cookware look no further than your friendly wall lizard / gecko.

Came across this neat idea of laying disease location data over google maps. ArsTechnica covers it in its article titled, “The wisdom of unhealthy crowds: Web 2.0 takes on the flu“

Science Alert Australia has a story about cheaper solar cells using synthetic chlorophyll.

Philips unveils e-Reader with rollable display

PHILIPS HAS UNVEILED the world’s first ever rollable display pocket e-Reader, the Readius.

The Readius is able to unroll its display to a scale greater than the device itself. The 320×240 pixel screen, which is five inches, provides “paper-like” viewing comfort with a decent contrast radio for applications that need a lot of reading, such as text, graphics and electronic maps.