Timbuktu Chronicles: Suleiman Famro's ‘Farmking Extractor’ cassava proc...

Timbuktu Chronicles: Suleiman Famro's ‘Farmking Extractor’ cassava proc...:
From the Leadership website : Famro has invented a multi-purpose crop processing machine branded ‘farmking extractor’.The machine was designed, primarily for the processing of root crops, especially cassava. 


The other benefits offered by the processing machine is the opportunity for farmers to extract all the useful by-products of cassava for other economic uses.

"Pressure Retarded Osmosis Power Generation"

From: SPECTRUM.IEEE


by- Dave Levitan


River Mouths Could Offer Hundreds of Gigawatts of Clean Energy


There are a lot of rivers in africa and in the world, and a lot of places where those rivers discharge into an ocean. And according to a study published recently in Environmental Science & Technology, taking advantage of even 10 percent of those interfaces of fresh and salt water could provide more than 150 gigawatts of power.


The process is called pressure-retarded osmosis. Basically, a membrane divides fresh water coming in from the river with the salt water of the ocean or sea. The fresh water flows through the membrane due to the salinity gradient, and the pressure difference spins a turbine to generate electricity. Simple, no fuel required, and clean.


The total river discharge globally is about 37,000 cubic kilometers (somewhere in the vicinity of 10 quadrillion gallons); the new study suggests that if 10 percent of that could be exploited using pressure-retarded osmosis, it would generate 157 gigawatts of power. (For comparison: The U.S. has an electricity capacity of just over 1,000 gigawatts.) And that's 157 gigawatts of emissions-free power; the same amount from coal-fired power plants would release a billion tons of CO2 every year.


The authors of the study, Ngai Yin Yip and Menachem Elimelech of Yale University, might overshoot a bit with one number: they estimate that this power could provide electricity for 520 million people. They base that on the DOE's Energy Information Administration per-capita electricity consumption numbers, but somewhere between one and two billion people still lack electricity access. So, a couple of caveats to what seems like a really good idea: somehow using 10 percent of the world potential for river discharge power is an immense undertaking and extremely unlikely to happen on time scales that matter for emissions reductions; and no, 157 gigawatts will not provide power for half a billion people.


Still, this seems worth doing. There is one prototype facility already in place, in Norway, which we'll watch closely to see if it delivers on the concept's promise.

Wind To Water

From: TreeHugger


by-Megan Treacy


Wind Turbine Makes 1,000 Liters of Clean Water a Day in the Desert


A cool new concept being tested in the Abu Dhabi desert uses a wind turbine to condense water from the air and pump it into storage tanks for filtration and purification. The technology was created by Eole Water after its founder, Marc Parent, was inspired by the water he could collect from his air conditioner unit while living in the Caribbean. He began thinking of ways that water could be condensed from air in areas without access to grid power and the wind turbine concept was born.


The 30-kW wind turbine houses and powers the whole system. Air is taken in through vents in the nose cone of the turbine and then heated by a generator to make steam. The steam goes through a cooling compressor that creates moisture which is then condensed and collected. The water produced is sent through pipes down to stainless steel storage tanks where it's filtered and purified.


A prototype of the technology has been installed in Abu Dhabi since October and has been capable of producing 500 to 800 liters of clean water a day from the dry desert air. Eole Water says that volume can increase to 1,000 liters a day with a tower-top system. The system requires wind speeds of 15 miles per hour or higher to produce water.

This technology uses a simple process that has been experimented with in a variety of designs, but this is the first powered by a wind turbine. That component makes it able to produce large quantities of clean water in areas that don't have ready access to it without requiring grid power, which makes it especially promising for remote communities and disaster areas. Eole has already landed 12 industrial partners for manufacturing the turbines.

DIY Drug Stores Coming Your Way..BeSpoke Health Care

From: Physorg

Provided by- GLA

A new 3D printing process developed at the University of Glasgow could revolutionise the way scientists, doctors and even the general public create chemical products.


Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry at the University, believes his research could lead to the development of home chemical fabricators which consumers could use to design and create medicine at home.


A new research paper, published in the journal Nature Chemistry today, outlines how the process has been proven to work. Using a commercially-available 3D printer operated by open-source computer-aided design software, Professor Cronin and his team have built what they call ‘reactionware’, special vessels for chemical reactions which are made from a polymer gel which sets at room temperature.


By adding other chemicals to the gel deposited by the printer, the team have been able to make the vessel itself part of the reaction process. While this is common in large-scale chemical engineering, the development of reactionware makes it possible for the first time for custom vessels to be fabricated on a laboratory scale.


Professor Cronin said: “It’s long been possible to have lab materials custom-made to include windows or electrodes, for example, but it’s been expensive and time-consuming. We can fabricate these reactionware vessels using a 3D printer in a relatively short time. Even the most complicated vessels we’ve built have only take a few hours.


“By making the vessel itself part of the reaction process, the distinction between the reactor and the reaction becomes very hazy. It’s a new way for chemists to think, and it gives us very specific control over reactions because we can continually refine the design of our vessels as required.


“For example, our initial reactionware designs allowed us to synthesize three previously unreported compounds and dictate the outcome of a fourth reaction solely by altering the chemical composition of the reactor.”


Although the technology they are developing is still at an early stage, the team, comprised of researchers from the University’s School of Chemistry and School of Physics and Astronomy, is also considering the long-term implications of developments in 3D printing technology.


Professor Cronin added: “3D printers are becoming increasingly common and affordable. It’s entirely possible that, in the future, we could see chemical engineering technology which is prohibitively expensive today filter down to laboratories and small commercial enterprises.


“Even more importantly, we could use 3D printers to revolutionise access to healthcare in the developing world, allowing diagnosis and treatment to happen in a much more efficient and economical way than is possible now.


“We could even see 3D printers reach into homes and become fabricators of domestic items, including medications. Perhaps with the introduction of carefully-controlled software ‘apps’, similar to the ones available from Apple, we could see consumers have access to a personal drug designer they could use at home to create the medication they need.”






see also:

             

                    3D Printers: Dawn Of Personalized Medical Care

Timbuktu Chronicles: Hydroponics production in Mauritius

Timbuktu Chronicles: Hydroponics production in Mauritius: From Nawsheen's world : Sweet Pepper grown under hydroponics culture in a Greenhouse Presently, most of the crops produced in Mauriti...

Morse Code- Based Texting For Deaf Phone Users

From: SciDev


by-Lucar Laursen


Indian designer develops Morse-based texting for deaf phone users


An Indian graduate student has development a mobile phone application that enables people with sight and hearing impairments to send and receive text messages.


The PocketSMS application was developed for Android smartphones, which are generally cheaper than Apple's iPhones. The application converts text into Morse code vibrations so that users can "feel" the message.


Regular mobile phones already use vibrations to alert users to incoming calls or messages. Anmol Anand, a graduate student at the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University in Delhi, realised that the same vibrations could also convey text message content.


He used the open source Google App Inventor to write a new application to covert each letter in a text message into Morse code — in which each letter corresponds to a set of a short and long tones — and then used the phone's hardware to vibrate for each letter.


An accompanying application, MorseTrainer, has been designed to teach deaf-blind users Morse code, and to use it without having to rely on smartphone keyboards, which can be difficult to see.

Text messaging is growing in importance as a tool for safety and social inclusion. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo late last year, for instance, a group of deaf users protested for their safety late last year when the government shut down text messaging services, the BBC reported.


In Uganda, the National Association of the Deaf is working on a project in which hearing students and deaf students learn how to send text messages together.


"We saw that deaf kids were not integrating," said education consultant Sacha DeVelle, who was volunteering in Kabale with the charity Cambridge to Africa.


When teachers began showing pairs of hearing and deaf students how to send text messages, deaf children became far more integrated into the school community. "It encourages them to go on and do what they want to do, [for example] go to university or set up a shop," DeVelle said.


Anand's collaborator, Arun Mehta — president of the Bidirectional Access Promotion Society (BAPSI) — said that internet access is just as important for the disabled as everyone else.


He said that the introduction of text-to-speech screen reading software had meant that "the gap between the sighted and the blind has shrunk dramatically. We would like to do that for the deaf-blind too."


Inclusive technology can help disabled people take part in everyday life, said Mohamed Jemni, a computer scientist at the School of Science and Technology in Tunisia.


Jemni says he is now  testing an application to turn text messages into animated avatars which "sign" the message visually. He said the underlying software could be customised to suit national sign languages in use around the world.


see also: Rice Farmers App

"MineSweeper"

From: Future Of Tech 


by- Neal Ungerleider


Piano inspires 17-year-old to invent land-mine detector


17-year-old Marian Bechtel might live in Pennsylvania, where land mines are not a common occurrence, but she has still managed to invent the prototype for a brand-new minesweeper.


The device, which cost far lower than current technology, uses sound waves to figure out where the deadly devices are. The combination of sensitive microphones and a seismic vibrator connected to a standard metal detector was tested, successfully, on mock plastic and metal land mines. It was a finalist in the recently concluded 2012 Intel Science Talent Search.


"My parents are both geologists," she says. "Years ago they got connected with an international group of scientists working on a project called RASCAN, developing a holographic radar device for detecting land mines. During the summer before eighth grade, I met all of these scientists and talked with them about their work and the land mine issue.
I was really touched and inspired by what they had to say, and wanted to get involved in science and possibly land mine detection."


Where does a 17-year-old find inspiration for life-saving innovation? In her music practice:


"I noticed that when I played certain chords or notes on the piano, the strings on a nearby banjo would resonate," says Bechtel. "I heard this, and it was almost like the story of the apple falling on Newton’s head -- I thought that maybe I could use the same principle to find landmines. So, I began doing research and talking with scientists in humanitarian de-mining and acoustics; three years later I had built a prototype."


Sean Sennott of the FDW Corp. and Lorenzo Capineri of the University of Florence also provided assistance. In addition, Bechtel was the recipient of a fellowship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development; the video clip below contains an interview of her with inventor Dean Kamen.


The winners of the Intel Science Talent Search, who were named on March 13, also include Nithin Tumma of Michigan, who won $100,000 for his research into breast cancer treatments, and Andrey Sushko of Washington state, who won $75,000 for developing a tiny motor for use in microrobotics. Other winners included projects on microscopic worms, Cherednik algebras, and the use of non-speech patterns of sound to convey information.