A year since I posted--bad bad blogger

Sorry--I have been consumed with weirdness, not the least of which is our, shall we say, unconventional president.

Anyhow, recently I got in a confab on Linked In with Allen Gannett, author of a new book called THE CREATIVE CURVE. I understand it's great, but since I lost sight in my right eye (stupid doctor tricks), I rely on audios and have not listened to it.

But Allan and a guest recently got involved in a back-and-forth about whether everyone is creative.

I used to teach a 6-part course on Creativity at Smithsonian Resident Associates back in the day. Then, I subscribed to the idea that was going around that 10% of people are "creative." I would then say most people enter the creative process as appreciators, although some seek training in how to be more creative (thus my course and Allen's book).

What do you think of this?

Allen and I got in a discussion of what creativity and "being" creative means...I say it means people who can't NOT do so-called creative things--they MUST write, they are driven to draw or paint, etc. They are wired to crave this.

I do think people can be taught to think about creativity in more detail and look at things "out of the box," to use the cliche du jour. Creativity can be expressed as doing old things a new way, never-done-before things any old way, combining ways of doing things between disciplines...and many other approaches. For instance, people can learn to draw the space between objects, and not the objects themselves--and if they do it accurately, the objects appear.

What is your take? You don't have to agree with me--I may not even agree with me any more,

Printing a house

Credit: New Story/.ICON/youtube

ICON has figured out how to 3D print a small house in under 24 hours--800 square feet--a nice porch.

Cost now about $10,000--but they are going to bring it down to $4,000 as soon as they can.

Target at the moment is the third world, but these don't look bad for Americans in the tiny home range.

I lived in a 600 square foot apt with another person--and loved it.

Pick up your "beach read" at the beach

Some people are just all about the pages, not the electrons. In Varna, Bulgaria, a team of architects built an open-air library on the beach.

The Rapana Library looks a little like a seashell and shelves more than a thousand books. It also has a small stage.

The designers went through 20 models and the final contains 240 pieces of wood.

Varna is not the only city to come up with some spiffy public spaces. In Indonesia, a little library has been built out of 2,000 ice cream buckets. That's some sweet space!

I have a question on the Varna "seashell" library--what about moisture, rain even, wind? Books, as I recall, are made of paper.

Tip of the hat--to life

The Ford Motor Company has invented the SafeCap, which will alert drivers to their drowsiness.

The cap is aimed at truck drivers, but could be used by anyone.

They mapped the typical head, neck and shoulder movements of drivers and equipped the cap with a gyroscope and accelerimeter to detect atypical movements indicating sleepiness.

When these are detected, a sound is emitted--followed by light and vibration.

By heading off accidents due to the driver nodding off, the company hopes to reduce deaths and  injuries.

Look for this in 2018.

Bone screws made of--bone!

Since the 19th century, surgeons have been using metal screws and plates to hold broken bones until they could fuse and heal.

However, titanium or steel screws can cause problems--such as infections--and sometimes need to be removed, meaning a second operation.

Now, engineers at the Graz University of Technology have teamed up with a startup called Surgebright to make these screws of human bone.

Called Shark Screws, these are made from donated bone--typed to match the recipient to prevent rejection.

A year after surgery, they don't even show up on x-ray--they are part of the patient's bone.

Surgebright was created in 2016 with the German Institute of Tissue and Cell Replacement.

Other surgical innovations to watch for? Tissue scaffolds and a smart needle to be used in brain surgery.

Can you think of others?

For more info, go to http:/www.tugraz.at,

This building builds itself

What if you need a decent-sized building someplace in 10 minutes? Call Ten Fold Engineering, a UK-based company (www.tenfoldengineering.com).

Each structure is 689 square feet of space. It can be transported to any site (no foundation needed) by truck.

All you need to set it up is a battery-powered, hand-held drill.

The building, you see, unfurls itself using a low-tech, counter-balanced folding assembly.

The units can be stack on each other or on sloped or uneven ground.

Use them for clinics, beach houses, offices, shops, anything.

Time to move on? They furl back together.

The company even combined some to make a 40-bedroom hotel for a festival.

What do these cost? The company's website promises more info on cost this month.

Oh--and you can see some cool depictions of the buildings unfolding.

Capturing your steps as energy

People walk around public spaces--a lot. A group of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers have develop an inexpensive way to convert footsteps to electricity.

Their brainstorm involves using wood pulp and nanofibers in the flooring.

This does not involve the sun having to be out and could work well in high-traffic places  like stadiums or a mall, according to On Wisconsin magazine.

Associate professor Xudong Wang is planning to build a prototype in a high-profile spot on campus...and from there, who knows.

Actually, this is not a new idea...It's being developed elsewhere as well--including England.
Google  Laurence Kemball-Cook, for example. That's him in the picture.

People walk--why let that go to waste? 

Meet Mr. Trash Wheel

That's it--Mr Trash Wheel

I used to love to go to Baltimore's Inner Harbor and poke around, back when I lived in DC.

Anyhow, I read on AwesomeOcean,org, that Baltimore now has a water wheel that sits at the mouth of the Jones Fall River and removes massive amounts of garbage from the water.

Since 2014, Mr Trash Wheel (the name could have used work) has removed over a million pounds of debris from the Inner Harbor.

That comes to 8.9 million cigarette butts, half a million potato chip bags, bottles, and you name it.  and probably things you would not want to name.

It can scoop up 50,000 pounds of trash a day---which is then sent to an incinerator to power Maryland homes.

If the river current does not deliver up enough stuff, it also has solar panels to power it.

A second one is now in the planning stages and money is being raised.

Could work in a lot of situations, right?

CloudFisher grabs water from fog

Some areas of the world are short on water, but long on fog.

For them, a partnership between Morocco's Dar Si Hmad, a nonprofit, and Germany's The Water Foundation and Aqualonis, called CloudFisher, distills water from fog.

Located in the Atlas Mountains, CloudFisher's huge nets gather up the fog and funnel water into storage tanks, where it is pumped to homes.

The big nets can withstand winds of up t0 120 mph.

Women and children, who foemer spent many horus a day gathering water, now have time for other things.

Cultures are also preserved because tribes and populations do not have to move elsewhere to find water.

The project has been so successful, it has spawned a school and an observatory.

Similar projects gather tiny amounts of rain for cooking, and that water is also used to cool homes.

Cool, huh?

Robot bees

What do you think? More work? (This is the Polish B-Droid.)

Isn't there an old axiom in the aviation industry that a big fuzzy bumblebee is so aerodynamically ill-designed it should not be able to fly? Yet it does.

This came to mind when I read about some mechanical pollinators being developed in Poland and at Harvard--the possible answer, temporary or permanent, to the declining population of honey bees.

Honey bees, wild and domestic, take care of  80% of the world's pollination.  This includes seventy of the top 100 human food crops. No bees, no food--or at least that could happen.

In the US, honey bees have declined from 6 million hives in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2008. That's 60% fewer hives. The cause is called Colony Collapse Disorder.

Now, after four years of work, scientists at the Warsaw University of Technology invented the B-Droid.

A tiny quadcopter, the B-Droid uses onboard cameras and an external computer to plan a flight path over a field.

Dina Spector, writing in the Business Insider (July 7, 2014),  also wrote about a small mechanical pollinator called RoboBees. When tethered to a power supply, they can lift off and hover mid-air using robot wings that flap 120 times a second.

As soon as 10 years from now, the Harvard people say,  RoboBees may be able to fly on their own and communicate like real bees (who use dancing movements to signal great pollinating).

One plus--the RoboBees do not eat and do not need to bring nectar back to the hive. They just pollinate.

But 10 years? Like the larger bumblebee, these seem heavy and clumsy--but they said that one couldn't do the job either--and it does.

Jackpot available for good educational simulation ideas

It's called the EdSim Challenge, a $680,000 contest in search of ways to use simulation in the classroom.

 VR and augmented reality are welcomed. Finalists could get $50,000 to build a prototype. 

The grand prize winner stands to get $430,000. 

Concept proposals are due by next Jan 17, 2017.

http://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2016/11/education-dept-seeks-vitrual-reality-video-game-devs-next-gen-tech/132915/?oref=govexec_today_nl 

Wow--a new take on an old favorite

I was going to say this is like vertical pinball and YOU are the pinball--but does anyone know what pinball is anymore?

Time Trial is an interactive video rock climbing wall. You can try it in Brooklyn at Brooklyn Boulders Sommerville twice a month.

To wit:

Look out, border collies--here comes Swagbot

Does it give kisses?

Even dogs may soon lose their jobs to a robot.

Writing in Nextgov, July 28, 2016, Mike Murphy says according to Smithsonian Magazine, researchers at the University of Sydney and the Australian Centre for Field Robots are working on a new robot that can:

--Monitor and herd farm animals

--Keep an eye on crops

--And do this off on its own, no human required.

The device wanders around the outback autonomously, picking up tree trunks like toothpicks and sending back messages on sick animals, among other services.

The things also work with drones watching the farm from on high. The drone can spot obstacles and help the Swagbot putter over to a trouble spot safely.

I wonder if this spidery, clunky thing appearing out of nowhere might frighten animals, cut milk production, run over things, I don't know...Seems a little ominous.

Yes, just call me a Luddite. Plus--I am standing up for the dogs!

Electricity-free "air conditioner" you can build

From Bangladesh come clever air coolers called Eco-Coolers invented by Ashis Paul, a creative supervisor at the ad company called the Grey Group.

You saw off the bottoms of liter soda bottles and insert the remaining neck  in a board, which is then placed "big side out" in a window.

With the wider part facing outside, hot air is drawn into the funnel created. Air pressure changes as the air passes through the neck into the room and cooled air is released. This can cool a room by five degrees Celsius in a short amount of time.

Maybe this wouldn't be "cool" in Phoenix, but it sure makes a difference in some countries where electricity is not available or is on and off.

For blueprints, check out www.grey.com.

Edible six-pack rings delight sea creatures

http://growlermag.com/mill-florida-brewery-
creates-edible-six-pack-rings-to-protect-
marine-wildlife/

You've seen the awful pictures--deformed turtles that grew with a six-pack ring around the middle, or plastic taken from the stomachs of dead water creatures.

Thousands of birds, fish, and turtles ingest plastic waste that ends up in the ocean by the thousands of tons.

Now, Saltwater Brewery in Delray Beach, FL, has invented a biodegradable six-pack ring that can be EATEN by animals or even humans.

No poisonous after effects, no years-long entrapment.

The rings are made of wheat and barley byproducts of the beer brewing process. They are also compostable on land.

Hungry? People can even eat them--although they are not really a gourmet snack.

Since the rings are more expensive than the plastic ones, the inventors are hoping demand will increase and other brewers will use these, and thus the positive impact will justify the cost.

Hear that, Budweiser? The ocean you save may be ours.

Transparent wood--wow

Researchers at the University of Maryland have made a block of linden wood transparent.

They say eventually this will be useful as building material and in light-based electronics.

Basically, they removed the molecule called lignin, which makes wood rigid and dark in color. This left the colorless cellulose structures--which they then filled with epoxy.

You can check out the journal Advanced Materials for more details.

The results were a "wood" that is mostly see-thru and has a high haze (scattering light), which makes it comfortable to look at.

This material could help solar cells trap light. The light would come in because it was transparent, but the high haze would keep the light bouncing around until it was absorbed by the solar panel.

Right now, the blocks of wood they are working with are 4 inches wide--but they say the process is scalable.

They are looking at five years to getting this to the market for use.

Solid wood windows...what will they think up next? Stay tuned.

SLAC's X-ray laser--a little-known advance equal to moon shot?

According to some, the future of science--spawning the electronics, medications, and energy solutions we will need--comes from being able to see atoms and molecules at work.

For that, you need a special light--such as an X-ray light with a wavelength as small as an atom, pulsing at the rate of femtoseconds. A femtosecond is to s second what a second is to 32 million years. In other words--fast.

Six years ago, the Dept of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Lab answered the call of the scientific community and built an X-ray-free electronic laser--the XFEL.

Since 2009, this powerful "microscope" has generated molecular "movies," gotten a glimpse of a chemical bond, traced electrons moving through materials, and made 3-D pictures of proteins leading to drug discoveries.

Such machines have now proliferated all over the world. Check out the March issue of Reviews of Modern Physics for an overview of the first five years of progress.

Some high spots:

Next-gen computers and the power grid.  The Linac Coherent Light Source or  LCLS, as it's called, is homing in on new computer components surpassing old limits on what computers can do.

Better, cleaner fuels and chemicals. Using this technology, scientists can now measure never-seen-before steps in chemical reactions, helping them design better fuels, fertilizers and industrial chemicals.

More effective meds with fewer side effects. Half of all medications on the market target receptor proteins on the outer layers of cells--we can now see how the meds dock on the cells. The LCLS technology allows smaller crystals to be examined as well as crystals too easily damaged by conventional X-rays.

Renewable energy that mimics nature. LCLS has allowed us to see how plants use energy from sunlight (photosynthesis), It can measure steps in the process not seen before.

Fusion reactions and seeing inside planets. High-power laser systems heat matter to millions of degrees and crush it with billions of tons of pressure. This allows scientists to see test resilience of materials and to see conditions as they might be at the heart of planets, which may lead to learning how solar systems form.

Located in Menlo Park, Calif, the DOE's SLAC lab attracts hundreds of scientists from around the globe.

This is an example of a US Govt basic research "challenge" that will be worth every penny spent.

For more info, go to http://science.energy. gov or http://slac.stanford.edu.

Adidas project highlights sports creativity

"I'm Here to Create" are films of Adidas' Sport16 Initiative.

The films feature female athletes--showing how they bring their own definitions of creativity to sports.

<--- EXAMPLE: French runner Julie Aubert. https://youtu.be/244vlGAQGbY. At 24, Julie began running through the streets of Paris, eventually getting her friends in on it. She created Mademoiselle Run, a digital tribe for women into running.

EXAMPLE: US Soccer star Morgan Brian. https://youtu-be/OTNbVxh-FZM. Morgan was essential to the US Women's Soccer Team's 2015 World Cup Victory. She's young--22--and doesn't let being on the stage with the top players get to her..she just has fun.

EXAMPLE: Brazilian volleyball champ Jaqueline Carvalho. https//youtu.be/mfF-bYmMoEU. Jaqueline led her team to double Oly gold in 2008 and 2012. She plays with reckless abandon, which has resulted in countless injuries and long periods of rehab.

EXAMPLE: Skater Julia Lipnitskaya. https://youtu.be/EDJHt79YUE8. In 2014, Julia led Team Russia to the top in the Sochi Olympics, making her the youngest Russian Gold Medal winner ever. She is still just 17.

"I'm Here to Create" airs in more than 50 countries and will be seen at the Oscars, as it was at the GRAMMYs.

Putting it all together in sports may not be what first comes to mind in terms of creativity, but it does require creative drive and talent.

Creative, creative--too much of a great thing?

I have not posted for more than a month...Why? Because there is too much creativity going around. It's like trying to drink out of a fire hose...


Or is it really creativity? Sometimes I see stories and programs dubbed with the Creativity description just because they are different than what the organization did before...so they got "creative."

People jump "out of the box," "get told to stay in the box," "make a new kind of box," or think up weird whimsical products that really address no real need or impulse. Examples: A gizmo to give the bike lane a green light faster when it rains...or a little rocker you can stand on at your standing desk...Both of these sound dangerous. How about those flaming Hoverboards, too?

Creativity--to me, anyhow--means conjuring something out of nothing, or destroying something harmful and putting something helpful in its place. Or maybe something just intriguing or beautiful.

The Apple watch--people had a watch to tell time. They had a phone to access the internet. The buttons were teeny...Not a huge seller...

All this wearable technology...Do you want your clothes buzzing you or bossing you around?

I saw a device the other day that will analyze what you put in a cup...The cup does it. Someone said, "So you're holding a beer, you put it in the cup and it says, 'This is beer'? So what."

So as we drag ourselves into the largely random world of news and discoveries and inventions to start another year...We need to look for the truly creative. The truly new. Or the truly new way of doing something truly old.

Calling botanists and farmers

Watermelons with white inner
rinds (top--lower right)?

According to a story by John Allen in On Wisconsin, the alumni mag of the Univ of Wisc, horticultural professor James Niehuis, PhD, uses paintings to show how fruits and veggies have changed over the centuries. Check out the watermelons in Giovanni Stanchi's painting.

He and his students in his World Vegetable Crops class go a a nearby museum to look a Renaissance still lifes to see how carious aspects of plants have been bred in or out over the centuries.

With grains, he says, archeologists can look at actual samples--but the more moist plants don't last.

He calls fruits and vegetables "art you can eat."

Hmmm...What else could we tell from paintings? Maybe that people are taller now. Breeds of dogs we don't have now? Certainly trends in fashion. Weapons?