Israeli archeologists use models based on their find to spin flax into yarn, indicating these pebbles were used as a version of a spinning wheel.

From winning their middle school invention contest to triumphing in the Regional Invention Contest, Mia and Madison journey with their product to the global market is a testament to their exceptional talent!

Winning Inventionland Education's Invention Contest Catapults Students to Licensing Agreement and International Rollout.

Inventionland® Education has introduced Bright Ideaz™ light panels to enhance classroom environments quickly, affordably, and creatively. These LED dry-erase panels, often integrated into Inventionland's Innovation Labs®, are designed to make classrooms visually stimulating and foster an inspiring atmosphere for students and teachers.

Do you consider yourself to be intelligent and creative? If so then you might be an ideal candidate to offer your services to Dr. Charles Michaelson as he explores the world of Innovatrix. The chance to take part in this opportunity comes in the form of Maze of Realities – Symphony of Invention, a game developed by Domini Games.

A draft document with "ambitions" for Swindon town centre is being put to the council.

The essence of plumbing is its mechanical genius.

The nature of plumbing is such that its most clever innovations usually are obscure to the public eye.

People take for granted devices such as the T&P valve, kitchen disposal, flush toilet and so many of our industry's other useful gadgets that have made lives safer, healthier, more comfortable and convenient.

IP.com's InnovationQ Plus business intelligence platform provides comprehensive analysis and deep insights enabling critical decision making around patenting, publishing, and competitive intelligence.

Mr. Peter Holman is lauded for his work as an inventor, subject matter expert, physical therapist, and certified strength and conditioning specialist

Introducing the "Golf Udder Bottle," a game-changing all-in-one portable cleaning kit that has transformed golf equipment maintenance. This groundbreaking invention combines unmatched convenience, enhanced performance, and exceptional functionality.

The universally used Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption can now be dramatically upgraded and customized by a patented technology called the Finite Lab-Transform (FLT).

The universally used Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption can now be dramatically upgraded and customized by a patented technology called the Finite Lab-Transform (FLT)

Original Sponge Scrapers is the only cleaning product on the market that combines: a soft sponge for washing, a scratch-free abrasive pad for scrubbing, and a built-in stiff plastic scraper for scraping without scratching!

My Cool Inventions Radio Show is looking for the next 100 million dollar product. Television hosts Akos Jankura "The Solutionist" and John Cremeans "The Doctor of Shopology" are taking submissions of inventor's ideas.

Inventor says artificial intelligence enables unique new paper thin shape sensors, softer robots, and using thinner stronger metals to reduce vehicle weight and climate change.

Italian-American scientist Dario Crosetto expresses his gratitude to the 2024 IEEE-NSS-MIC-RTSD General Chair and NSS Chairs for supporting Transparency in Science and calls for other scientific institutions to join them

A Light Breeze Generates Electricity With New Invention hsauer Mon, 11/21/2022 - 14:08

Darius Rucker has reached the top of the music charts in not just one but two genres: first as the lead singer of the 1990s band Hootie and the Blowfish, then in a second act as a solo country star. He shares lessons on following your passion, staying humble, working your way up, and defying stereotypes and expectations. He's the author of a new memoir Life's Too Short.

Change is hard. Transitions can be tough. But they're also opportunities to discover and reimagine what you thought you knew. In her first episode, Manoush Zomorodi explores the power of reinvention. Guests include OK Go lead singer Damian Kulash Jr., former college gymnastics coach Valorie Kondos Field, Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, and entrepreneur Nick Hanauer.

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Change is hard, but it's also an opportunity to discover and reimagine what you thought you knew. From our economy, to music, to even ourselves—this hour TED speakers explore the power of reinvention. Guests include OK Go lead singer Damian Kulash Jr., former college gymnastics coach Valorie Kondos Field, Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, and entrepreneur Nick Hanauer.

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Sensibo produces smart heating and cooling devices and IAQ monitoring products, allowing users to control their heating and cooling equipment with artificial intelligence, data, and sensors, while taking advantage of air quality data to optimize equipment use and reduce energy consumption.

The Cruz Cool cooler is made of a home-compostable polymer rather than Styrofoam, which takes over 500 years to decompose.

NanoTech Materials Inc.’s Insulative Ceramic Particle technology has been named to TIME magazine’s Best Inventions of 2024. 

Santa Clara County fraudster Dennis Fountaine fled sentencing last month. Fountaine was convicted of three felony counts of grand theft by fraud. He also admitted to the aggravated white-collar enhancement for defrauding four victims of over $350,000.

There has always been room in jazz for those creative minds who can bridge the gap between the heart of tradition and the leading edge of change. In the world of saxophonists, Thomas Chapin, Arthur Blythe, Julius Hemphill or David Murray easily come to mind... [ read more ]

The early polygraph machine was considered the most scientific way to detect deception—but that was a myth

‘RAD’ Design Delivers Higher Snow Machine Performance

Administrative innovations in south-west Asia during the 4th millennium BCE, including the cylinder seals that were rolled on the earliest clay tablets, laid the foundations for proto-cuneiform script.

The post Study: Cylinder Seals and Sealing Practices Stimulated Invention of Writing in Ancient South-West Asia appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Every invention begins with a problem—and the creative act of seeing a problem where others might just see unchangeable reality. For one 5-year-old, the problem was simple: She liked to have her tummy rubbed as she fell asleep. But her mom, exhausted from working two jobs, often fell asleep herself while putting her daughter to bed. “So [the girl] invented a teddy bear that would rub her belly for her,” explains Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson MIT Program. Its mission is to nurture the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs.

Anyone can learn to be an inventor, Couch says, given the right resources and encouragement. “Invention doesn’t come from some innate genius, it’s not something that only really special people get to do,” she says. Her program creates invention-themed curricula for U.S. classrooms, ranging from kindergarten to community college.

We’re biased, but we hope that little girl grows up to be an engineer. By the time she comes of age, the act of invention may be something entirely new—reflecting the adoption of novel tools and the guiding forces of new social structures. Engineers, with their restless curiosity and determination to optimize the world around them, are continuously in the process of reinventing invention.

In this special issue, we bring you stories of people who are in the thick of that reinvention today. IEEE Spectrum is marking 60 years of publication this year, and we’re celebrating by highlighting both the creative act and the grindingly hard engineering work required to turn an idea into something world changing. In these pages, we take you behind the scenes of some awe-inspiring projects to reveal how technology is being made—and remade—in our time.

Inventors Are Everywhere

Invention has long been a democratic process. The economist B. Zorina Khan of Bowdoin College has noted that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has always endeavored to allow essentially anyone to try their hand at invention. From the beginning, the patent examiners didn’t care who the applicants were—anyone with a novel and useful idea who could pay the filing fee was officially an inventor.

This ethos continues today. It’s still possible for an individual to launch a tech startup from a garage or go on “Shark Tank” to score investors. The Swedish inventor Simone Giertz, for example, made a name for herself with YouTube videos showing off her hilariously bizarre contraptions, like an alarm clock with an arm that slapped her awake. The MIT innovation scholar Eric von Hippel has spotlighted today’s vital ecosystem of “user innovation,” in which inventors such as Giertz are motivated by their own needs and desires rather than ambitions of mass manufacturing.

But that route to invention gets you only so far, and the limits of what an individual can achieve have become starker over time. To tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity today, inventors need a deep-pocketed government sponsor or corporate largess to muster the equipment and collective human brainpower required.

When we think about the challenges of scaling up, it’s helpful to remember Alexander Graham Bell and his collaborator Thomas Watson. “They invent this cool thing that allows them to talk between two rooms—so it’s a neat invention, but it’s basically a gadget,” says Eric Hintz, a historian of invention at the Smithsonian Institution. “To go from that to a transcontinental long-distance telephone system, they needed a lot more innovation on top of the original invention.” To scale their invention, Hintz says, Bell and his colleagues built the infrastructure that eventually evolved into Bell Labs, which became the standard-bearer for corporate R&D.

In this issue, we see engineers grappling with challenges of scale in modern problems. Consider the semiconductor technology supported by the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, a policy initiative aimed at bolstering domestic chip production. Beyond funding manufacturing, it also provides US $11 billion for R&D, including three national centers where companies can test and pilot new technologies. As one startup tells the tale, this infrastructure will drastically speed up the lab-to-fab process.

And then there are atomic clocks, the epitome of precision timekeeping. When researchers decided to build a commercial version, they had to shift their perspective, taking a sprawling laboratory setup and reimagining it as a portable unit fit for mass production and the rigors of the real world. They had to stop optimizing for precision and instead choose the most robust laser, and the atom that would go along with it.

These technology efforts benefit from infrastructure, brainpower, and cutting-edge new tools. One tool that may become ubiquitous across industries is artificial intelligence—and it’s a tool that could further expand access to the invention arena.

What if you had a team of indefatigable assistants at your disposal, ready to scour the world’s technical literature for material that could spark an idea, or to iterate on a concept 100 times before breakfast? That’s the promise of today’s generative AI. The Swiss company Iprova is exploring whether its AI tools can automate “eureka” moments for its clients, corporations that are looking to beat their competitors to the next big idea. The serial entrepreneur Steve Blank similarly advises young startup founders to embrace AI’s potential to accelerate product development; he even imagines testing product ideas on digital twins of customers. Although it’s still early days, generative AI offers inventors tools that have never been available before.

Measuring an Invention’s Impact

If AI accelerates the discovery process, and many more patentable ideas come to light as a result, then what? As it is, more than a million patents are granted every year, and we struggle to identify the ones that will make a lasting impact. Bryan Kelly, an economist at the Yale School of Management, and his collaborators made an attempt to quantify the impact of patents by doing a technology-assisted deep dive into U.S. patent records dating back to 1840. Using natural language processing, they identified patents that introduced novel phrasing that was then repeated in subsequent patents—an indicator of radical breakthroughs. For example, Elias Howe Jr.’s 1846 patent for a sewing machine wasn’t closely related to anything that came before but quickly became the basis of future sewing-machine patents.

Another foundational patent was the one awarded to an English bricklayer in 1824 for the invention of Portland cement, which is still the key ingredient in most of the world’s concrete. As Ted C. Fishman describes in his fascinating inquiry into the state of concrete today, this seemingly stable industry is in upheaval because of its heavy carbon emissions. The AI boom is fueling a construction boom in data centers, and all those buildings require billions of tons of concrete. Fishman takes readers into labs and startups where researchers are experimenting with climate-friendly formulations of cement and concrete. Who knows which of those experiments will result in a patent that echoes down the ages?

Some engineers start their invention process by thinking about the impact they want to make on the world. The eminent Indian technologist Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, who has popularized the idea of “Gandhian engineering”, advises inventors to work backward from “what we want to achieve for the betterment of humanity,” and to create problem-solving technologies that are affordable, durable, and not only for the elite.

Durability matters: Invention isn’t just about creating something brand new. It’s also about coming up with clever ways to keep an existing thing going. Such is the case with the Hubble Space Telescope. Originally designed to last 15 years, it’s been in orbit for twice that long and has actually gotten better with age, because engineers designed the satellite to be fixable and upgradable in space.

For all the invention activity around the globe—the World Intellectual Property Organization says that 3.5 million applications for patents were filed in 2022—it may be harder to invent something useful than it used to be. Not because “everything that can be invented has been invented,” as in the apocryphal quote attributed to the unfortunate head of the U.S. patent office in 1889. Rather, because so much education and experience are required before an inventor can even understand all the dimensions of the door they’re trying to crack open, much less come up with a strategy for doing so. Ben Jones, an economist at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, has shown that the average age of great technological innovators rose by about six years over the course of the 20th century. “Great innovation is less and less the provenance of the young,” Jones concluded.

Consider designing something as complex as a nuclear fusion reactor, as Tom Clynes describes in “An Off-the-Shelf Stellarator.” Fusion researchers have spent decades trying to crack the code of commercially viable fusion—it’s more akin to a calling than a career. If they succeed, they will unlock essentially limitless clean energy with no greenhouse gas emissions or meltdown danger. That’s the dream that the physicists in a lab in Princeton, N.J., are chasing. But before they even started, they first had to gain an intimate understanding of all the wrong ways to build a fusion reactor. Once the team was ready to proceed, what they created was an experimental reactor that accelerates the design-build-test cycle. With new AI tools and unprecedented computational power, they’re now searching for the best ways to create the magnetic fields that will confine the plasma within the reactor. Already, two startups have spun out of the Princeton lab, both seeking a path to commercial fusion.

The stellarator story and many other articles in this issue showcase how one innovation leads to the next, and how one invention can enable many more. The legendary Dean Kamen, best known for mechanical devices like the Segway and the prosthetic “Luke” arm, is now trying to push forward the squishy world of biological manufacturing. In an interview, Kamen explains how his nonprofit is working on the infrastructure—bioreactors, sensors, and controls—that will enable companies to explore the possibilities of growing replacement organs. You could say that he’s inventing the launchpad so others can invent the rockets.

Sometimes everyone in a research field knows where the breakthrough is needed, but that doesn’t make it any easier to achieve. Case in point: the quest for a household humanoid robot that can perform domestic chores, switching effortlessly from frying an egg to folding laundry. Roboticists need better learning software that will enable their bots to navigate the uncertainties of the real world, and they also need cheaper and lighter actuators. Major advances in these two areas would unleash a torrent of creativity and may finally bring robot butlers into our homes.

And maybe the future roboticists who make those breakthroughs will have cause to thank Marina Umaschi Bers, a technologist at Boston College who cocreated the ScratchJr programming language and the KIBO robotics kit to teach kids the basics of coding and robotics in entertaining ways. She sees engineering as a playground, a place for children to explore and create, to be goofy or grandiose. If today’s kindergartners learn to think of themselves as inventors, who knows what they’ll create tomorrow?

Manu Prakash spoke with IEEE Spectrum shortly after returning to Stanford University from a month aboard a research vessel off the coast of California, where he was testing tools to monitor oceanic carbon sequestration. The associate professor conducts fieldwork around the world to better understand the problems he’s working on, as well as the communities that will be using his inventions.

Prakash develops imaging instruments and diagnostic tools, often for use in global health and environmental sciences. His devices typically cost radically less than conventional equipment—he aims for reductions of two or more orders of magnitude. Whether he’s working on pocketable microscopes, mosquito or plankton monitors, or an autonomous malaria diagnostic platform, Prakash always includes cost and access as key aspects of his engineering. He calls this philosophy “frugal science.”

Why should we think about science frugally?

Manu Prakash: To me, when we are trying to ask and solve problems and puzzles, it becomes important: In whose hands are we putting these solutions? A frugal approach to solving the problem is the difference between 1 percent of the population or billions of people having access to that solution.

Lack of access creates these kinds of barriers in people’s minds, where they think they can or cannot approach a kind of problem. It’s important that we as scientists or just citizens of this world create an environment that feels that anybody has a chance to make important inventions and discoveries if they put their heart to it. The entrance to all that is dependent on tools, but those tools are just inaccessible.

How did you first encounter the idea of “frugal science”?

Prakash: I grew up in India and lived with very little access to things. And I got my Ph.D. at MIT. I was thinking about this stark difference in worlds that I had seen and lived in, so when I started my lab, it was almost a commitment to [asking]: What does it mean when we make access one of the critical dimensions of exploration? So, I think a lot of the work I do is primarily driven by curiosity, but access brings another layer of intellectual curiosity.

How do you identify a problem that might benefit from frugal science?

Prakash: Frankly, it’s hard to find a problem that would not benefit from access. The question to ask is “Where are the neglected problems that we as a society have failed to tackle?” We do a lot of work in diagnostics. A lot [of our solutions] beat the conventional methods that are neither cost effective nor any good. It’s not about cutting corners; it’s about deeply understanding the problem—better solutions at a fraction of the cost. It does require invention. For that order of magnitude change, you really have to start fresh.

Where does your involvement with an invention end?

Prakash: Inventions are part of our soul. Your involvement never ends. I just designed the 415th version of Foldscope [a low-cost “origami” microscope]. People only know it as version 3. We created Foldscope a long time ago; then I realized that nobody was going to provide access to it. So we went back and invented the manufacturing process for Foldscope to scale it. We made the first 100,000 Foldscopes in the lab, which led to millions of Foldscopes being deployed.

So it’s continuous. If people are scared of this, they should never invent anything [laughs], because once you invent something, it’s a lifelong project. You don’t put it aside; the project doesn’t put you aside. You can try to, but that’s not really possible if your heart is in it. You always see problems. Nothing is ever perfect. That can be ever consuming. It’s hard. I don’t want to minimize this process in any way or form.

#GeneralMills150 in :50 Seconds

An Epic Summer Adventure Awaits

Video: Invention of the Starr-Edwards valve

San Francisco, California : Maker Media, Inc., 2017.

New York : Berghahn, 2020.

Rusch, Elizabeth, author

New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2024.

New York : Thames & Hudson in association with Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2002.

Lanham, Md. : University Press of America, [2002]

The best idea, trick, and tool for getting inspiration is to go as far away as possible. In the design of user interfaces, which use physical principles to help us access an entirely abstract realm, the heart of invention is a leap into the unknown. Oblong Industries' John Underkoffler lent his extensive experience in computer graphics and large-scale visualization to films Minority Report and Iron Man, where he advised on the science of the near future. ABOUT WIRED NEXT GEN WIRED Next Generation is the inspiring one day event for teenagers – between 13 and 19. On November 3 in London, hundreds of young minds gathered to hear from the people reshaping the world. Discover some of the fascinating insights from speakers here: http://wired.uk/4SGWwi ABOUT WIRED EVENTS WIRED events shine a spotlight on the innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs who are changing our world for the better. Explore this channel for videos showing on-stage talks, behind-the-scenes action, exclusive interviews and performances from our roster of events. Join us as we uncover the most relevant, up-and-coming trends and meet the people building the future. ABOUT WIRED WIRED brings you the future as it happens - the people, the trends, the big ideas that will change our lives. An award-winning printed monthly and online publication. WIRED is an agenda-setting magazine offering brain food on a wide range of topics, from science, technology and business to pop-culture and politics. CONNECT WITH WIRED Web: http://po.st/WiredVideo Twitter: http://po.st/TwitterWired Facebook: http://po.st/FacebookWired Google+: http://po.st/GoogleWired Instagram: http://po.st/InstagramWired Magazine: http://po.st/MagazineWired Newsletter: http://po.st/NewslettersWired

Topics presented by young researchers included science of sonar, exploration of planets outside solar system, use of nanotechnology in cancer treatment, environment-friendly alternative for food security, and use of AI to save diabetics from eye diseases

The company is listed in India for over six decades, has brands that are as old as the country

Lewis Library - ML174.R26 2018

Most of the projections of the cost of meeting climate change mitigation targets hinge crucially upon assumptions made about the cost and timing of the development of breakthrough technologies. This paper seeks to uncover attributes of inventions – as reflected in patent data – which serve as "leading indicators" of subsequent technological and market development in climate change mitigation technologies.

Inducing environmental innovation is a significant challenge to policy-makers. Efforts to design public policies that address these issues are motivated by the fact that innovations can allow for improved environmental quality at lower cost.

This paper analyses the determinants of invention in efficiency-enhancing electricity generation technologies that have the potential to facilitate climate change mitigation efforts, including fossil fuel based technologies aimed at reducing carbon emissions, renewables and nuclear technologies.