Posts Tagged "green"
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Cheap air filters for the broke?
Cheap air filters when you can’t afford to make a fashion statement? Air pollution is serious enough to create elevated cancer, trigger allergies and asthma is of concern in nearly every major city in the world. However, according to NASA, the worst PM2.5 pollution is in Chinese and Indian cities, places where it may be difficult for the average citizen to afford a traditional, consumer-grade air purifier. As most people don’t want to wear a mask all day long and look like a medieval plague doctor, the hunt is on for other cheap technologies, such as dirt cheap air filters and purifiers. [UPDATE: Thomas Talhelm of Smart Air Filters emailed us some comments/corrections on the article. We’ve included these in the comments below.] One Chinese/American startup, based in Beijing and the US [Update: they are mainly in Beijing], may have a solution. Smart Air Filters has come up with inexpensive kits consisting of little more than a fan, some duct tape [Update: it’s a velcro strap], and a HEPA filter.… Read the restDr. Beak From Rome and the Black Plague, or why having a surgical mask might be handy
This 1656 woodcut (see photo) depicts the plague doctor “Dr. Beak from Rome” (“Doktor Schnabel von Rom”). His bird mask was stuffed with straw, which served as a crude air filter. Medieval artists alternated lampooned him (as here) and later celebrated him as scientific and practical methods of plague control slowly proved themselves over the more superstitious practices of that era. When we got into this we were thinking about how smart homes (and smarter air purification) could reduce dust buildup in our more dusty urban areas (like urban California, Europe, and Asia). While it was obvious there was a lot of dust buildup on furniture, we didn’t realize just how badly air quality fluctuated from day-to-day here. Bird Flu or just poor air quality Earlier this week one of our staff members saw someone walking the streets of Los Angeles with a surgical mask on. He appeared to be from a part of Asia that had experience with bird flu, and wearing surgical masks on the street is more culturally accept there than here.… Read the restWhy did the toaster salute the CES-announced Internet-of-Things smart range hood? Because it was General Electric.
Smart, Internet-connected kitchen appliances make it easy to prepare Internet spam? We’ve already mentioned that the Internet Of Things was big at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and have already covered Internet-connected vacuum cleaners with airborne dust sensors. Now, you might not have heard about the smart range hood. (It was, of course, right next to an Internet-connected smart refrigerator, the product labels and exhibit material still in Chinese (see photo gallery), so fresh off the boat is this smart refrigerator technology. Actually, there are several companies with an Internet-connected refrigerator. They are sometimes the butt of jokes. It is technology of the future. It was already the technology of the future at last year’s CES. And probably the year before. A little slow getting off the ground. In more recent news one of these Internet-connected smart refrigerators was recently implicated in spam sending attacks after being hacked. So if there’s spam in your Samsung smart refrigerator, it’s not clear if you mean email spam or Hormel Spam(TM).… Read the restAcculation, Inc. and AQcalc in the news!
AQcalc got mentioned in the “Green Living in DC blog!” (see their article: Explosive Wildfires awaken Fresh Air Consciousness) Note that the Air Quality Egg(TM) with dust sensor mentioned in the article (and supported by AQcalc) is already available for purchase from Wicked Devices. Like some recent CES announced products, It is an Internet of Things device (it reports crowdsourced pollution sensor readings to the Internet from all over the world to a public database) and has the advantage of also being somewhat usable outdoors (when shielded), but it’s currently still a kit. (On a coolness note, it is based on Nanode, a low-cost variant of the Arduino Open Source hardware prototyping platform. All of the Air Quality Egg hardware designs have been open sourced as well, so you can incorporate their schematics into your projects or products. Update: This means you could use AQEs as a platform to add wireless, crowdsourced seismic sensors as we suggest in this later blog post.)… Read the restRecent Posts
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