Robot Aids Carpet A creepily cute robot baby created by Purdue University researchers is helping to determine how much dirt, pollen, skin cells, fungal spores, and bacteria are stirred up and breathed in by crawling infants. Indoor environments, mainly carpeted areas, can trap a diverse collection of debris, and this new study is the first to analyze indoor debris dispersal and…
How clean do you think the inside of your car is? Most people think their car is cleaner than most other everyday items, but cars can get filthy and germy. According to research out of the UK, car interiors were found to be 50% dirtier than appliances such as keyboards or smartphones. Swabs collected from handbrakes and other frequently-touched areas…
As per data collected by the World Toilet Organization, 1 billion people in the world defecate in the open. As per smartphone studies, the more features your smartphone has, the longer you sit on the toilet when you have your phone with you. Seventy-five percent of smartphone owners use their phones on the toilet, including texting, making phone calls, surfing…
How Do You Celebrate World Toilet Day? To many in the United States and other western countries, World Toilet Day seems like a set up for a joke and not a likely candidate for a holiday. Unfortunately, November 19th is not as trivial or humorous as it may seem. World Toilet Day strives to draw attention to various sanitation issues around the world and work towards resolving them.
In 2015, the non-profit Consumer Reports announced it was removing the colorful, single-use packets of laundry detergents from its list of recommended detergents, calling them, “Too dangerous to use.” Since then, in addition to accidents involving children, incidents involving adults with dementia have also been reported. In response, the American Cleaning Institute (ACI), in conjunction with laundry packet manufacturers, is launching its…
Spread DiseaseAir travel is the disease-spreading trifecta: You have forced proximity with a mixture of people from many different places for long hours. These factors combine so germs can hop from person-to-person and bounce from continent-to-continent.The SARS, Zika, and Ebola viruses have shown us that airlines have important responsibilities when outbreaks occur because their actions can have widespread consequences. In…
What is the single largest source of dust pollution in the United States? I saw this question on www.howtogeek.com and asked a few friends what they thought. I got answers like concrete factories, coal-fired plants, diesel and gasoline pollution, strip mines, and the Sahara Desert (source of many Cape Verde Hurricanes that threaten the East Coast in Summer). Although all are valid answers, the single largest source, which people from California might know, is the 108 square…
The CEO of iRobot spoke recently about mapping customers’ homes and selling the data to Google, Amazon, or Apple.
One problem with cleaning chemicals you may not know about is that they have been linked to reproductive problems such as infertility, menstrual changes, reproductive organ cancers, miscarriages, premature births, and changes in onset of puberty.
Peeing In Public It’s an unfortunate fact of outdoor concerts: The number of toilets is always in inverse proportion to the number of drunk asses who need to pee. So people -- and by people, we mean shameless dudes—make a urinal out of the local flora. Here to rescue Mother Nature from full bladders everywhere is AANDEBOOM, a Dutch design studio…