A tool to ease birth. Designed by a car mechanic [Article]

The idea came to Jorge Odón, an Argentine car mechanic, as he slept. Somehow, he said, his unconscious made the leap from a YouTube video he had just seen on extracting a lost cork from a wine bottle to the realization that the same parlor trick could save a baby stuck in the birth canal.

As one of the comments on this article says, it is a good reminder that  truly revolutionary breakthroughs rarely, if ever, come from someone immersed in the field and practicing the discipline. It’s always an outsider, unfettered by the beliefs and paradigms of the present state that can think clearly and see what is really needed.

Sunlight in a bottle – ingenuity [Article, Video]

In 2002, Brazilian engineer Alfredo Moser invented a simple way to bring the sun’s light indoors: fill a clear plastic 2 liter bottle with water and two capfuls of bleach, then make a hole in the roof and secure it with a waterproof sealant. The result: 40 to 60 watts of free, natural light. Watch the video here.

What’s in a can of Coke? [Article]

Kevin Ashton discovers that “a can of Coke is a product of our world entire and contains inventions that trace all the way back to the origins of our species.”
He concludes that “The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space.“.
It may all be true, but that doesn’t make it healthy.