Mar 02, '07
School dropout turns inventor, looks for patent
An electrician from Madurai who has been educated only upto the seventh standard, has turned an inventor with a two-in-one cooker , which he claims has been patented. Unable to market his product due to lack of funds, he however, continues to make new inventions. Abdul Razak (37) of Bibikulam in Madurai is an electrician by profession. He always wanted to invent something that would be helpful like domestic appliances. Not being good at studies, he dropped out of school in the seventh standard and began working to support his poor family.
He is now married and has two children. His first invention was the boiler, made by modifying an ever-silver vessel. One of its compartments has a strainer at the bottom and a valve attached on the side. “I found that the biggest problem women face is draining the starchy water from the pot used to cook rice. The water used for boiling the rice also scalded many of them. So I decided to invent a vessel, which would do away with the manual straining process and then I came up with the boiler cooker, “ he said.
When the rice is boiled to the required consistency, the cooker can be taken off the fire and the valve below opened to drain out the water in which the rice is cooked, he explains. This can be done safely and the valve can be fixed to big vessels also , he adds. “The National Innovation Foundation is helping me patent my other products, which are a double-sided table fan, a two in one cooker and a letter-box fitted with an alarm,” he says.
news 2:
Snails Save Energy by Re-Using Mucus Trails
In order to conserve valuable energy, snails essentially play a game of follow-the-leader, a new study finds.
Snails create trails of mucus to that help them glide across the ground, mainly in search of food or a partner, but making all that mucus uses up a lot of energy.
“Snails expend a lot of energy, probably a third, creating mucus,” said Mark Davies of the University of Sunderland, lead author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “This process is very taxing indeed—much more so than walking, swimming or flying.”
Davies and his colleagues studied marine snails off the coast of Britain and discovered that to save some of this vital energy, the snails sometimes follow the existing mucus trails laid down by other snails to get around and so only have to create a fraction of the mucus needed to make a new trail.
“The fact that they can make savings has a knock on effect in as much as they have more energy to do other things like reproduce,” Davies said.
The energy savings may also helps snails which live in environments where food is scarce, making the energy harder to replace.
Davies discovered the snails’ reuse of trails by measuring the thickness of the mucus along the trails.
Biologists had long suspected that snails behaved this way, but this is the first study to directly observe it.
Davies said that it is likely that all snails use this means of cutting energy as they plod through life.
bye for now...
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