South African Dr. Sonnet Ehlers was on call one night four decades ago when a devastated rape victim walked in. Her eyes were lifeless; she was like a breathing corpse.
“She looked at me and said, ‘If only I had teeth down there,’” recalled Ehlers, who was a 20-year-old medical researcher at the time. “I promised her I’d do something to help people like her one day.”
Forty years later, Rape-aXe was born.
Ehlers is distributing the female condoms in the various South African cities where the World Cup soccer games are taking place.
The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man’s penis during penetration, Ehlers said.
Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it — a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.
The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car uses a piston mechanism: a six-foot long rod sits inside a six-foot long tube attached to each bottle of Coke Zero. When the Mentos drop into the soda, the pressure tries to push the rod out of the tube. With 108 rods all pushing at once, that gives us a lot of power.
All that power is pushing against a wall braced with 3,600 pounds of cement blocks. So all the force is directed into moving the Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car forward.
BP approved Costner’s “Ocean Therapy” centrifuge as a cleanup technology Wednesday, after watching it work in New Orleans last Thursday. The centrifuge reportedly can remove 97 percent of the oil from water.
One centrifuge can clean up to 210,000 gallons of sea water per day, according to John Houghtaling, CEA of Ocean Therapy Solutions. That’s the amount some government scientists estimate has been spilling from the remains of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The machines are basically sophisticated centrifuge devices that can handle a huge volume of water and separate at unprecedented rates,” Houghtaling told WWLTV. “Costner has been funding a team of scientists for the last 15 years to develop a technology which could be used for massive oil spills.”
Inspired by the 1989 Exxon-Valdez spill, Costner and his brother Dan have invested $15 million in the centrifuge.
Scientists in the US have developed a flexible shirt made of the same material used in tank armour, by combining carbon in the shirt with the third-hardest material on Earth, boron.
“It could even be used to produce lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircrafts,” Xiaodong Li, from the University of Southern Carolina, wrote in the journal Advanced Materials.
The plain white T-shirts are dipped into a boron solution, then heated in an oven at more than 1000C, which changes the cotton fibres into carbon fibres.
The carbon fibres react with the boron solution and produce boron carbide – the same material used to make bulletproof plates in armoured vests.
The resulting material was stiffer than the original cotton tee, but still flexible enough to be worn as such.
“We expect that the nanowires can capture a bullet,” Prof Li said.
Rather than having to painstakingly wet the end of the thread and pass it through the eye, Pam Turner’s design is foolproof for even the most inept of seamstresses.
Her Spiral Eye invention is a stainless steel needle with a gap in the metal on one side of the eye.
A loop of thread is draped over the needle and then pulled into the eye before being secured in the normal way.
The 55-year said she was inspired to redesign the sewing needle, which has seen little change over the centuries, after watching her mother struggle threading the traditional style implement.
She claims that her needle, which costs $4.00, allows users to get sewing within a matter of seconds and can be thread with your eyes closed.