sterilization
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Self-sterilizing door handle looks perfect for hypochondriacs, is as real as their ailments
The world of concepts is quite the wonderful place to behold, it's filled with electric supercars, cameras that only ever need one lens, beautiful BlackBerrys, and now... a self-cleaning door handle. The product of one Choi Bomi's hyperactive imagination, this gatekeeper continuously sterilizes itself with a UV light, only taking a break when you actually use it. A clandestine switch in the handle's frame is what toggles the sanitizing illumination on and off, a spark of cleverness that's earned the design a Red Dot award. That's great, now who hands out the awards for making economically viable, mass producible devices?
Vioguard's self-sanitizing keyboard means maybe we don't all have to die this year
If there's one thing scarier than going to the hospital for some potentially harmful harmfulness, it's getting sicker due to some minor slip-up in the carefully-observed hygiene practices of your own personal Zach Braff M.D. That's where Vioguard's newly shipping UVKB50 self-sanitizing keyboard comes in, with a proximity detector to let a set of freshly sanitized keys slide out for use by a health care professional, which slide back once they're not in use to get re-sterilized with anti-bacterial ultraviolet light. The $899 pricetag isn't too bad given the application, but it probably won't be making our own cubicles safer any time soon. Video of the keyboard in action is after the break.
People ruining microwaves, creating a stink because of Reuters report
The humble microwave: source of hot cups of water, stinky popcorn, and now, apparently, sterile kitchen sponges. A Reuters article recently reported that microwaves are great tools to sterilize bacteria-laden kitchen sponges -- but unfortunately for the not-so-sharp, it turns out that Reuters didn't tell the witless that the sponges should be wet before getting their nuke on. Apparently, more than one person threw his dry sponge into the kitchen microwave only to discover that the thing melted, burnt, stunk up the joint like hot bacteria, and reeked like burnt tires. One more for the Darwin awards. So for the uninitiated: yes, you can throw your kitchen sponge in the microwave for a few minutes to sterilize it. Do make sure it's wet, though, k?
