Interesting Inventions From the Last Ten Years There have been an incredible number of new devices which have come out in the last ten years. I think it is fair to say we have advanced further in the last ten years than we have at any other time in history. Who ever would have believed we could have developed a tiny computer which had an incredible number of functions and we could buy it for $25? In case you are not computer savvy, I am talking about the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. It may only be a small computer board without a case, but it is mighty in what it can do for the money. People are using it to create their own functioning hardware using their ideas of what they want a device to do. A lot of people have turned it into a sensor or sensors of one type or another. Others have used it to connect to the internet for various functions and still others are using it for experiments. What we have started to notice is the disappearance of wires. If you are anything like me you have several computers and different devices and the wires from these things are everywhere in the room. It will only be a matter of time when this is no longer the case. Look at what has happened with earphones and many speakers. They have become Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a technology which broadcasts to devices so no wires are necessary. The same is true for WIFI. As most of you know we now have the option of wired or not wired to receive WIFI on a computer and our phones receive it without wires. Now we have to get rid of all those electrical wires and that is what is really going to make the difference. We have begun to see the advent of wearable sensors which monitor our health in different ways. Who would have believed we would have been able to print a circuit on something equivalent to Scotch Tape? One such sensor can monitor the contents of a person’s blood. Soon there will be quite a few different ones on the market. Many people when asked what was the greatest accomplishment of the last ten years say it is the self-driving car. I think I would have to lump this one into the broader topic of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence or AI is now in many different devices. Many of us experience it in devices like the Echo or with Siri, to name a few. They have the ability to not only obey informational commands but to hold a conversation. While it is not perfect, it is functional. If you ask your Echo device to hold a conversation, it is happy to connect you to a social bot which will converse with you. These social bots get better every day. As far as driving with AI is concerned it is already safer than with a human driver. We do hear about accidents, but they are very scarce. There is one advance which I think everyone should jump on. No, it is not a trampoline, it is the LED light bulb. When I switched to all LED bulbs in my home, my electric bill went down dramatically. I now get mail from my electric company telling me I have one of the most electric efficient homes in my area. I can’t believe how much I have saved. I did have neon bulbs before that but the light was not as satisfactory and yes, they were cheaper than incandescent lighting but not as inexpensive as LED lighting. I remember watching as the SpaceX rocket came back to earth for a landing on a barge and landed in the same manner as those rockets in science fiction movies did, tail first. I thought to myself this is the beginning of much less expensive space launches since these rockets will be truly reusable. I also thought this was just the first step and things were now going to advance much quicker in space travel and I still feel that way. Before SpaceX I don’t recall any other aerospace company or any other country trying to land a rocket that way. I don’t want to leave out the genetic modification system known as Crispr. In the beginning when Crispr was first used it took years for results, but as time went by the time to perform gene editing with Crispr decreased dramatically. This technology may someday eliminate all birth defects and even be able to protect us from some diseases. This one technology could turn out to be the most incredible of all. One technology might just help us in our quest for colonizing other planets and that is the 3D printer. Before the advent of this printer scientists were worried about having to carry a lot of spare parts on flights to other worlds, after all something could break down. The 3D printer allows us to create the replacement parts we need on the fly. That is not the only thing it can do. When we get to the planet or moon of our destination, we can use our printer to build our structures. It could turn out to be one of the most useful devices we take with us. While many things are necessary for us to have comfortable lives, humans also need entertainment, especially in this age of the Covid virus which has been responsible for keeping us home for longer periods of time. That is why I am adding streaming video on the list. Providers like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others have become very important to our sanity. Many others are now jumping on the boat, but this could eventually mean some will not make it because there will be too many vying for our hard earned money. One thing I heard about seems brilliant to me. We all know Lego has been around many years, but the idea I am going to talk about I heard just a couple of years ago. There are some people in construction who want to create full size Lego type blocks which would lock together just as the plastic ones do, only these would be used for full size construction and be made of brick or cement. I can’t believe this wasn’t thought about many years ago. It turned out the material Lego is made of is far stronger than cement and tests show you could pile 375,000 Lego bricks on top of one before it fails, but there is a problem. The Lego blocks would be too expensive. That is why something like cement has to be used, or some other cheaper material.
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