5 NASA Inventions That Are Now Everyday Household Items

Today on the blog we're featuring a guest post kindly provided by James Hall.  James is a cracking UK writer who is a home appliance enthusiast - take it away James!

5 NASA Inventions That Are Now Everyday Household Items

Ever since I first watched Star Trek as a child, I’ve always been interested in space-age technology. Ideas such as faster-than-light travel or realistic virtual realities still fascinate me – even though I understand little of the science behind them!

In comparison to sci-fi technology, it’s sometimes easy to forget how astonishing “everyday” items actually are. Society has developed so rapidly over the last 100-150 years that we quickly become indifferent to technological breakthroughs – even when they come as a direct result of space research.

With that in mind, here are five everyday items that were first developed by NASA.

 1. Scratch-Proof Glasses

As you can imagine, it’s important for an astronaut’s visor not to get scratched. That’s why NASA scientists in the 1970s put a lot of time into developing strong plastics coated with a thin film to prevent scratching. The result was visors that were up to ten times less likely to scratch than previous versions.

Fast forward a decade, and sunglass manufacturer Foster-Grant realised the same technology could be used on their products. The company was the first to licence it from NASA, although today most plastic lenses have a similar coating.

2. Memory Foam Mattresses

Walk into any mattress shop and you’ll almost certainly be greeted be a sales person extolling the virtues of memory foam. This type of foam, which contours to your body to provide extra support while sleeping, has become popular in recent years.

What many people don’t know is that memory foam was first developed by NASA as a way to protect passengers during a crash. It’s still used for that today, but is also found in pillows, mattresses and even roller coasters due to its ability to absorb energy.

3. Water Filters

One of the challenges of long-term space missions, such as establishing a base on the Moon, is producing clean water. That’s why NASA has been collaborating with a number of companies to develop water filtration systems. The first filters were designed in the 1970s and could handle basic cleaning. In recent years, new filters are being created to convert water with greater contamination – including human urine – into a drinkable form.

While this technology might not be found in the average western home, it has the potential to make a big difference in poorer countries where clean water is scarce.

4. Handheld Cordless Vacuums

An example of a more mundane NASA technology is the humble handheld vacuum. Before the Apollo mission, NASA commissioned Black & Decker to produce a drill to collect samples from the moon. This needed a highly optimised motor and tiny power consumption, as energy would be at a premium during the mission.

Later on, the same technology would be used to create the Dustbuster range of vacuums. Black & Decker still produce Dustbusters today, although handheld vacuums are now built by a wide range of companies.

5. Cochlear Implants

In the 1970s, analog hearing aids simply magnified sound. This meant any noise or imperfections would also be amplified.

At the time, NASA was putting a lot of research time into sound and electronic sensing. An engineer named Adam Kissiah, who also had hearing difficulties, realised this technology could be used to produce an implant that would transmit sound digitally.

He founded a private company to develop a working prototype of the cochlear implant. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have had their hearing restored – including people who have been deaf since birth.

James Hall is a home technology writer from the UK. Aside from writing, he enjoys hiking, cycling and spending time with his family. He's always had an interest in space-age technology and has high hopes for the next-generation of virtual reality devices. He's currently writing for Spotless Vacuum and you can also find him on Twitter.

The Top Eight Snacks to eat during Superbowl 2017

In just a few hours, Superbowl 51 is going to kick off, New England Patriots versus the Atlanta Falcons.  Now, despite my long-term insistence that soccer is better, this post is all about the Superbowl.

So, I'm going to take a guess that Tom Brady and the Patriots are going to bring the thunder today for the win, but that is pretty much where my American Football knowledge ends, and instead I'm going to focus on the snacks!

So, what snacks should you have?  The key is having a variety of snacks, and I'd recommend ones that are sweet or salty, and not too sticky.  Anything that requires the use of cutlery is out.

Here's my top eight snacks, in reverse order:

8th : Chocolate - chocolate is great, but be warned, if you delay eating it, it melts in your hands and is not nice.  And too much will just give you a sugar rush.  Ration your chocolate if you're in for the long haul.

7th : Carrot sticks - bit of a bizarre one, but if you're on a health kick, carrot sticks are probably one of the best snacks you can get.  Quick to make, reasonably tasty (maybe with a dip) and healthier than anything else on this list!

6th : Pizza - now, I love pizza, but it's just a little bit stickier than other snacks, earning it a lowly sixth place.  Nevertheless, pizza is still good, and might even be slightly healthy if you load it up with veggies.

5th : Biscuits aka cookies - not as sugary as chocolate, you can plough through biscuits for longer before sugar rush becomes a problem.

4th : Chips/fries - American fries are a great idea, with some salt.  British chips are great too, thicker and make sure they're liberally doused with vinegar as well as salt.  Or get some chip spice!

3rd : Pretzels - slightly controversial, I'm not a huge fan of pretzels, but I don't know why, and for the Superbowl they tick all the boxes.  Dry, crunchy, salty, tasty!

2nd : Popcorn - popcorn, especially when still warm, and ideally a mix of sweet and savory popcorn is just awesome.

And finally...

1st: Crisps aka chips - Crisps are the winner for me, simply because they come in so many different flavours. Salted, cheese, meaty, prawn cocktail... the list goes on, and the types too, puffed corn, potato chips with ridges in, baked crisps.... you can get a huge variety of crisps, in a massive bowl, and just plough away at them!

Enjoy your snacks and go sports!

Not really sure what this picture has to do with Sunday, but I searched for Sunday in my favourite picture website and this came up...

Eight things you learn when you go to a slimming club

Even if you've never joined a slimming club, you probably know what one is.  Basically, it's a group that you go to regularly (typically once a week), you get weighed, you get encouragement to lose more weight, and often tips on healthy meals to cook.  And they absolutely work for some people.  Perhaps even most people.

It didn't work for me, but that's probably down to my own views and opinions than anything else.

Nevertheless, if you are considering going to a slimming club, here's a few things that you'll learn.

8) There's a plan that if you stick to it, will make you thin.

The club will have a plan specific to itself, that if you follow it, will make you lose weight.  Weight Watchers have points, Slimming World has red and green days (and extra easy if you're a more recent attendee), others will have their own plans.  All you have to do is work out what you can and can't eat, and stick to the plan!

A bottle of water, and three tacos filled with chicken, salad, a dash of vinaigrette and a little american chip spice, with a side of pickled onions?   That would be free on a brown day.

But...

7) No one sticks to the plan

Sure, you do at first.  The first week of your slimming club, you'll stick exactly to the plan.  You might even be a little stricter on yourself.  And you'll do fantastically well.

But over time, your willpower weakens, and reasons pop up that mean, absolutely, that you must drink huge amounts of beer tonight and follow it up with a deep fried cake kebab.

One of the great things that I remembered when I did Slimming World was what was known as "Twilight Night".  On Slimming World, you had a number of "sins" that you could use each day for unhealthy foods, like a chocolate bar or a bag of crisps.  But on the day of the weigh-in, what you would do is use your sins beforehand (although see number five), but then after weigh-in, people saw it as a free night.

I will absolutely guarantee you that at least 30% of the people leaving the slimming club immediately went for a takeaway.  And the other 70% couldn't afford it, because...

6) Slimming club costs money

It isn't a free evening you get here.  You have to pay to attend (and often pay even if you skip a week), and the club will be selling recipe books and the like there, I remember when I went to Slimming World they sold their own healthy snack bars called Hi Fi bars.  Hi Fi bars are bloody gorgeous but not desperately cheap, and because you could have one as a "healthy extra" instead of using your limited number of sins on a typical chocolate bar, you buy them, and as a result you find yourself getting through a couple of packs of bars in a week.  Then you often need to donate a piece of fruit or something every week for a competition for the biggest loser that week, or make an example of a healthy meal to take in, and the cost of the group adds up.  I'm not saying that it isn't worth it, but it could be the cost of a takeaway right there.

Speaking of takeaways, all those twilight nights have added up, and you're not losing as much as you want to.  So...

5) You try to cheat.

The day of the weigh-in people go to ridiculous lengths (except obviously for exercising) to manufacture a weight loss, because if you get weighed and you haven't lost, the group leader will be asking questions of you.

The steps taken may well include:

• Not eating or drinking before the weigh-in - you'll find people often getting weighed, then having a cup of tea. Not the other way round.
• Going to the toilet right before the weigh-in to maximise that loss (or minimise that gain).  Good luck if you're in a rush for the toilet at slimming club, because prior to weigh-in, every single person there will be in there trying to make the difference between staying the same weight and losing half a pound.
• Getting a haircut - or even shaving off arm hair.  This makes virtually no difference whatsoever but you try it anyway

However, what it won't include is trying lighter clothes.  This seems logical to me - start slimming club in jeans, a padded shirt, a jumper, a coat, and trainers, and if one week you've not done very well, switch it for shorts, t-shirt and flip flops, but it is a unwritten rule that you must attend slimming club in exactly the same clothes every week.

Of course, none of the above cheats work, so you will end up with everyone looking at you while you get interrogated by the leader as to why you put on half a pound this week, but if this happens there's an easy solution.

All you have to do is slip in a comment about a rival slimming club, because...

4)  Every other slimming club in the world is wrong.

The one thing that the group leader hates more than someone gaining weight is a rival slimming club.  I don't remember a single occasion where any of the group leaders that I've experienced (yes I have tried multiple slimming clubs) had anything good to say about one of the other clubs.  I kind of imagine that while the plans may differ from club to club, their general aim is the same - to lose weight.  So I foolishly imagine that perhaps eating more fruit and veg, less fat, and maybe going for a bit of a jog now and then might be a good thing.

Oh no - it's all down to whether you're counting points, or whether you're counting sins.

My partner has suggested occasionally that I give Slimming World another try.  The last time she suggested it I threatened to join Weight Watchers as a response.  She never mentioned the idea again.

But for me, I found that after a while sticking to this plan starts to get you down.  And you discover that...

3) The most critical thing in the world has to be done, by you, at exactly the same time as slimming club happens.

Slimming club will be at the same time, on the same day, every week.  Within three months of starting you'll find something - anything - that absolutely must be done at the time, with the result that this week, you can't make it. Doctors appointment, cat to be taken to the vet, the lawn absolutely must be cut tonight, whatever it is, you can't believe that it's clashed with your club, you've really got absolutely no option but to miss it this week.

Just this week, of course.

But why would you not want to attend your slimming club of supportive friends?

Well...

2) Slimming club folk hate other slimming club folk

I've already mentioned the group leaders, but not your fellow losers at the group.  The competition for the title "Slimmer of the week" is intense.  I've had some nerve wracking evenings when, after securing a weight loss of two and a half pounds, you have to sit through twenty other people, and all you can do is hope and pray that no one did better than you.
 "Mary, you lost half a pound! Well done Mary!" the group leader says.  You all burst into applause, while silently thinking that's not enough Mary, nice try!
This will go on until almost at the end of the group, you are defeated by someone who lost eight pounds because they're been in bed all week with stomach flu, and let me tell you, the applause that follows that announcement is almost drowned out by everyone thinking you lucky bugger, I wish I had been throwing up all week!

But there is one last thing.  And I have to tell you about the mistake that everyone makes, and the reason why.

1) Slimming club folk despise the fallen.

Everyone picks the slimming club closest to home.  Of course you do - it makes sense, it's the least amount of travelling time, it's convenient.

But if you're not one of the ones that manages to get down to their target weight, and end up dropping out of the slimming club, you can never get takeaway again, because every time you do, you will walk out of the takeaway, whilst stuffing your face with chips or pizza, and come face to face with someone from your old group, one of them that didn't drop out and is now six stone lighter.  And they'll look at you with a smile of superiority.

Which almost conceals the look of lust they give your burger.

You can't even go to the supermarket because one of the group will work on the checkouts and see the black forest gateaux you've purchased - and because you chatted to them in the group, they'll know that you live alone, and they know that you're going to get home, microwave it so you don't have to wait, dump it in a bowl and eat it with a ladle.

All in all a good reason to order your food to be delivered, I feel.

If you enjoyed this list, why not check out this list of four items that have cornered their markets?

6 Weird Things About NCIS

I love NCIS.  I love Gibbs and his neanderthal vocabulary and random violence, DiNozzos' cool attitude, McGees' geekiness... they're all great.

But, as a fan, there are a few odd things about the show.

Number 6: Typing solves everything

There is one hell of a lot of typing done in NCIS.  In a typical workplace, you'll certainly hear a significant amount of typing, sure.  But you'll also hear mouse clicks.

In NCIS, mouse clicks don't happen.  Anything and everything Gibbs could want, from the location of a bad guy to the bank account statements of a grieving widow, are found with a few seconds typing.

And never does the computer systems crash, unless of course DiNozzo is using it.

But if, by some chance the keyboard doesn't meet your needs, well...

Number 5: The psychic clicker

The clicker will.

Whatever Gibbs wants on the plasma screen, it will appear with one click of the clicker.  If you've ever used a "clicker" before, for example for a PowerPoint presentation, you'll know that it can either go forwards...

...or backwards.

It isn't a magical tool that will bring up any slide that you want, never mind information that isn't on the slide.  Either someone at NCIS is spending all their time creating PowerPoints that will be used a total of one times, or there's something special about that clicker.

And don't get me started on-

Number 4: Ducky

Is there anything this man hasn't done?  He's trained in shooting, he's been a doctor pretty much everywhere...

And he looks like Illya Kuryakin.

From the LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection

Number 3: The field office in NCIS: Los Angeles

I'm only mentioning this spin-off series once, because to be honest I don't really watch it.

But why are they stationed in what appears to be a garden centre?

Number 2: Everyone else in NCIS.

Who are they?  There must be hundreds of different people working at NCIS headquarters, but apart from the handful of named cast, we've no idea who any of them are.

Number 1: GIBBS.

Leroy Jethro Gibbs.  The leader of the team, the fearless and indestructible Gibbs.

Gibbs knows when DiNozzo is making jokes about him.  He stares confessions out of bad people.  He makes boats teleport through walls.

And he is incredibly lucky.

Think about it.  Every case, he'll tell his people to look into a particular aspect - the wife, the boyfriend, the bank account, the phone records... and that one thing will result in the piece of information that he needs to find the naughty person and stare the life out of them.

And if that doesn't work, his gun will finish the job.

Almost as though it was a TV show or something.

If you enjoyed this list and like rants of variable quality, check out this list of 8 things you learn from slimming clubs (hint: none of them include "eat less, exercise more")

6 things only YouTube Creators understand...

So, making YouTube videos is an art.  Something for a natural creator to undertake. But there are experiences that all video makers will share, whatever their video style, regardless of whether they make short hardhitting films, music, or perhaps just videos of a monkey riding a vibrating pig.

Oink.

6) Recording the video will be unreasonably difficult.

I have a variety of equipment to record with.  None of my equipment is top of the range, but it includes an HD webcam, a camcorder, and my smartphone.

The webcam is basically the cheapest 1080 one that I could get, and although it works, it isn't great.  In my computer room it inevitably gives an image too dark, unless I select the "Low Light Compensation" option.

Which solves the problem brilliantly!

Except that this option then makes the speech go out of sync, so you look like a poorly dubbed french film.

If I had a live stream from my webcam, it would look like this.  I haven't had that beard for months.  And I haven't even used that headset since I first got it dancing like a night elf.

Next up is the camcorder.  The camcorder isn't HD, and what's worse records in 4:3 aspect ratio, which probably means nothing to you unless you make videos on YouTube - basically it means that, for it to fit in YouTube nicely, you lose a chunk of either your head or your gut out of the video.

Meanwhile the smartphone is actually the best piece of kit, except for one odd feature.  If you have a modern smartphone, you'll know that the display rotates to whatever way you are holding the smartphone. Got it upside down?  Not a problem, the display will flip round.

However, the camera records a certain way up, and even though the display may look fine, if the smartphone records the "wrong way up" (which isn't obvious as you generally record YouTube videos with your phone on its side) it'll record your video upside down.

Which makes editing REALLY easy.

I hate technology.

Of course, I don't have the best kit to record with, but even if you do...

5) Your video will have a tiny, but critical, mistake in it that means after waiting four hours for it to render, it will be absolutely dreadful and will need amending.

Seriously, this happens far too often.  If you aren't a video creator, you might be forgiven for thinking that actually, percentage-wise, a large chunk of the video makers time is spent recording the video.

No.

Although you might spent a bit of time recording re-takes, and rerecording certain scenes, the vast majority of time is spent mucking about with the video on the computer afterwards.  As an example, I made a ten-minute video talking about video games, as a sort of audition for a gaming channel.  I really enjoyed doing it, but for the two hours I spent recording stuff, I spent about twenty editing the video.

And it still turned out bad.

But there will be some setting in the video editing software that you'll forget to change.  As a result your speech will be out of sync with the video, or the video will end up with black banners around it, or just be plain bad.

Yes YouTube, that's what I wanted. Some big black frames around my video, just to give it that "condolence card" look.

Oh. My. God.  That's the professional quality that has attracted an entire thirty two subscribers to me.

But rendering a video takes an age.  And if you do anything with your PC, it'll slow down and take even longer.  So, as a result, you'll have to wait at least half an hour, watch the video, discover what you did wrong, and repeat.

But eventually, you'll get the video rendered, it looks fine, and you'll start uploading it to YouTube.  Which takes hours if you're uploading a decent quality video, so you'll probably use your PC for other stuff in the meantime.  And you may well do the next one.

4) You will log out of Google in one of your browser windows, whilst your video is uploading in another window.  This will mean that you have to start the upload process again.

Yep.

Next!

3) Any time that you tell YouTube to publish a video, there will be a problem in that video, meaning that a shedload of tweets, Facebook statuses, and Google+ notifications go out, with a link to a video that you don't want people to see.

YouTube tries to be helpful.  It tries to automate the social media promotion stuff that you do, but it will either not work, and make you do it anyway (particularly when trying to post to Facebook), or when it works, about ten minutes later you'll realise that there's a problem with your video, and have to take it down, and restart the whole process.  And when the new video goes up, and is promoted, everyone will think that you're just spam posting about your video and hate you.

Obviously a joke - who could hate a chin like that?  Covered in cuddly grey spikes.

Finally, your video is live.  It looks okay, it has a custom thumbnail, it has annotations, you've done hours of promotion, you've done all the things you're supposed to do.  This one is bound to go viral, right?

And yet...

2) After publishing your video, for about the next six hours you grab your phone every time it vibrates in the hope that it is a nice comment about your video, or perhaps even a new subscriber.  Every time it will be an update from Candy Crush Saga.

NO I DON'T WANT TO SEND ANY OF MY FRIENDS AN EXTRA LIFE

After a few days, you decide to check out the videos statistics, and see if there's anything there that will help soothe your battered ego.

What do you see?  A dislike.

1) You pretend to be okay when a video gets a dislike, but inside you want to kill.

WHY?!?!?!?

Of course not everyone in the world will like your video, you tell yourself.  Of course they can't.  Psy's Gangnam Style has around a million dislikes. You have just one.

Plus, you've got more likes than dislikes, so on balance it's all good.

It doesn't matter. Someone disliked your video.

Time to go hunting.

You can't beat a wooden sword for revenge.  Splinters hurt, boy!

All's said and done, I still love making videos.  If you do want to watch any of my videos, which contain a lot of eating and a significant amount of vibrating pigs, they're over at www.youtube.com/ravenswingthog - thanks for reading!

4 rants about certain products who cornered their markets

1 - Why have blueberries cornered the fruit-in-muffins market?  Who does their PR?

No one likes blueberries.  You don't ever think "I know!  I'll get the kids a treat, they can have some lovely blueberries".

No.  It doesn't happen.  You buy strawberries BECAUSE THEY TASTE NICE.

And yet, in muffins, it's chocolate, it's lemon and poppy seed (poppy seed?!? Again - what's going on there), or it's blueberry.  Try and get a strawberry muffin, I challenge you.


2 - If water is so good for you, why doesn't it taste of anything?

There is a reason that bacon, sausages, pork scratchings, cheese etc taste nice - it's because they have fat in them.  Fat, for the majority of the human population, is in short supply and we are genetically designed to like the taste of it, because we need the energy supply of fat to survive.  It's better than stuff like carbohydrates because it's easy for the body to store until needed.

It's just that in the current "modern" western civilisations, we have an excess of it, so we pretend to like salad.

But taking this reasoning, why don't we love the taste of water?  Apparently we need it to survive, and yet the taste of it is nowhere near as good as lemonade, or beer, or coffee or any number of other drinks.

There's only one explanation for it - it's actually bad for us.


3 - Cranberry sauce with Christmas dinner?

Why is it acceptable to have weird jam with a Sunday dinner, if you happen to have it on December 25th.  I'm not saying that I don't like Cranberry sauce, I do, but if we're allowing jam to be spread all over our turkey then what about when we have pheasant?  Can we have some blackcurrant jelly on that?  What about some lemon curd on a ribeye steak?  Perhaps marmalade is the Colonels secret ingredient in his Kentucky Fried Chicken?

(If this post vanishes abruptly, you know that the last suggestion was right)


4 - WHY DO WE HANG A PINE SMELLING CARDBOARD TREE IN OUR CARS TO MAKE THEM SMELL NICE?

No one likes the smell of pine, at least not the smell of pine cleaner.  Pine cleaner is inevitably the "bargain" or "value" brand of linoleum cleanser you've bought because it's only twenty pence for five litres, and the trade off for buying such an inexperience cleaning solution is that it stinks of nasty pine, probably it's the smell that you'd get if an elk urinated on a rotting pine branch, it was left to soak in for a few days, and then you brought the branch in to lighten the atmosphere of your kitchen.

And yet we choose - voluntarily - this smell to go in our cars.

Mad!