Cavalcade of Mammals

Pepper spray has been around for years now, but there is not commonly available antidote. And we know how the active ingredient, capsaicin acts to active, or hold open, the ion channels that transduce pain signals. In fact, a quick Google shows that capsaicin binds and activates a receptor called the vanilloid receptor subtype 1 (VR1), a member of a group of related receptors called TRP ion channels that are activated by temperature changes.

Capsaicin chemical structure (from Wikipedia)

So an antidote would be an inhibitor of the VR1 receptor, and such a thing should be easy to find, or create, and in fact another Google shows that several have been created. Capsazepine was the first inhibitor discovered, way back in 1994. Activators and inhibitors of this receptor have many potential uses as analgesics and anti-inflammation compounds so there is a lot of research interest.

Capsaicin inhibitor capsazepine (from Wikipedia)

A spray containing one of these inhibitors should be an effective antidote for pepper spray. But surprisingly no such inhibitor is available! The small quantities of purified inhibitors are available in small quantities for research purposes (i.e. capsazepine, 50mg for $455 but I can’t find anyone who has made an antidote preparation. This should be safe and fairly easy. Safe, because it would be applied mainly externally, and because pepper spray is itself fairly safe–aside from the pain and shock it is used to cause. It doesn’t have other, non-specific side effects. And relatively easy to make because the literature describes the synthesis of inhibitors from capsaicin itself. So the starting product used to make an inhibitor can be capsaicin, and capsaicin is readily available in large quantities!

Update:
Wikipedia: Discovery and development of TRPV1 antagonists

Have you ever had to push your car around? Very hard when it is possible at all. So let’s make a short distance car mover. Here’s one way to do it:

Put the front wheels on remote control dollies. Have one remote control work both dollies. The remote control would send two sets of signals, one for each dolly. The dollies are basically remote control cars with low speed/high torque motors and gearing.built heavily enough to carry the load.

The down side of this is that jacking each wheel would be required to put the dollies in place. Also, if the carts had roller skate sized wheels it would not be able to climb curbs.

Here’s a gadget idea. Have a faucet light that shows temperature. I’ve seen faucet lights, with a LED inside the water stream lighting it up. Take that design and add a temperature sensor and a 2-3 LED that get lit up in varying proportions to indicate temperature.

Update: Doh! Thinkgeek sells one! Foiled again.

Saw this colored peg low res image and was reminded again I want to do something similar with black and white ping pong balls. I would work up a Lego bot to drop the balls in.

And then I had a cooler idea–I’ve seen a programmed water drop device used to make images. A related idea would be to drop water onto piano strings. The drops would strike the strings and make sound instead of images. The drops would fall a distance so you would see the music visually–see the notes coming before they hit.

Thinking more, there’s a good chance this wouldn’t work–the water drops wouldn’t have enough force. Worth a try though. :)

A company has developed a new reading technology called Live Ink (paper here). The idea is to improve the way text is displayed to improve reading comprehension. The way the brain perceives a page of text is as small region at a time. Words from several lines get picked up at the same time. This confuses the parts of the brain that comprehend words and sentences. Live Ink proposed to spread text out to avoid this mental confusion to improve reading comprehension.

There’s a kernal of a good idea there–electronic text allows reformatting to increase comprehension. But their solution sucks. It takes up too much space and it only partially helps with the problem of line confusion. The syntactic breakup may be helpful. Here’s an image of it:

Computer formatting is a good idea. Here is my idea of how to do it. Fuzz out the lines before and after the current line. This could be done one of two ways. If eye movement tracking is available, follow the eye and only make the line being looked at visible with the others fuzzed out. Without eye tracking make this a timed system (like traditional light bar reading trainers). Start it on a section of text and make one line at a time is visible moving through the text. Controls would be needed to pause and go back a few lines, and flip it off.

By fuzz out the rest of the page I mean alter it so the brain doesn’t think it is text and try to decode it. Whether making it out of focus is enough or if another kind of noise needs to be added would need to be determined by trials. It would be important to leave enough information that the presence of text blocks and formatting is visible. These provide visual landmarks needed for good reading.

Technically, this could be easy–a web browser extension or perhaps as simple as some Javascript added to a page with overlay images fuzzing the text and moving as needed.

Here’s an idea: wall moisture sensor. Water damage can be hard to spot early on and by the time you notice it the damage and rot may be extensive. So add a cheap moisture sensor.

The sensor is a 5cm spike with a nickel-sized head. To install it, you push it through the drywall. It expands a bit inside the wall and this helps fix it in place. Also, the back side of the sensor head is adhesive covered so it sticks to the plasterboard and seals the hole.

Now on to the working bits. It contains a cheap humidity sensor IC, a control chip, and a battery. On the head there is a tiny solar cell, a pair of contacts, and a red LED. The solar cell gets a bit of energy from room lighting and keeps the unit working for more than a decade. When humidity is detected, the LED flashes. Touch the contacts and the LED lights to show it works. The sensor and a control chip are embedded in the spike.

It should be cheap to make and long lasting. Home owners can buy a couple and pop them into walls they want to monitor–walls of finished basements, walls containing plumbing, exterior walls, etc. Installed, the sensor is unobtrusive.

If you think this could be useful and are interested in manufacturing/selling this send an email.

       [   ]-plasterboard
 R     [   ]
 o   ||[   ]
 o   ||========* -sensor spike
 m   ||[   ]
       [   ]  Inner wall
       [   ]