​This portable device can chill a drink in 30 seconds

PTI | Oct 15, 2013, 05.32 AM IST
WASHINGTON: Move over refrigerators ! A new portable device that cools beverages in just 30 to 60 seconds has been developed.

Using the basic principles of heat transfer, the Spin Chill device developed by a US startup can take a beer or soda and chill it in half a minute, manufacturers claim. Setting a can or bottle in the freezer takes 20-30 minutes to become drinkable. Putting it in ice water take 10-20 minutes. Using the 'Chill Bit' device , it takes 30-60 seconds, the Florida-based company said.

By spinning the container, convection is introduced to both the inside and the outside of the container, thus increasing the rate of heat transfer and cooling the beverage down at a rate of at least 20 times faster.

"You can get your drink (beer or soda ) down to zero degrees Celsius (freezing) and get ice crystals in your drink," the startup said on its website.

"We refined the idea by 3D printing multiple iterations of the design . In order to improve the clipping mechanism we simplified the device and created the Chill Bit which incorporates the same clip, but uses a power drill to spin the beer. Chill Bits were made by over-molding liquid plastic onto metal drill bits using 3D printed molds," it said.
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​Software builds your life history from tweets

PTI | Oct 15, 2013, 05.32 AM IST
READ MORE Wikipedia|tweet|Gold|Cornell University|Carnegie Mellon University
WASHINGTON: Twitter users, beware ! Your tweets can reveal your life history! Researchers have developed a new technique that studies your tweets to identify the most significant events you have experienced and assembles them into an accurate life history.

The algorithm developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Cornell University in Ithaca can sort out news of important events from entirely trivial details from Twitter streams. Researchers Jiwei Li and Claire Cardie can use the algorithm to generate an accurate chronology of a person's life-changing events, without knowing anything about them.

Li and Cardie test their idea by mining the streams of 20 ordinary twitter users and 20 celebrities over a 21 month period from 2011 to 2013. They then asked the ordinary users to create their own life history by manually identifying their most important tweets, according to 'MIT Technology Review' .

For the celebrities, Li and Cardie used Wikipedia biographies and other sources of information to create 'gold standard' life histories manually. When they compared these gold standard life-histories against the ones generated by their algorithm, their method had accurately picked out many important life events that are also identified in the gold standards. However, the technique only works with users who tweet regularly and with enough followers to allow the algorithm to spot the unique pattern of responses that identifies important tweets.

Still, that is a significant number of people and Lie and Cardie said their technique can be broadly applied.
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Railway man’s fumigation chamber wins PM award

TNN | Oct 10, 2013, 02.35 AM IST
READ MORE man’s fumigation chamber|Basin Bridge train care centre
CHENNAI: B Selvam, a senior section engineer at the Basin Bridge train care centre in Chennai, had a problem. The pesticides meant to sanitise train coaches weren't working. Determined to find a solution, he scoured the crevices of a coach with a pencil camera attached to a laptop. What he found — colonies of pests and bed bugs behind walls, floors and the roof — spurred him to devise a fumigation chamber.

It not only proved a success but also won him the Prime Minister's Shram Vir award for 2012. "I used a network of narrow tubes through which poisonous methyl bromide gas was pumped into the crevices of coaches. A chamber was made so that coaches could be kept in isolation," said Selvam.

Southern Railway chief mechanical engineer S K Sood said, "The gap between the inner walls and the metal shell is six inches wide and there was no way to send pesticides into the gap. A chamber was made of used rexine to accommodate a coach so that fumigation could be done without affecting workers."

After it proved a success, a chamber to accommodate three coaches was made at the yard last year. The coaches treated in the chamber remain pest-free for six months.

Southern Railway general manager Rakesh Misra said, "Last year, we got a lot of complaints about pests in coaches. Now, the complaints have come down."
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