. . . it's on again . . .

At some point it came to my attention that a cardinal challenge with drip irrigation is that mud clogs may accumulate in the pipes if the pipes’ pores are in contact with the ground. Evidently this would stifle the pipes. Now, isolating the location of clogs in lengthy pipe networks is a tall order.  So I ruminated on how we could design irrigation pipes that would be rigged with instrumentation for this purpose. Using light could seem a natural avenue for one’s wit to take in such an undertaking since this is how we ourselves see. Accordingly, I imagined concentrated light beams, laser perhaps, being reflected off the lining of a pipe, as they propagate along it, in a way that could locate any clogs.  It occurred to me that this solution was just the thin end of the wedge. The remedy I’d come up with could also be used in conduits of fluids in other contexts such as natural gas pipelines. In these the discontinuity could be caused by perforations conceivably factitious as in ...

In my recent foray into horticulture I took interest in growing broccoli and cauliflower but discovered early on that these crops don’t fare too well in summer because of the heat. I mused on the practicability of quenching the temperature around the crops in an open space such as a garden. I thought, if we could enhance convection in the environment ambient to the crops that could have a quenching effect on them. Googling a bit I came across a phenomenon known as “thermomagnetic convection” that occurs in ferrofluids. With this, the temperature dependence of the magnetic susceptibility of ferrofluids can be used to complement conventional convection by subjecting the fluid to an external magnetic field. Cooler parts of such fluids have a greater magnetic susceptibility and so are attracted to regions of higher magnetic field strength by a so called "Kelvin body force" to displace warm parts of the fluid. I wondered if this occurrence could be found in matter other than ferro...

One night as I did my laundry, with confidence that the process needed no supervision I went to a different room to do something else expecting the usual audio notification I’d get when the process is complete. Sadly I’m about as sharp as a marble so I totally forgot about the task I had initiated in the other room. After a while, to my horror when I put my foot on the floor I felt a soggy carpet. A water supply pipe had unfastened from the machine and the water pump supplying the machine was gushing out water at a furious flow rate. Looking back at the incident I thank God the power extension bars that were on the floor miraculously did not have the water touch their live components. It could have meant electrocution or some other catastrophic outcome for me and other people in the house. I got to thinking about how this hazard could occur in other settings especially in factories where they might work with high electrical power and processes that involve liquids that could leak and g...

I’ve agonised over the experience of dropping valued electronic gadgets to the ground. There came a point when I imagined how alleviating it would be if we could add functionality to these devices such that when you drop one it wouldn’t fall straight to smash on the ground but rather cushion itself better than phone cases do.  I couldn’t help feeling inclined to explore a scheme where the device would detect it was falling and use it’s electrical energy to transiently enact this protection. Being me, I gravitated towards looking for some property of the earth that could interact with this momentary state of the device, say, a phone. So I thought of the earth’s magnetic field. If we went down this alley we might say of the concept, “We’ve conjured up a form of ‘geomagnetic cushioning’.” Entertaining the idea further I thought, from  electrodynamics we’re  cognisant of a principle known as the Lorentz force law (which I've mentioned in prior articles) that informs us a char...