Inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Ben Franklin are revered for their contributions to the world through their inventions. These inventions happened ages ago make the world what it is today but that doesn’t mean that inventing has stopped. From electric cars to cell phones, modern day marvels were created in this century and science keeps birthing new things every day.
QMilch: Organic textiles are trending in a big way, but this textile is what you would call exceptionally healthy. Made out of casein, the protein found in milk, QMilch is a German yarn made of spun proteinfibre. QMilch doesn’t tear or disintegrate easily because it is heated in such a way that its molecules fuse together. It takes about six litres of milk to make a dress, which actually feels like silk. According to the advertisement, the amino acid present in the dress improves blood circulation and prevents ageing.
If that is true we should all be wearing milk dresses all the time!
PrintBrush: This is the world’s tiniest inkjet printer. The promo video on YouTube (which itself is an example of a modern invention) proves how amazing this invention is. All you have to do is click a picture and then hold the small camera like device against a plain piece of paper, and move it back and forth along the paper to get a printout of the image you just took. A boon to the interior design and architecture industry, this camera can be used to take images of an area that can be immediately printed out and drawn on at the client’s convenience.
Cotton Candy Grapes: One would think that they came out of a genetic lab, but the truth is that these grapes are au naturel and are a product of cross breeding of two different varieties of grapes. They look like normal green grapes but taste and smell like the popular indulgent treat of spun sugar. Many people who have done blind tastings of the fruit said, “Cotton Candy” when asked what the fruit tasted of. A lot of people also said that if not told that the grapes were special, they would just assume that these were exceptionally sweet grapes.
Glow in the dark dogs: This is actually true, even though it is just a side effect. The South Korean inventor believes that this is the key to the cure of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. This cloning technique was done on a 2-year-old beagle named Tegon.
“The creation of Tegon opens new horizons since the gene injected to make the dog glow can be substituted with genes that trigger fatal human diseases,” researcher Byeong-Chun Lee says.
There are 268 diseases that dogs and humans have in common. This glow in the dark Tegon could open up a whole new world of possibilities for the cure of these diseases in humans.
Mini Brains: Where will science stop? There is no answer to this question since we all know that innovation and invention will never stop and this latest invention is just unthinkable. Scientists in London have literally grown brains out of stem cells. These mini brains will be used to figure out the cause of developmental disorders of the brain like schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer’s disease that affect millions of people all over the world.
Although they are very small and still don’t look anything like a fully developed human brain, the mini brains contain firing neurons and distinct types of neural tissue. Both the research team and other experts acknowledged, however, that the work was a very long way from growing a fully-functioning human brain in a laboratory.
Some of these inventions maybe fun and some controversial, but one thing cannot be denied, evolution takes millions of years, but humans are impatient creatures, we evolve and adapt to new things every day. We are almost growing brains in labs and new technology comes in every day making the old one obsolete. I don’t know whether this is good or bad, but the term, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ has kind of lost its meaning along the way.