Great Inventors ~ Migrants Making America...

Inventing Honeyflow ~ Inspired Bee-friendly Hive!

Cedar Anderson and his Dad Stuart have invented the beekeeper's dream hive -- the Flow -- which splits the honeycombs apart in a way harmless to the bees but releasing the honey easily! Didn't happen overnight, though, and here's Cedar telling their story... And here you get close-up view of what's going on when the beekeeper turnkeys the Flow...

Greatest Inventions ~ Plotting Ingenuity & Impact!

Raconteur surveyed scientists, tech journos, etc to identify the Greatest Inventions of All Time and thence infographically plot them!

RePlan It ~ Jock Brandis & Co on Indiegogo!

Support our MIT Development Ventures inspiration and CNN Hero Jock Brandis and his crew at Full Belly and fellow documentarians on Indiegogo RePlan It!

Beam ~ Screw-in Smart(er)bulb Videoprojector...

Beam -- the smart(er)bulb videoprojector that fits in any light socket -- is Kickstarting now! Still just a baby-step towards Underkoffler's I/O bulb and luminous room and true smartbulbs.

Faraday ~ Working-Class Scientist-Inventor!

One of my favorite Barron's columns is The Long View by historian and author John Steele Gordon. This week he spotlights Michael Faraday: Working-Class Hero...

"Faraday would be the first great man of science to have a working-class background. Because the family had little money, Faraday received only the most rudimentary formal education. Indeed, he never mastered mathematics beyond simple algebra, an astonishing fact for someone who would become one of the world's greatest physicists. But if he had little formal education, he was a voracious autodidact. [The Danish scientist] Ørsted discovered that an electric current running through a wire induces a magnetic field around the wire. This was the first indication that electricity and magnetism, long thought to be completely different forces, must have a connection. [To explore this, Faraday] hung a copper wire, able to rotate freely, from a metal support. The wire reached into a vessel below containing a magnet in a pool of mercury. When he attached a battery to the support, the copper wire began to rotate around the magnet, following the lines of the magnetic field (a term Faraday coined) in the mercury. Faraday had converted electrical energy into mechanical, work-doing energy. In other words, he had invented an electric motor [...] One of the attributes of great scientists is a knack for asking the right question. And Faraday wondered, since an electric current could induce a magnetic field, whether a magnetic field could induce an electric current. [...] in 1829, Faraday found the answer to his question. He wrapped two copper coils on opposite sides of an iron ring. He found that when he attached a battery to one coil, there was a momentary electric current generated in the other coil. And when he disconnected the battery, there was a second momentary current. He soon found that it was changes in the magnetic field that induced the current. By simply keeping the magnetic field in continuous motion, he was able to generate a steady current. Faraday had invented the generator, a device that turns mechanical energy into electrical energy -- the opposite of the electric motor. It was the means of providing a bottomless supply of electric power, and the modern world could be born."

Truly one of the heroes of progress and civilization! See more in this Great Moments in Science and Technology video...

Breastpump Hackathon ~ MomTech @ Media Lab!

Today's Day 1 of Breastpump Hackathon here at the MIT Media Lab has explored a wide range of prospective new, better, and alternative approaches to improved connections between babies and busy moms!

"The health benefits of breastfeeding (both to mother and baby!) are numerous and include the reductions of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, female cancers, heart disease and osteoporosis. Despite the overwhelming data and worldwide endorsement of breastfeeding for at least two years, many women do not breastfeed at all or wean after several months. In particular, low-income, working women are rarely able to take extended maternity leave, to afford the cost of a pump, or to pump breastmilk at their workplace. In emerging economies around the world, women who go back to work wean their babies rather than using a breast pump."

There's lots of room for improvement and creative re-imagination of the current and prospective enabling technologies! Here's just a few of the key people -- Media Lab students, alums, and and friends, including many Moms and Dads -- who are making this goodness happen...

Future of Play ~ Sand Garden Born in Boston!

Ruth Graham writes in the Globe about the future of play, How the American playground was born in Boston...

"As children’s play spaces evolve, the spirit behind the original 19th-century “sand garden” is on the rise again. [...] in 1885, one charitable group decided to offer something of an experiment to the local children: a pile of sand, deposited for the summer in the yard of a chapel on Parmenter Street. Little did any of them know how much it would change the experience of childhood in America. [...] The spot -- across the street from what is now the North End public library branch -- was an immediate hit with children, who spent long afternoons digging with small shovels and making sand pies. [...] Today, playgrounds look nothing like that simple sandpile. Over the next century, playgrounds were filled in with dangerous but thrilling monkey bars, swings, see-saws, and metal carousels, all on beds of dirt or asphalt. Then, starting in the 1980s, a new trend began, in which these sometimes rusty and risky structures were replaced by standardized plastic structures, the asphalt giving way to rubber matting. Modern playgrounds have become so predictable, cushioned, and programmed that they are now coming under attack as a symptom of everything that’s wrong with contemporary childhood. [...] The most ambitious play thinkers argue that the ultimate goal should be returning the places we live -- or at least neighborhoods -- to kids. [...] Not all opportunities for play, in other words, need to be look like playgrounds. They don’t necessarily need to be permanent, expensive, or complicated. As Johnson puts it, “We ought to have play that comes and goes. We ought to dump some sand piles in the summer.” What people thought children wanted in the 1880s, it turns out, might be the same thing they want today."

Here's just a couple of the Globe's archival playground pictures!

Upsee ~ Harness Enables Kids to Walk & Play!

Thanks to John Farrier at Neatorama for spotting the Upsee...

"Debby Elnatan's young son, Rotem, has cerebral palsy. He has very limited mobility. She wanted to find a way to help him experience upright movement, so she invented the Upsee. It's a harness that straps a child to the legs and waist of an adult. Both the child and the adult wear sandals that are joined together and slip over their shoes. With the adult's assistance, the child can step, walk, dance and even kick. Both can keep their hands free while doing so. Elnatan took the Upsee to Leckey, a child accessory manufacturer in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. On Monday, the company released Upsee for global distribution."

The DailyMail shares more parent+child experiences...

"Short-term, the Upsee improves special needs family participation and quality of life, while research suggests it has the potential to help with physical and emotional development in the longer term,' she said. 'It has been humbling to see the progress and happiness the Upsee is creating; watching children to do simple things for the first time such as kicking a ball or playing with a sibling is wonderful for everyone involved, but especially the families."

First Dance ~ Haslet-Davis on MIT Leg @ TED14

Kate Torgovnick May writes on the TED blog that Boston Marathon bomb-amputee Adrianne Haslet-Davis dances on new MIT Leg...

"In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dance floor,” [MIT's Hugh Herr] says. “In 200 days, we put her back.” With that, Herr calls Haslet-Davis out for what will be her first dance since the bombing [...] on stage with her partner, professional dancer Christian Lightner. The two begin to dance a rumba, Haslet-Davis performing intricate back-and-forth footwork. [...] she twirls around her partner as the white fringe of her skirt flaps in the air. Her body looks lithe and unimpaired. Her bionic foot is encased in a white dancing slipper, just like her right foot. It’s a stunning moment. One that underscores Herr’s ultimate point. “Bionics are not only about making people stronger and faster,” he says. “Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into our electromechanics.”

Aha, TED has posted it online!

Lego Sorter ~ BrickIt's Robomation for Dynaway

JK at MITERS shares Lego porn, the Sorting Plant...

GoldieBlox ~ Girls Construction Book & Kit...

Check out GoldieBlox girls construction toys! Plus see earlier Kickstarter campaign.

Honda U3-X ~ Amazing Proto Robochairs...

I'm still wondering when Honda will ship their amazing robochair, the U3-X first unveiled in 2009...

Human-Powered Helicopter ~ Sikorsky Prize Win!

Kottke spots Sikorsky Prize-winning Human-Powered Helicopter!

Shark Wheel ~ Reinventing Rollers on Kickstarter!

Shark Wheel reinvents rolling; now Kickstarting!

AmoeBAND ~ Clever Reinvention of Band-aid!

Bizweek spotlights Band-aid Reinvention!

Jet Beetle ~ Ron Patrick's Streetlegal VW-Mod;-)

Ron Patrick's badass VW-mod streetlegal jet-powered Beetle!

Odyssey Inventor ~ Baer, Father of Video Games

Kottke spots Ralph Baer, The father of video games...

Silicon Valley ~ Epic PBS American Experience!

PBS American Experience spotlights Silicon Valley! Note, btw, how Silly Valley was really born as MIT-west with Francis Amasa Walker MIT President co-designing Palo Alto's Stanford University, Fred Terman MIT SB'24 creating Stanford Industrial Park, Bill Hewlett MIT SM'36 co-founding HP with first product based on his MIT Masters audio oscillator, William Shockley MIT PhD'36 co-inventor of transistors and co-founder of Shockley Semi, Bob Noyce MIT PhD'53 co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of both Fairchild Semi and Intel, Tom Perkins MIT SB'53 co-founder of Kleiner Perkins VC firm, Bob Metcalfe MIT SB'69 co-inventor of Ethernet and co-founder of 3Com, and dozens of other key MIT alumni figures playing early roles!

Getting Big Stuff Done ~ Stephenson Solves for X