Personal TV censor
Worried about your kids watching the wrong stuff on TV? Don’t trust the official suitability ratings either? An inventor in Salt Lake City, Utah, thinks he has the answer.
A computer connected to a TV set or Personal Video Recorder (PVR) simply monitors electronic programme guides along with the closed captioning text that accompanies programmes for hard of hearing viewers. Software then searches for dubious key words and the computer decides – based on the user’s preferences – whether to block the entire programme or simply mute the sound for a short while.
Inventor Matthew Jarman gives some examples. If the programme uses the words “serial killer”, the system could block a programme altogether. The same could go for anything that promises an appearance by Pamela Anderson.
The word “damn” could be acceptable on the Discovery Channel, but muted on all movie channels. And the word “bitch” might only be permitted during a programme about pets, and never if preceded by “you”. Of course, parents could override everything with a password.
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Radio tyre warnings
Checking tires for tread wear is a dirty job, and not easy to do accurately. But drivers need to know when a tyre tread has worn down to 3 millimetres or less, at which point road holding starts to suffer. IBM has a neat way for a car to monitor itself and display a warning on the dashboard when its tyres need changing.
Passive RFID tags are moulded into the tire tread, or stuck into the grooves. While the tags are still in place they reply to a trigger signal continually beamed from an antenna mounted beneath the car. But, as the tread wears out some of the tags are shed and stop responding. So the car automatically “knows” when its tires are getting dangerously thin.
A vehicle could also tell which tire is needs changing because the radio antenna is mounted off centre and thus at unequal distances from all four wheels. So the reply signals received from each tyre has a slightly different delay. The same system could work with trucks and aircraft tires too, IBM says.
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Deep fried detector
Here’s an idea for anyone who’s felt sick after eating greasy fried food. Honeywell, based in New Jersey, US, has come up with an acoustic wave sensor that fits inside a deep fryer and constantly monitors the quality of cooking oil.
Fatty acids build up as oil is used in a fryer and eventually becomes deposited on food cooked in this way. Ultimately, this can cause indigestion for those who eat deep fried foods, Honeywell warns. Its acoustic sensor could detect this build up and warn a chef that the oil needs changing.
The system consists of an antenna that generates acoustic waves and a transducer made from a piezoelectric component, which picks up the acoustic wave and converts it into an electrical signal. The sensor is coated with material that reacts with fatty acids.
The acoustic waveform is damped and modified as fatty acids attach. A connected computer analyses this waveform signal and issues a warning to change the oil when it builds up too much.
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For more than 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled through the world’s weird and wonderful patent applications, uncovering the most exciting, bizarre or even terrifying new ideas. Read previous Invention columns, including:
Diamond-coated gadgets, computo-cooked perfection, Cellphone sunscreen, skateboard meets Segway, Taser gets tougher, razor light, wing-mirror cameras, body-wired headphones, rocket-repelling parachutes, tooth decay probe, laser healing, throwable game controllers, Microwave oven gun, Smart-card DVDs, Smart night scope, laser microphone, triple-standard DVD, ultimate body armour, Long-range stunner, tongue-o-vision, jellyfish injections, Flesh-burn sensor, fire-escape tubes, VoIP mangling, in-flight rearming, sense that fat, Designer speakers, throw-away parachutes, password-protected bullets, spinning touchdown, palmtop Feng Shui, Origami gadgets, mile-high showers, Hydrogen fuel balls, human cannonballs, the riot slimer, the bomb jammer, Apple’s all-seeing screen, the TV-advert enforcer, the wing-sprouting drone, the drink-driver arm scanner, laser spark plugs, remote-controlled implants,the “I’ve been shot” gun, the snore zapper, the guitar phone, explosive-eating fungus, viper vision, exploding ink, the moody media player, the spy-diver killer, preventing in-flight interference, the inkjet-printer pen, sonic watermarks, the McDownload, hot-air plane, landmine arrows, soldiers obeying odours, coffee beer, wall-beating bugging, eyeball electronics, phone jolts, personal crash alarm, talking tooth, shark shocker, midnight call-foiler, burning bullets, a music lover’s dream, magic wand for gamers, the phantom car, phone-bomb hijacking, shocking airport scans, old tyres to printer ink and eye-tracking displays.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
