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Serious Business
Super BowlsDoing your business is serious business in Japan with three new high-tech toilets. The Intelligence Toilet, which retails for $3,300 and up, checks sugar levels in your urine and sends the data to your PC over a home network. The portable Wrappon, $1,250, which comes with a remote control, seals waste inside diaper-like bags in a bin below the seat. And the Alauno, $2,900, made of stain-resistant glass, packs its own scrubbing bubbles, helping its spiral-shaped siphon flush clean while also conserving water.
-- Japan
Germ-Detecting Wipes
Disinfecting wipes are great, but what if they could tell you exactly what’s living on your kitchen counters? Researchers at Cornell University have created a special fabric that, when immersed in a fatty solution, changes color if you’ve picked up E. coli bacteria. In the future, this technology could be used to detect other types of biohazards.
-- U.S.
Good Pour
The Twist & Spout is so simple it’s brilliant. Attach it to the mouth of a regular 2-liter bottle, and presto, you’ve got a watering can! A smaller kitchen version of the gizmo, designed by Nicolas Le Moigne of Switzerland, makes it easier to dispense a round of Sprite. It’s available in two sizes for $5 each at perpetualkid.com.
-- Switzerland
A New Kind of Houseboat
There’s a new trend in Dutch architecture: houses that float. The need to build on all available land—lakefronts, riverbanks, areas below sea level—to accommodate the country’s growing population has many developers embracing the concept. The typical amphibious home has a hollow concrete foundation that acts like the hull of a ship, rising and falling with the tides. The structure is connected to mooring posts that keep it from drifting away. In an alternative “ecoboat” design by retired engineering professor Frits Schoute, wind and wave energy would be used to heat the home and filter seawater for drinking.
-- The Netherlands
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