Eddy's Good News: Innovative stroke detector and new style sticky tape

Virgin Radio

27 Jun 2023, 10:51

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Tuesday 27th June 2023

Fantastic tech news from here in the UK as a simple gizmo fitted to a shopping trolley is able to diagnose people and save lives while they’re shopping.

Say hello to Atrial Fibrillation, or Afib, it’s a very common heart condition - two of my favourite man-friends have it, and it increases the risk of having a stroke, of the probably 50 million people around the world who have it, most of them won’t even know until it’s too late. But it’s so easy to diagnose, a simple pulse check will do it, so in a pioneering scheme in Liverpool, they fitted heart monitors into the handles of shopping trolleys and asked people if they'd like to volunteer, all they had to do was grip the handle for at least 60 seconds while shopping, then a light lit either green or red and over the couple of months the trial took place, they diagnosed 39 people who didn’t know they had Afib and who got a cardiologist appointment as a result and may go on potentially life saving blood thinning medicine.

Via: youtube.com

Good tech news from the USA where they’ve made sticky tape even more sticky, but much easier to remove and much stronger!

Say hello to Virginia Tech who’ve been inspired by the Japanese art of paper cutting and folding to do the seemingly impossible. Sticky tape was invented in the 1920’s to meet a demand from companies wanting to paint cars in more than one colour and went on to be a household must-have, but the worst thing about it is that it’s not sticky enough for anything heavy duty and it can be incredibly hard to get off sometimes, yet it’s a frustratingly weak bond, so how have engineers managed to make it not just 60 times stronger, but easier to remove? It doesn’t make any sense!

They were inspired by kirigami, the ancient Japanese way of folding and cutting paper to make shapes like snowflakes, so now imagine micro cuts on the sticky tape which mean that when you apply it, the bond is incredibly strong, but when you lift it off, the separation isn’t happening in a linear way, it’s going in lots of opposing directions, which makes it incredibly easy to lift off. Brilliant huh! Totemo kakkoii desu! (that’s Japanese for “that’s really cool”)

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org