Dick Sblog

Sometimes I’m just amazed at the ideas people have. Today I went to two events that had innovation at their hearts. At one, I met Matthew Thurling who has, single handedly and with almost no support, set up science.tv If you are interested in science, as I am, this is a great site – a sort of youtube with meaning.  A social networking site based around giving people the opportunity to upload videos that describe scientific concepts.  Brilliant – take a look or , better, produce and upload a video.

There are some fascinating videos here -  exploding  methane bubbles,  recombinant  DNA,  dandelions opening/closing in response to sunlight: wonderful. I wish I had thought of it first. Surely there’s an opportunity here for a major technology company to sponsor a set of videos explaining some core technological concepts, maybe around computing, for example. This would provide them with marketing profile whilst doing something useful to contribute to improving the lamentable state of UK science education.

At the other event I was exposed to GoScience, a local (to me) company that’s developed an underwater sensing robot based on a ring-wing design; take a look at their videos and watch this device in action.

The other, Tidal Generation, also a local start-up company, is a bunch of folk who worked for one of the established tidal energy companies. Despite their commitment to the technology and its potential contribution to helping reduce climate change, they left the business in near despair. Their problem was that conventional device designs required specialist vessels to position the tidal generators. There aren’t many such ships and, as a result, you have to book them years in advance, creating a major bottle-neck in deploying this much-needed technology.

Faced with this problem, they took a radically different approach and designed a device that could be deployed by a  simpler vessel at the rate of one a day (in the right weather conditions, of course). They also overcame the problem of maintaining generators running at 40m depth in tidal races of 4m/second by simply recognising that if they were made to float, they could be easily brought to the surface and then towed inshore for any necessary work. This is in contrast, once again, to the need for a specialist vessel with heavy lifting equipment.

Two great examples of using science and engineering principles to solve real, multi-disciplinary problems through teamwork and good project management.