Oct 30 2009 $899 For The World's Cleanest Keyboard
Germaphobe? Worried about the bovine flu (it's coming, you watch)? Tired of operating a keyboard when you're 99.98% sure The Superficial Writer was touching with himself while using it? Enter the $899 Vioguard self-sanitizing keyboard.
The Vioguard keyboard is aimed at medical market uses and consumers in Canada. It uses two 25-watt UV lights to kill 99.99% of viruses and bacteria in about 90 seconds. Ultraviolet light is known to be affective against harmful microorganisms such as H1N1 flu, MRSA and molds.
Alternatively, only operate the keyboard while wearing surgical gloves, which is what I do. You should see everybody in the office tense up when I'm slapping them on! I think it's the winking that really gets to them.
The Cleanest Keyboard From Vioguard [techfresh]
Thanks to naas, who doesn't need a keyboard because he rocks dual mice.
Apr 25 2009 Red Rover, Red Rover: Glowing Puppies
Created in the same fashion as the glowing kitties we posted way back in December, 2007, scientists have bred transgenic (expressing a gene from another, unrelated organism) puppies that glow red under UV light. I don't want one. Ain't no devil dog livin' in this house!
A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones.
Greg Barsh, a geneticist at Stanford University who studies dogs as models of human disease, says creating a transgenic dog is "an important accomplishment", showing that cloning and transgenesis can be applied to a wide range of mammals."I do not know of specific situations where the ability to produce transgenic dogs represents an immediate experimental opportunity," Barsh adds. But transgenic dogs will give researchers another potential tool to understand disease.
Eh, I thought it was so you wouldn't kick your dog on the way to the kitchen for a midnight snack. I don't know about this whole disease bit. Which reminds me: any of you good at identifying rashes? I can send pics.
Hit the jump for what the puppies look like when they're not glowing. Except the middle one, the middle one isn't a glower.
Mar 4 2008 UV Light Kills Germs, Chance Of Being Normal
This handheld UV scanner costs $30 and runs on 4 AAA batteries. You wave it over an object you're going to touch and it kills 99.9% of germs. But I've got news for you -- it's that 0.01% of germs that'll kill you. No, seriously -- those are the ones that are so tough nothing can faze them. It's actually funny that I found this online because an ex-neighbor of mine had one of these and swore by it. He wouldn't touch anything without blasting it with UV first. So you know what I did? I coughed all over the back of the handle when he was out of the room. And then you know what he did? He died. Yeah, apparently he had some sort of disease that made regular germs fatal. Oops. I feel really bad too because the couple that bought his house are a-holes who I can't stand and they don't even keep the yard looking nice.
Handheld Disinfecting UV Scanner [ohgizmo]
