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Two high school students, Sum Ming Wong and Kin Pong Li, both living in Hong Kong have designed and built a door handle that kills germs, thus preventing the spread of disease through hand contact. They demonstrated their handle at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair held last month in Pittsburgh—taking second place in the materials science category.
One of the ways that ailments such as cold and flu are passed is via contact, and one of the main avenues is via door handles—a sick person coughs into their hand then uses the handle to enter a bathroom, office, or other location, depositing germs. Others that enter the same room pick up the germs from the door handle and invite the germs into their own bodies by touching their eyes or noses. Door handles that kill such germs on contact would stop them from spreading—that is what Wong and Li set out to build.
The pair started by noting that a mineral called titanium dioxide is quite toxic to germs, but it hasn't been used as an antibacterial agent much because it requires the presence of UV light. To get around this problem, the team ground some of the mineral and then used it to coat a glass tube, they then affixed a LED onto one end of the tube—it shines UV light onto the insides of the glass tube—any germs that land on the outer side are then killed by the mineral (testing showed it to be 99.8% effective). Putting the glass tube onto brackets allowed for it to be used as a door handle.
Read More at PHYS.ORG
[Source]: Society for Science & the Public
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:10PM
Hmmm.... if this thing emits UV light, will it attract flies? If so it might end up germier than a standard door handle, especially once you get a good coating of grime on the magic surface to shield the bugs from the antibacterial voodoo.
Assuming the above is not a problem, however, why stop at door handles? Taps [1], kitchen surfaces.... all sorts of applications. I would welcome it in hospitals and commercial / industrial kitchens.
However it will probably end up being marketed to domestic users, who seem to think that they can and must live a 100% germ-free existence, then wonder why their immune systems are all shot to hell. Before long you won't be able to buy any door handle or appliance that isn't coated in this material, which will push up the price (and power bill, for the UV light) for consumers like me.
Everybody go eat some dirt, then get off my lawn.
[1] AKA "faucets"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:44PM
Soylent does unicode, learn it, use it, love it:
Assuming the above is not a problem, however, why stop at door handles? Taps¹
...
¹AKA "faucets"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @01:28PM
Or you could make use of the fact that SN supports <sup> 1 (it seems to be missing in the "allowed HTML" list below the edit box, though2) and could use that to generate footnote signsॐ.
1) and <sub> as wellas demonstrated here
2) which is a clear sign that this list is not automatically generated from the code that actually recognizes the tags
ॐ) which has the advantage that you're not restricted to characters for which Unicode provides a raised version
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @12:21PM
Oh that's cool! now I can speak in waves :) *makes dolphin sounds*