Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-bright-idea dept.

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:36PM (#199963)

    You could also use silver handles. They are "a bit" more expensive, though. :-)

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:45PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:45PM (#199971) Journal

    You could also use silver handles. They are "a bit" more expensive, though. :-)

    Or you could use the Tollens reagent [wikipedia.org].

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @05:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @05:02PM (#199979)

    They'd be gone as soon as you turn around. People will steal anything, especially anything thats worth money. People already break into houses to strip out all the copper, silver would be gone even quicker.