Last week’s most-read news items selected by our editorial staff: mini wind turbines, infrared to recognise Italian pasta and an ingenious project to recycle face masks
What are the most read news stories of the last week? What were the trending topics in the world of innovation? What was talked about on social networks around the world? In order to answer these questions, we have selected the news items which, over the past week, have had the most visibility on our portal and have aroused the curiosity of our readers.
Most read news items of the week
Recycling masks to build roads: the RMIT project
Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) have developed a project to recycle surgical masks into construction material for roads and pavements. If not disposed of properly, surgical masks can become an environmentally harmful pollutant waste. To get an idea of the extent of the problem, an average of 6.8 billion disposable surgical masks are used worldwide every day, and more than half of these are not disposed of properly. A big problem for the environment! Read the full article
Mini wind turbines produce energy even without wind
Wind power is the energy of the wind, the kinetic energy produced by a moving mass of air. In Great Britain, however, there is a start-up company that manages to produce wind energy even without wind. It is Alpha 311, a London-based company that has designed special mini wind turbines capable of generating energy even without air movement. The devices are very small (just 68 centimetres high and weighing 4 kilograms) and made entirely of recycled plastic. Their unique vertical design is designed to capture and exploit even the slightest air movement. Read full article
100% Italian pasta? Find out with infrared
How can we be sure of the food we eat? On many packages of pasta, for example, there are labels and stickers stating that the product is ‘100% Italian’. But can we trust them? To dispel any doubts on the part of consumers, a team from the Institute of Food Science of the National Research Council (CNR-Ispa) has developed a truly innovative project. The researchers have developed an infrared system that can identify Italian pasta and distinguish it from ‘counterfeit’ pasta. All this is possible,” explained Dr Annalisa De Girolamo of the CNR, “thanks to FT-NIR technology or infrared spectroscopy. Read the full article
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