Movie about washing machines

A LOVE story that goes through many cycles, Ben Roper Films’ newest project, Final Spin, is a tale of the oft-ignored household appliances — the washing machine.

The production team is crowd funding a live-action short film about a washing machine that wanders into the woods, meets another washer, get friends… and fights a microwave.

The producers describe the film as a “story of a little machine with a big heart and a dream to experience the world, after a long life of clothes-washing service!”

Roper promises, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry… it will change your life.”

The movie is 50 per cent complete and of course still needs to be shot, and the team is hoping to raise an additional $13,000 to complete the film.

IF you’ve always wanted to scale walls like Spider-Man now is your chance to do so. A climbing system inspired by geckos has made it possible for a human to scale vertical glass.

In a dramatic experiment, an 11-stone volunteer crawled up a 12ft pane using sticky attachments on his hands and feet.

The gecko devices are technologically sophisticated and real. They employ the same natural molecular forces that allow gecko lizards to scurry around on ceilings.

Electrostatic Van der Waals forces cause neighbouring molecules to be attracted to each other. Although very weak, the effect is multiplied by thousands of tiny hairs that cover a gecko’s toes, allowing them to stick firmly to surfaces. Adopting the same principle, scientists created tiny tiles called “microwedges” to generate Van der Waals forces and produce a dry adhesive even more efficient than the gecko’s.

WHAT we think is a waste could actually be of much use! Fuel producer GENeco says the fuel created from human and food waste is also being added to Britain’s natural gas network.

The sewage company behind Britain’s first Bio-Bus said the vehicle can run up to 186 miles on one tank of fuel from human and food waste. GENeco, a subsidiary of Wessex Water, said the fuel for the 40-seat Bio-Bus is produced at the Bristol sewage treatment works, where human waste and food unfit for consumption are put through a process to create biomethane.

Mohammed Saddiq, general manager of GENeco, said, “Through treating sewage and food that’s unfit for human consumption we’re able to produce enough biomethane to provide a significant supply of gas to the national gas network that’s capable of powering almost 8,500 homes as well as fuelling the Bio-Bus.”

MEET Daisy, a ten-year-old Labrador who has discovered cancer in almost 551 different patients, including her owner. Dogs have a keen sense of smell, but usually used to find a bone or a tasty treat but this talented dog can sniff out cancer — like her owner’s undiagnosed tumour before it spread.

Dr Claire Guest began training her to sniff out the killer disease in urine and breath samples when she was a puppy. Dogs have 300 million scent receptors in their noses, compared to a measly five million in the human nose. Medical dogs are trained by sniffing samples of people already diagnosed with cancer and those of people without the disease so they can learn to tell the difference.

One day Daisy suddenly turned to sniff her owner and pawing at the affected area — the first time she has detected the disease actually growing in someone’s body, rather than by sniffing a sample.

When the owner, examined herself she found there really was something wrong. But thankfully, it was caught early and the lump was removed before it had time to spread.

Animal rescue charity Blue Cross presented Daisy with a medal for her achievements.