Fold up phones, Grocery Shopping and Sheep

Following on from yesterday’s blog and question, where we were finding out what you are all doing with your summer holidays, we’ve found some exciting new technology that’s going to be popping up in an airport, a field and a pocket near you!

Tesco have decided to embrace smart phone technology and have created a virtual shop where you can scan items on a bill board at the airport and then they’ll be waiting for you when you get home from your holiday! Gone are the days of having to survive on a chunk of half mouldy cheese and a few dry crackers until you’ve recovered from your jet lag and can face the supermarkets again.

Another first in the world of phone technology is the development of a system that allows Swiss sheep to send a text to a farmer when there is a wolf nearby.  It works by a collar on the sheep picking up on their accelerated heart rate that happens when they spot a wolf stalking them.  There are hopes that this will stop as many sheep being eaten or scared into running away by wolves!

Something that may be a little more relevant to our electric car engineering challenge are the scientists and engineers from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology who have come up with a flexible battery.  This could see the advent of roll-up mobile phones and other electronic devices.  Ultimately (many, many years down the line) we could see the technology coming into our challenges allowing greater design flexibility.

Head over to our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/GreenpowerEducationTrust, and let us know which of these new inventions are the craziest and post some links of others you’ve seen in the news recently.