Keep Cool Next Summer with These 3 Devices

As we prepare for what could be another hot summer, you may already be feeling the heat. Luckily a range of unusual and clever devices are now available to help make hot summer days more bearable.

Umbrellas serve a double function, protecting us from rain and sunlight; they also serve as a sort of personal ozone layer. The Fanbrella, which looks and feels just like a conventional umbrella, is perfect for keeping the rain at bay but boasts a delicate fan located underneath the cover, so that you can enjoy fresh cool air while you walk through the summer showers. The fan is small and quiet enough to be unnoticeable yet powerful enough to reduce humidity. Operated by a switch on the handle of the umbrella, it can be activated only when you need it most.

Humid nights are a horrible experience for most people, causing much discomfort and making sleep impossible. Unfortunately, a conventional fan in your bedroom will do little to mitigate your suffering, as humid air is simply blown around the room. An air conditioned bed is the perfect solution! This revolutionary furniture boasts quiet fans at the foot of the bed that help to circulate cool air from the opposite end, so you’re effectively sleeping on an air conditioned bed. With low running costs, summer nights without sleep could be a thing of the past.

iPhones are known for getting pretty hot to the touch when you’re using one, but now your smartphone could be the perfect device to help keep the summer heat at bay when you’re working at your desk or on the move. The small plastic fan fits onto the top of your iPhone and plugs into your phone’s charging socket (充电插座), so you need not worry about running out of batteries. With a quiet motor, you can be confident that colleagues won’t be disturbed and, if you remember to keep your iPhone charged, you can take the fan anywhere, from a sweaty train ride home to a walk in the local park with family.

With a range of inventive accessories to help make hot days more bearable, all we need now is a summer!

I write this on a spring morning, in the van I have called home for two years now.

From one small window, I have a view of joggers pounding the sunny path by the Oxford Canal, and the other looks onto the busy railway line along which trains travel from Southampton Docks to Birmingham.

The woods where I’ve parked my van have grown up between them. This ancient van, a vehicle designed for freedom and the open road, has proved a stable solution for surviving the current housing crisis.

I became a travel writer after my studies ended, committing to brief “residencies” with museums and art centres—where temporary accommodation is often provided in exchange for producing new work about a community. Over the years that followed, living and working on location in the polar regions or Scandinavia or the Alps, not settling down for very long, meant wherever I landed was always “home”.

During the pandemic it was necessary to adopt a more permanent engagement with locality. Oxford had often drawn me back. It’s a crossroads of reality and the imagination, the perfect city for a writer.

It takes a surprising amount of work to keep a tiny home in order: buying a used van online; ensuring the smooth running of a gas cooker and car batteries; fetching water and emptying the mobile toilet. I began to enjoy taking care of my immediate surroundings. Over the summer, I worked to turn waste-ground into a wild garden, replacing weeds with wild plants.

I made friends with the self-sufficient boaters living nearby, always ready to share knowledge on the low-carbon simplicity of life without electricity. I’ve learnt that comfort can be found away from the bright infrastructure of urban life: in watching the birds that nest in the tree and the foxes playing in the woods at dawn, in making a cup of coffee on a spring morning.

My step away from conventional housing has been a necessary act of personal economy, but the benefits include taking nothing for granted, and unexpected delight.

Libraries. They have that reassuring smell of well-read pages, are peaceful, have free Internet and, of course, abundant books.

But guess what? There’s a new kind of library sweeping the nation — a tool library — and it’s just as cool, but in all sorts of different ways.

It’s often said that the average electric drill is only used for 11 minutes in its entire lifetime. Granted, it doesn’t take that long to drill a hole, but still — that’s crazy. Yet the majority of households have one, even though DIY is actually a really infrequent activity for most people.

What if you could just borrow tools when you need them, and drop them back so that they can be used by someone else all the time you’re not DIY-ing? Well, in some parts of Scotland, you now can. Membership-based tool sharing services are popping up in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling, Linlithgow and Cumbernauld. They work just like a normal library but instead of books, you can borrow a massive range of tools and equipment when you need them, then drop them back when you’re done.

Zero Waste Scotland’s Andrew Pankhurst recently renovated (翻新) his house using the Stirling Tool Library. He said, “It’s amazing. It had all the tools I was looking for, and some I didn’t even realize I needed.”

And that’s the beauty of a tool library. Borrow a tool, use it for one afternoon at a small amount of cost of buying it and instead of it cluttering up your house gathering dust, it’s back off to a busy life all across town, week in and week out.

The tools available to borrow are mainly received as donations. The tool library will then repair them if needed and PAT test for safety ready to be borrowed and saved from going to landfill.

So next time you have a job to do around the house, why not borrow rather than buy?

Antibiotics, which can destroy or prevent the growth of bacteria and cure infections, are vital to modern medicine. Their ability to kill bacteria without harming the patient has saved billions of lives and made surgical procedures much safer. But after decades of overuse, their powers are fading. Some bacteria have evolved resistance, creating a growing army of superbugs, against which there is little effective treatment. Antimicrobial (抗菌的) resistance, expected to kill 10 million people a year by 2050 up from around 1 million in 2019, has been seen as a crisis by many.

It would be unwise to rely on new antibiotics to solve the problem. The rate at which resistance emerges is increasing. Some new drugs last only two years before bacteria develop resistance. When new antibiotics do arrive, doctors often store them, using them only reluctantly and for short periods when faced with the most persistent infections. That limits sales, making new antibiotics an unappealing idea for most drug firms.

Governments have been trying to fix the problem by channeling cash into research in drug firms. That has produced only limited improvements. But there is a phenomenon worth a look. Microbiologists have known for decades that disease-causing bacteria can suffer from illnesses of their own. They are supersensitive to attacks by phages, specialized viruses that infect bacteria and often kill them. Phages are considered a promising alternative to antibiotics.

Using one disease-causing virus to fight bacteria has several advantages. Like antibiotics, phages only tend to choose particular targets, leaving human cells alone as they infect and destroy bacterial ones. Unlike antibiotics, phages can evolve just as readily as bacteria can, meaning that even if bacteria do develop resistance, phages may be able to evolve around them in turn.

That, at least, is the theory. The trouble with phages is that comparatively little is known about them. After the discovery of penicillin, the first antibiotic, in 1928, they were largely ignored in the West. Given the severity of the antibiotic-resistance problem, it would be a good idea to find out more about them.

The first step is to run more clinical trials. Interest from Western firms is growing. But it is being held back by the fact that phages are an even less appealing investment than antibiotics. Since they are natural living things, there may be trouble patenting them, making it hard to recover any investment.

Governments can help fun d basic research into phage treatment and clarify the law around exactly what is and is not patentable. In time they can set up phage banks so as to make production cheaper. And they can spread awareness of the risks of overusing antibiotics, and the potential benefits of phages.

Our son, Tobey, has always had a generous spirit, as well as a very independent nature. Like many small boys, he liked to show his _______ for someone by doing a kind or helpful thing.

“I’m going to make Vanessa’s birthday cake,” he announced _______ at age nine. I knew that he loves his sister and he was eager to do something very grown-up to honor Vanessa’s special day but I was a little _______ about how he would accomplish this _______ task. Fortunately, the cake his sister most _______ was available and the instructions certainly didn’t sound too _______.

On the eve of Vanessa’s birthday, he _______ his homework and carried out the list of _______ carefully. He broke eggs into a bowl for the first time and measured out the other ingredients as though he were _______ priceless objects. Encouraged by his ________, I went to answer a phone call and was ________ to see him working his hands in the bowl. I wanted to shout but thankfully, the astonishment kept these words stuck in my ________. When he saw my expression, he immediately ________ me that he’d washed his hands ________ in the washbasin in front of the cupboard. After finishing all the ________, he put the cake into the baking pan carefully. Soon the smell of baking cake filled the house. Finally, the cake ________ beautifully. Vanessa was ________ by Tobey’s loving gesture and she gave him a big hug.

Now Tobey has become an accomplished cook who still likes to show the love by ________ others good food. People who are ________ in helping others may have much more ________ to develop powerful skills and get happiness more easily.