Mahlangu Hand-Washer
By ALICE RAWSTHORN
Irene van Peer is a Dutch designer who, with a group of colleagues, has devised a clever method for turning empty plastic beverage bottles into hand-washing devices to help prevent the spread of disease in Africa. Van Peer realized the need for such a device while working on sanitation projects in South African townships; many of the township residents have difficulty washing their hands because they lack easy access to water. Van Peer and her colleagues began by having conversations about the idea with people, mostly women, in the townships. “For me it was important to listen to their problems and to come back with a solution they could make themselves,” she says.
Eventually, van Peer and her colleagues hit upon an ingenious design. It involves converting the cap of an empty bottle into a homemade tap. The cap is pierced and then a long, skinny cone made from a readily available material like cork is inserted. One end of a length of wire is pushed through the cone, and the other is wound around a weight, like a stone, to nestle in the palm of the hand. The bottle is held above the hand facing downward, and when the weight is pushed up, the water is released and trickles down the wire toward the weight. Used carefully, a one-liter bottle can perform up to 60 hand-washes.
After showing people in the townships how to use it, van Peer also left instructions to be passed on from person to person. She named it the Mahlangu after Johanna Mahlangu, a woman who told her she planned to make the hand-washers for her day care center for disabled children.
Minicattle
By CLAY RISEN
Half a century ago, American cattle averaged less than 900 pounds. Today they average a hefty 1,300 pounds — which means more beef but also more waste and the need for more land. With declining farm sizes and the skyrocketing cost of animal feed, farmers are turning toward what sounds like a sideshow joke: miniature cattle.
Livestock bred to stand some 42 inches high and weigh about half as much as regular cattle, minicattle have been around for decades. But miniature-cattle breeders say that recently they have seen a sharp rise in demand, according to an article this year in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Information. “I’ve had a number of visits to my farm over the last few months, and frankly I don’t have enough cows to sell,” says Charles Townson, a breeder of minicattle in Cowpens, S.C. “Every calf I’ve had this year I’ve sold.”
Some minibreeds, like Townson’s Dexters, are naturally smaller than regular cattle, while others are petite versions of full-size breeds like Angus and Hereford. (According to purists, Dexters are therefore not technically miniatures.) What’s the advantage of smaller cattle? Miniatures, it turns out, are more efficient than their larger cousins. They consume a third as much feed, but they still manage to produce more than half as much meat. “The productivity per acre is at least twice as much as large animals,” says Richard Gradwohl, a retired business professor who, at his Washington State farm, developed 18 of the world’s 26 breeds of miniature cattle.
Breeders say miniatures are in particular demand from newbie farmers, whether they’re retirees looking for a second career or families who want to grow more of their own food. “A lot of people keep them as a homestead calf, just enough for the family,” says Chuck Daggett of the American Dexter Cattle Association. Smaller cattle are also bred to be docile, he says, making them more attractive to families with small children.
Moonvertising
By STEVEN KURUTZ
In March, advertisements for Rolling Rock began appearing on TV and on highway billboards trumpeting a bold new break-through. According to the ads, during the next full moon the company planned to use lasers to project its logo roughly 238,000 miles into space, where it would appear on the lunar surface, visible to earthly imbibers.
They called it “moonvertising.”Even before the first full moon came and went, with no sign of an extraterrestrial billboard, people began to suspect the obvious — moonvertising was a hoax, part of a viral marketing campaign created by the Goodby, Silverstein & Partners agency. As far-out as the concept sounds, a real moonvertising campaign was actually tried a few years ago by a marketing executive at Coca-Cola named Steve Koonin. Koonin read an article about how scientists measure the distance between earth and the moon using lasers and wanted to harness the technology to capture worldwide attention for Coke during Y2K. “In success it would be stupendous,” recalls Koonin, now president of Turner Entertainment Network. “Even in failure they’d be talking about you for a while.” Koonin hired scientists, and a few hundred thousand dollars was spent in development, but the plan collapsed because of logistical issues.
According to Jim Garvin, the chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, moonvertising is possible, if impractical for a number of reasons. While scientists have bounced lasers off the moon, they illuminated an area only about the size of a tennis court. “In order for an advertisement to be seen by people on earth,” Garvin says, “the laser light would need to cover an area about half the land size of Africa,” a challenge because the moon’s surface is dark and fairly nonreflective.
But should Madison Avenue get serious about Rolling Rock’s spoof campaign and launch a Kennedy-esque program to send an ad to the moon, Garvin theorizes that moonvertising “might take a decade to develop and cost somewhere between a big-budget movie and a week in Iraq.”