Faith

What is the purpose of a pressure washer?

Electric pressure washers and gas pressure washers are the two types of pressure washers available. Regardless of the source of power, all pressure washers operate on the same premise. The pressure washer uses a pump to pressurize water to a pressure of 1000 pounds or more, which is then driven through the spray wand and into the nozzle. Depending on the pressure, pressure washers can tackle some of the toughest cleaning chores (measured in pounds per square -inch). Some of the toughest stains that a power washer can quickly remove are listed below.

Calcium and lime deposits

Calcium and lime deposits are unsightly and hazardous, and they can be found on almost any hard home surface, including pools and retaining walls. When hard water generates mineral deposits on hard surfaces with which it comes into regular contact, calcium and lime deposits form. However, with the correct pressure washer, these can be easily removed.

Gum chewing

Gum is the most persistent stain observed in public places such as park seats. Furthermore, when chewing gum falls on concrete roads or tile floors, it sticks quite well and requires a lot of scraping to get it off. However, instead of kneeling and scraping them off, a good power washer will suffice.

Graffiti

Graffiti is both an art form and a form of vandalism. Graffiti stains are also incredibly difficult to remove, particularly when one’s property has been vandalized. Graffiti may be easily removed from concrete surfaces with pressure washers rated between 2000 and 3000 psi.

Grease and oil

When its inventor, Frank W. Ofeldt, observed that his portable whisky’s steam output could move around oil on the floor when directed downward, he stumbled across the pressure washer. For grease and oil stains on hard surfaces, pressure washers have been the recommended cleaning method since then.

The Giraffe Pressure Washer

The Giraffe Pressure Washer by Giraffe Tools is one of the top pressure washers on the market. Because the Giraffe Pressure Washer is powered by an electric motor, it is quieter, lighter, and emits no pollutants. However, the following are the qualities that make it one of the best electric pressure washers on the market:

The effectiveness of the motor

In comparison to its competitors, the Giraffe Pressure Washer has a higher motor efficiency. The Giraffe Pressure Washer is powered by a German-made motor that provides exceptional performance.

Spraying nozzle with many modes

The Giraffe Pressure Washer comes with three useful settings that may be mixed and matched at will. For every pressure washing need, the foam spray, tanning spray, and direct flow give a quick and enhanced cleaning function.

System of filtration

A thin stainless filter and an industrial mesh are included with the Giraffe Pressure Washer to ensure that the water is clear of contaminants. An auto-priming device on the machine optimizes filtration and purification.

Aesthetics

The usefulness and elegance of the Giraffe Pressure Washer set it apart from the competition. The machine boasts a unique soundbox design that is both attractive and functional, as well as being lightweight and portable.

Nonetheless, the Giraffe Pressure Washer stands out the most because of its filtration technology, which provides automatic water filtering and purification. The machine is also equipped with a high-performance electric motor that allows it to perform a variety of cleaning tasks. The Pressure Washer is also built with safety in mind, having a total stop system (TTS) that turns off the switching gun automatically.

Coming on the heels of the Neuralink announcement earlier this month—complete with video showing a monkey playing Pong with its mind, thanks to a wireless brain implant—researchers with the BrainGate Consortium have successfully demonstrated a high-bandwidth wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) in two tetraplegic human subjects. The researchers described their work in a recent paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering.

BCIs interact with brain cells, recording the electrical activity of neurons and translating those signals into action. Such systems generally involve electrode sensors to record neuronal activity, a chipset to transmit the signals, and computer algorithms to translate the signals. BCIs can be external, similar to medical EEGs in that the electrodes are placed onto the scalp or forehead with a wearable cap; or they can be implanted directly into the brain. The former are less invasive but can be less accurate because there is more noise interfering with the signals; the latter require brain surgery, which can be risky.

BrainGate is an implanted device, used in research efforts focused on treating patients with spinal cord injuries or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Back in 2012, two paralyzed subjects with BrainGate implants successfully controlled a robotic arm; since then, subjects have been able to type on computers and use tablet apps. That BrainGate system employs a large, gray box cable, tethering the implanted sensor array to the external computers that decode the signals. This has restricted the system’s usefulness because technicians need to be on site during operation and take the cable with them when they finish a session.

As for the latest Neuralink breakthrough, Ars Science Editor John Timmer wrote last week that most of the individual pieces of Neuralink’s feat have been done before—in some cases, a decade before (BrainGate is among those earlier pioneers). But the company has taken two important steps toward its realization of a commercial BCI: miniaturizing the device and getting it to communicate wirelessly, which is harder than it sounds.

There were two participants in the clinical trial—a 35-year-old man and a 65-year-old man—both of whom were paralyzed by spinal cord injuries. They were able to continuously use the BCI for a full 24 hours, even as they slept, yielding continuous data over that time period. (The medical-grade battery lasts for 36 hours.)

“We can learn more about the neural signals that way because we can record over long periods of time,” said Simeral. “And we can also begin to learn a little bit about how people actually will use the system, given the freedom to do so.” His team was encouraged by the fact that one of its study participants often asked if they could leave the wireless transmitters on a little longer. He has a head tracker he can use as a fallback, but several nights a week, he would choose to use the wireless BrainGate system because he liked it.

“Right now, we typically decode or interpret the spiking activity from networks of neurons,” said Simeral. “There are other encoding mechanisms that have been studied in the brain that have to do with how the oscillations in the brain are related to these spiking signals. There’s information in the different oscillation frequencies that might relate to, for example, sleep state, attention state, other phenomenon that we care about. Without a continuous recording, you’ve surrendered the ability to learn about any of those. Learning how this all happens in the human brain in the home as people are behaving and having different thoughts requires having a broadband system recording from the human brain.

“The ability to potentially have individuals with disability using these systems at home on demand, I think is a great step forward,” said Simeral. “More broadly, going forward, having more players in the field, having more funding, is important. I see nothing but great things from all of these interactions. For our own work, we see things on the horizon that were impossible five years ago, when there was essentially nobody in the corporate world interested in this space. So I think it’s a very promising time.”

A mouse is an obvious candidate for cord-cutting. Going wireless ensures that you don’t get tangled up in your cord or have to deal with cable drag, and wireless connections have become so reliable that even gaming companies are offering wireless mice with no real lag issues.

The situation is a bit more complicated for people using multiple devices. Bluetooth connections may be stable, but that doesn’t mean I want to pair and re-pair my mouse repeatedly. Sometimes, being able to just plug in a mouse seems easier.

But there’s another way. The Razer Pro Click Mini joins a selection of wireless mice that let you pair with three Bluetooth devices and pick which machine you’re controlling with the press of a button. You can add yet another PC to the mix by using its included wireless dongle, for a total of four connected devices.

The $80 Pro Click Mini is a more portable, cuter version of the original Razer Pro Click, which costs $20 more. The new mouse has a longer battery life and is highly programmable, from its five-way wheel that can manage two different scrolling styles to its ability to store macros. But rivals with similar feature sets offer even longer battery life, a quieter scroll wheel, and even an easier way to toggle across your connected devices. Does Razer’s new mouse do enough to keep up?

Table of Contents

• One wireless mouse, four PCs
• Battery life
• Rattly, but highly functional, scroll wheel
• Quiet clicks, though
• Even more programmability
• Gaming-grade sensor
• Big(ger) where it counts

But it’s not so easy to toggle across Bluetooth devices with the Pro Click Mini. You switch machines by pressing the same button that you long-press to start Bluetooth pairing. But unlike with the MX Anywhere 3, MS7421W, and Spectre 700 mice, there’s no image on the mouse itself to let you know what you’re currently connected to. Instead, you have to memorize a color code. A light on the mouse’s underside turns blue when connected to PC 1, for example, green for PC 2, and greenish-yellow for PC 3. It’s a tiny light, and two of the colors are pretty similar, so the system isn’t exactly intuitive.

Moving to the device with the dongle is much easier. You just toggle a switch on the mouse’s underside from Bluetooth to 2.4 GHz mode. The dongle connection is supposed to be more reliable and induce less lag than the Pro Click Mini’s Bluetooth option. Both worked well for me, even alongside a Bluetooth keyboard.

Gaming-grade sensor

Razer’s gaming heritage means it isn’t afraid to get into more extreme specs. Even though the Pro Click Mini is a productivity mouse, it uses a sensor found in some of Razer’s gaming mice, including the newer Razer DeathAdder V2 X HyperSpeed and the MMO-focused Razer Naga X. Razer toned down the Razer 5G sensor’s capabilities in the Pro Click Mini, however, as you don’t need the highest counts per inch (CPI) or max velocity when you’re working on office tasks.

The Pro Click Mini supports a sensitivity of 200 to 12,000 CPI, adjustable by 100-count increments. That’s a notably lower max than the Naga X’s 18,000, but at 12,000 CPI, you should be able to zip across even large 4K screens pretty quickly. By comparison, the MX Anywhere 3 tops out at 4,000 CPI.

You can store five CPI settings in Synapse. But there’s no default button for CPI toggling like you’ll find in some gaming mice. You’ll either have to program a button to change CPI stages or do it manually in Synapse.

Firefighters needed four hours to douse the flames, in part because the battery kept reigniting. When the blaze was finally over, about 30,000 gallons of water had been poured on it—what the department normally uses in a month.

Electric vehicle fires aren’t common, but they’re different enough from fossil-fuel-vehicle fires that firefighters need new approaches. One firm in Europe has developed a shipping container-like box in which a blazing EV can be deposited and blasted with water from all sides. But it requires a dedicated truck, making it a costly addition for a fire department.

Next year, though, firefighters will have another option—a high-pressure nozzle that can be shoved underneath a burning vehicle to deliver water directly into the battery. Rosenbauer, an Austrian company that makes firetrucks and other equipment, says it has successfully tested the devices on a variety of battery designs, including pouch, prismatic, and cylindrical cells.

Most EVs house their batteries flat and low in the chassis, which allows for spacious interiors and a low center of gravity that benefits handling. But when a fire breaks out, there’s a lot more car between the battery and any water sprayed on top, which is the traditional technique.

The new device allows firefighters responding to battery fires to use water more efficiently and hopefully extinguish the fire faster. First, firefighters make sure nothing else is burning on the car (seats, tires, etc.). Then they slide the device under the battery before retreating about 25 feet to a control box. Finally, they activate a “piercing nozzle” which punches into the battery pack to deliver water directly to the cells.

In a preview of the technology last year, Rosenbauer said that only around 260–1,000 gallons (1,000–4,000 liters) of water are needed to bring a flaming battery pack down to a safe temperature. That’s around two orders of magnitude less than it took Texas firefighters to put out the Model S in April.

If a vehicle is on its side or roof, or if there isn’t enough clearance under the vehicle, firefighters can place the device inside the car or on the exposed undercarriage—whatever will give them safe access to the battery. The nozzle can also be left attached to the vehicle as it’s being towed away so firefighters have quick access should the battery reignite.

While the original Moto 360 was an Android Wear (now Wear OS) smartwatch, with the Moto Watch 100, we’re seeing the feature-phonification of the Motorola smartwatch. It runs something called “Moto OS,” which the website describes as “a streamlined experience focused on health and routine that dramatically increases battery life.” There won’t be any third-party apps, or an app store, so you’ll be stuck with whatever the packed-in features are. As far as we can tell from the user manual, that seems to be fitness tracking with 26 activity modes, continuous heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, and displaying the time and weather. When paired with an Android 5.0+ or iOS 10+ phone, you’ll get notification mirroring and remote media control. There’s also a companion smartphone app.

While the original Moto 360 was an Android Wear (now Wear OS) smartwatch, with the Moto Watch 100, we’re seeing the feature-phonification of the Motorola smartwatch. It runs something called “Moto OS,” which the website describes as “a streamlined experience focused on health and routine that dramatically increases battery life.” There won’t be any third-party apps, or an app store, so you’ll be stuck with whatever the packed-in features are. As far as we can tell from the user manual, that seems to be fitness tracking with 26 activity modes, continuous heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, and displaying the time and weather. When paired with an Android 5.0+ or iOS 10+ phone, you’ll get notification mirroring and remote media control. There’s also a companion smartphone app.

Most people are probably familiar with iodine through its role as a disinfectant. But if you stayed awake through high school chemistry, then you may have seen a demonstration where powdered iodine was heated. Because its melting and boiling points are very close together at atmospheric pressures, iodine will readily form a purple gas when heated. At lower pressures, it’ll go directly from solid to gas, a process called sublimation.

That, as it turns out, could make it the perfect fuel for a form of highly efficient spacecraft propulsion hardware called ion thrusters. While it has been considered a promising candidate for a while, a commercial company called ThrustMe is now reporting that it has demonstrated an iodine-powered ion thruster in space for the first time.

Ion power

Rockets rely on chemical reactions to expel a large mass of material as quickly as possible, allowing them to generate enough thrust to lift something into space. But that isn’t the most efficient way to generate thrust—we end up trading efficiency in order to get the rapid expulsion needed to overcome gravity. Once in space, that need for speed goes away; we can use more efficient means of expelling material, since a slower rate of acceleration is acceptable for shifting things between different orbits.

The current efficiency champion is the ion thruster, which has now been used on a number of spacecraft. It works by using electricity (typically generated by solar panels) to strip an electron off a neutral atom, creating an ion. An electrified grid then uses electromagnetic interactions to expel these from the spacecraft at high speed, creating thrust. The ions end up being expelled at speeds that can be an order of magnitude higher than a chemical propellant can produce.Advertisement

Only a relatively small amount of material can be accelerated at once, so this can’t generate anything close to the amount of thrust produced in a short period of time by a chemical rocket. But it uses far less material to produce the same amount of thrust and, given enough time, can easily produce an equivalent acceleration. Put differently, if you can be patient about your acceleration, an ion engine can do the equivalent amount in a form that uses less mass and less space. And those are two very important considerations in spacecraft.

Critical to making this work on a spacecraft’s energy budget is a material that can be ionized without requiring much energy. Right now, the material of choice is xenon, a gas that’s easy to ionize and resides several rows down the periodic table, meaning that each of its ions is relatively heavy. But xenon has its downsides. It’s relatively rare (it’s only one part per 10 million in our atmosphere) and must be stored in high-pressure containers, which cancel out some of the weight savings.

Enter iodine

Iodine seems like an ideal alternative. It’s right next to xenon on the periodic table and normally exists as a molecule composed of two iodine atoms, so it has the potential to produce more thrust per item expelled. It’s even easier to ionize than xenon, taking 10 percent less energy to lose an electron. And, unlike xenon, it happily exists as a solid under relevant conditions, making storage far simpler. Just a bit of heating will convert it to the gas needed for the ion engine to work.

The big downside is that it’s corrosive, which forced ThrustMe to use ceramics for most of the material that it would come into contact with.

The thruster design included a fuel reservoir filled with solid iodine that could be heated with resistance heaters powered by solar panels. The iodine itself was inside a porous aluminum oxide material that kept it from fragmenting from the vibrations it experienced during launch (the aluminum oxide is 95 percent open space, so it didn’t subtract much fuel storage). The tank is connected to an ionization chamber via a small tube; when the system was cooled after use, enough iodine would solidify in this tube to seal off the fuel from the outside world.