I used to write for the popular electronics press (well, I still do). However, some of my electronics ideas, while I thought they were good, would not sell a million magazines. Here's one that I thought could change the face of palaeontology. Son M. had found a job at the South African Museum, where he needed to clean Permean fossils. These are stone, through and through, and one needs to drill away surrounding rock -- without drilling into the fossil. This is painstaking and time-consuming work. So I designed an extremely sensitive Ohmmeter -- and with this I proved that the resistance within a fossil, and the resistance within the surrounding rock, are two different things. On this principle it should be relatively simple, therefore, to speed up the cleaning process -- if not automate it. The photo shows one of the fossils I experimented with.
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