I know engineers, they love to change things!

A great quote from Dr. McCoy in the beginning of Star Trek-The Motion Picture and like many sayings, it has a measure of truth. A great example from the engineers in training at Rice University.

Trendy Houston restaurant gets Rice engineering students to develop soap dispenser

Rice University freshmen developed a unique type of soap dispenser using a common kitchen utensil that a downtown Houston restaurant will soon incorporate into its bathrooms.

It may cause diners to pause when they see the wall-mounted dispenser that looks uses a kitchen grater to dispense soap at The Pass and Provisions eatery.

The device is built around a kitchen grater that serves flakes of a high-quality bar of soap, according to a university statement.

Four Rice University freshman engineering students are currently working on the soap dispensers. The restaurant asked Professor Ann Saterbak, who teachers bioengineering, to offer a design that would fit its aesthetic, which called for a real kitchen utensil to be used to fit the restaurant's theme.

The five students, who call themselves "Fork Yeah," took on the challenge this semester as part of Saterbak's course.

"People use a lot of things in their daily lives that they take for granted," Saterbak said. "They don't actually think about the engineering design and testing that goes into simple, everyday things."

The students, Sarah Hernandez, Marie Hoeger, Kayla McCarty and Josiah Grace, say the soap grater may make diners' visits memorable.

The device is constructed using a rubber band that presses a bar of soap onto a spring-loaded grater that the user pushes to shave off flakes that fall gently from the dispenser.

The team is working on reinforcing the rubber bands' tension and on the aesthetics to make it look sleeker.

"Right now, it's made of really nice cutting-board wood, but it doesn't look like it could be in a bathroom all the time or at the level of a finished product," Grace said.

The team worked to determine the soap's ability to handle humidity without softening, as it would be in frequent and close proximity to hot running water.

"It doesn't have as much moisturizer as more common soap," Hernandez said. "It grates very well and doesn't leave a lot of gunk."

Hoeger said the bar soap makes the user work to lather.

"I think we all get lazy with liquid soap that just washes right away," Hoeger said. "You have to work to get the lather off. That's how your hands get clean."

Gotta love this. I'll see if I can check it out while I'm on patrol. But I was looking at the comments at the bottom and this was classic:

There going to law suits, because some idiots thought it is cheese and put it in his/her mouth.

True, very true. Probably a few lawyers handing out business cards now!