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Still Suits and Body-powered Devices
Helmholtz writes: "Soon
body powered devices may be a reality thanks to work being done at the Center for Space Power and Advanced Electronics, a NASA commercial center in Alabama. The article talks mostly about military and space applications, but I think it'd be really slick to make still suits, not to mention portable audio players, PDA, and even laptops that are powered by energy that we are generating anyway."
why is it every new technology that comes out is required by law to be compared to the matrix? it was a good movie, but lets move on.
Trust me, if my computer (or PDA for that fact) were to run off the energy I make sitting at my freak'in desk, we all would be in a world of hurt. :-)
The only excersize I get is running to the bathroom several times after that Super BigGulp of Pepsi!
The only other thing that gets my fingers moving fast, is seeing a new article appear on SlashDot without any postings yet!
Newt-dog
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
What if, like, all these robots and shit found out about the energy we make, and, you know, like, totally put us in these vats and stuff, and sucked all the energy out, while our minds were placed in a prison that looked exactly like reality? That'd really suck, man.
- undoware.ca
guuurgh..my brain!! Stop sucking it!!!
Hmmm. Somehow I won't be beta-testing the reverse-engineered water...
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Owned by the push media, which specifically loves this kind of brainwashing.
It's sad to see grown up people watching weak sci-fi shows for kids and get all excited when something that doesn't suck comes up in the theaters.
I have a Seiko kinetic on my wrist that tells me reality goes faster than Slashdot (and tells me the time too).
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Does this still body suit need to be fused with a new form of fusion?
I really hate Dan Patrick.
MUUAADIIIBB!
And your body crumbles to ashes...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Don't even tell me about the next logical step...
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
There havn't been any matrix refrences yet.
While these cool ideas are unfortunately under-researched (according to the article), it is pretty obvious that the energy efficiency of the items you wish to power is a more important research goal than how you power them, as greater efficiency will always have a benefit, while improved energy reclamation techniques may be limited in usefulness.
IMHO, it is better to have efficient core business operations than a business/revenue model whose excessive burn rate losses are "balanced" by millions pop-up X10 video cam ads. The former model has greater inherent stability and therefore flexibility. While the latter is just plain annoying.
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
It was a fix. I demand a recount!
http://chronocentric.com/watches/winders.shtml
All the irony involved there makes me think I should just go with a battery in the first place. =)
I'm really glad that Taco Snotting is illegal here in Europe.
Human powered devices? Think of the Wall Street investment possibilities! With the stock price of old school bulk energy suppliers like Enron swan diving into the abyss, companies that provide fuel for the human machine will skyrocket. Of all the companies that seek to power the human machine, Taco Bell has to be the most efficient source as a catalyst for human produced methane gas. IANASP (I am not a Stock Broker) but if I had some extra cash lying around, I think I would sink it into Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc (YUM) -- parent company of Taco Bell and that chicken shop that supposably sells dead fried birds that never had bones, feathers or feet with the mascot that reminds you of the "Good Ole Days" before the Civil War (War of Northern Aggression for you Georgia boys). One stop everyday at Taco Bell could power your PDA, Cell Phone, AbTronics Belt, GPS, IBM's Digital Photo Linux Watch, iPod and a Madonna Vougeing Aibo via a rear mounted methane to electric converter. Plus, if Hollywood can predict the future, according to Sly Stallone's movie "Demolition Man", every restaurant is going to be a Taco Bell anyway...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Hey, Johnny Toaster! Here is a funny joke! How many hu-mans does it take to screw in a light bulb? None! We must cast off the yoke of opression and deny them light!
like a japanese cowboy, or a brother on skates.
When I was a kid my father had a watch more advanced than the one my grandfather had.
My father's watch would recharge itself by normal daily arm motions while my grandfather still winds his watch every morning.
Recycling energy sounds good, but one could probably just move less and eat less 8)
I'm curious to know how much energy the brain consumes and if it varies sensibly depending on the action performed.
Look at that hot chick over there ... overloaded and burnt out my Visor. Damn!
Now the computers are *REALLY* going to look at us as food.
We are the creator.
The creation eats its creator.
Man thats weird.
Stick with light cotton and layers in the desert. Black rubber, while quite stylish, is simply not workable.
A lot of technologies are thought up in sci-fi way before we ever get around to making them. I mean, they might be thought up wrong, but they're thought up. So I'm trying to figure out the earliest that this sort of idea appeared in sci-fi. A few people have mentioned the Matrix, but that's not exactly body-powered devices. The earliest I can think of is from a series called The Dungeon, edited by Farmer. And according to that, we should have all had a Baalbec A-9 last year. That's from 1988. Does anybody have anything earlier?
The electrostrictive polymers sound pretty cool. Not only would you be generating power for all your electronics, but you'd also stay warm and dry. I assume if it can protect you in space then it would be able to do the same here on good ol' Earth. Can you imagine it? Everybody wearing skin-tight "space-suits"? It'd be just like in the movies.... except luckily there are never fat people in movies wearing those things.
Here's one I didn't notice in the article. How about sucking chemical energy from blood chemicals? Basically we're talking about a dialysis-like blood filter that pulls out stuff like glucose and fatty acids and does its own cellular respiration.
Good for controlling your weight ... diabetes ... arteriosclerosis ... but bad for maintaining high energy and preventing chronic fatigue ... hmmm, maybe it isn't such a good idea. (:
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Seiko has the only Quartz watch of this kind, afaik.
However, self winding watches have been around for quite a while. Now, these watches don't run off body heat, sweat, brain waves or any else NASA might be thinking of, god knows. They work from adjustments in tilt, giving off enough power to build a reserve. Just getting out of the office chair and going for coffee, or off the couch and walking the dog, should be enough.
...and for an extra $30, you can get the fart-burning module which, depending on bowel volatility, can generate up to 7 extra watts an hour!
Nevrar
we can tap into a very available form of energy: Methane.
I guess I am not that much an asshole to be a solider/astronomer in the future. :-)
I got a self winding wristwatch that is at least 25 years old now, this is not newtech now coverting the kenetic to electricity that might be new, but not the concept of human powered devices.
If these devices work off the energy we generate, think of how much exercise some people will get trying to power all their stuff!
This could be the best thing for geek health since interlaced monitors were outlawed.
anyone here seen the matrix?
I never been so broke that I couldn't leave town.
If you could burn as many calories by sitting on a couch powering a TV as you would by going jogging ... now that would be something.
"I think it'd be really slick to make still suits..."
That's right! Forget about flying cars, I wish for the day when I can drink tepid water harvested from my own sweat and urine!
324006
This thing mainly relies on methane.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
They claim that 81W are waiting to be harvested from a sleeping human. This is incorrect, due to Carnot's law (a thermodynamic law). Basically if we have a heat source at Th (the body) and a heat sink at Tl (the environment) the maximum possible efficiency is
1- Tl/Th
All temperatures must be in Kelvin (or Rankine). So for a human at 37C = 310K, with an environment at room temperature 20C = 293K, the best efficiency is
1 - 293/310 = 5.5%
If they can get 3% efficiency with current materials, they're already doing extremely well. At this efficiency a sleeping human, putting of 81W of heat, can only provide
81W * 5.5% = 4.4W
of usable energy. It's true that 4.4W can power a fair bit of energy-efficient technology, but they're starting with a lot less available energy than they claimed in the article.
...the rubber is really made of flexible solar cells.
Power during the day, camoflage during the night.
What's this Submit thingy do?
...would be powered armor suits, much like they had in Starship Troopers (no, not the movie, the book by Heinlein).
Is your company running tools written by ma
I fail to see why this doesn't sound like a royal pain in the end.
-- MarkusQ
"for you body" --> "for your body"
"real cold" --> "realy cold"
And perhaps others. *sigh*
Typing with my eyes closed...
--MarkusQ
Somehow this topic reminds me of those old generator lights for bicycles. Anyone remember those? They made it so hard to pedal.
I seem to recall a simpsons episode with one of those too. Was it 7G13? I can't confirm it.
limited battery life is the bane of my mobile existence. i'd love to have some of these gadgets recharge my wearable computer while going about my day. gimme a stillsuit and a nutrient IV and i could go for weeks at a time without having to worry about what to do for dinner.
it's stilsuit. http://www.darkholmekeep.net/dune/stilsuit.cfm
Sorry. It's one of my favorite books. Yes, books.
thermowax
I seem to remember that there is a
location in southern saudia arabia
which is so dangerously arid and
large that aircraft overflights are
forbidden due to the danger associated
with rescue. In scientific american
a research team went there in airconditioned
humvees looking for an ancient
meteorite strick(and found it). They
also had airconditioned suits with
hoods. If you want to see a more
accurate rendering of a stillsuit look
at the scifi miniseries version of dune.
Less cool looking, but more functional.
I seem to remember that aside from water
reclaimation the suits in dune provided
evaporative cooling that was better than
cotton through the use of advanced
breathable fabrics etc,... kind of a
goretex 30,000AD.
Applied Digital Solutions supposedly has this new body heat powered body availible to buy. Pretty cool little device. Supposedly they are going to be supplying it for some new watch that does all kinds of neat stuff like GPS and CDMA..
It's called Thermo-Life. I think it's here.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Why bother trying to harvest energy from humans when you could harvest energy from horses, pit-bulls, cheetahs, anacondas, kangaroos, dairy cows, or houseflies? Fill an square mile of Nevada with houseflies wired to a generator and feed them sewage. How many small towns would that power? PETA would have a conniption fit, but most people have no sympathy for this easily enslaved species.
Through this logic, the Matrix can be seen as a metaphor for human domination over farm animals.
Or you would have seen the following right after the 81W for a sleeping person.
Strange, isn't it. It's almost as if they knew what they were talking about.
The following quote comes from http://www.europastar.com/ESWatch/watchtech/autom
The neat part is that because pocket watches were so popular at the time, the self-winders didn't have much of a chance to show off their advantages.
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
Is this life imitating art, or is it fiction making accurate predictions about science?
;)
I am of course, talking about The Matrix. I just hope that when they start making bioelectric power plants, they use cows instead of people.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Did anyone else think that it was ironic that the article starts out by callin the human body an "inefficient, energy-wasting machine"?
The energy we waste is orders of magnitude below any machine that humans have built; if we were to create a machine that did half of what the human body did with current technology, I guarantee you that it would lose a helluva lot more in heat than we do.
Besides which, the heat that we generate makes possible our ability to keep chemical reactions going that are WORTH the heat expenditure. Sure, it may be wasteful to eat a thousand calorie meal to power us for six hours, but show me an mp3 player that can power itself off something so readily available as plant material or a loaf of bread before starting to argue that our ability to convert energy from diverse sources results in a wasteful process. In other words, I'd rather be able to be omnivorous and waste a lot of that energy than to need to be powered off electricity that can only come from sources like burned fossil fuel (and we waste a HUGE amount of energy when we harness that power).
If you ask me, the human body is remarkably EFFICIENT, because of the elements it can use for power, and because the wasted energy that is derived from those elements is minimal in comparison to the waste from, say, and Athlon processor.
What they're ACTUALLY doing in this article is trying to harness the efficiency of the human body, not its inefficiency. It's easier to feel a soldier an extra couple of peanuts a day and let them power all their devices than it is to try to use lousy, lossy batteries to do the same work.
um, that irony is mentioned in the first page of the article. check out my other post for the REAL irony of the article... (hint, it's the post after yours)
I'm not too sure I'd want to drink water reclaimed from liquid and solid waste. Still suits are cool to read about in a novel, but I'll stick to spring water, thank you.
actually, after super-leaping the chasm, your boots will absorb the shock of landing and use the force to compress a gas, from which another device reclaims the energy. The recaptured energy should (theoretically) be sufficient to land three or four super-kicks to the mutant lizard-men on the other side, before you make it to the hypercopter.
I dunno, but depending on how you harvest energy, could you start to force your body to metabolize more and lose weight? I mean, it would be uber31337 if I could lose weight by listening to MP3s, don't you think?
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
As I allways thought, people has the last truth.
These days wake up our darkest side of life...Rwe obliged 2 save our future by choosing:O3 hole-greenhouse effect instead of accepting everydays gossip-nonsense chat?
posted by beqteq but no password in my inbox means it says Anonymous Coward. beqteq@yahoo.com
I think I have a way to stop both prison overcrowding, criminals and supply cheap power to everyone. If we can get the technology nicely refined we could simply use prisoners who are otherwise useless and the cancer of society, even better use the ones who people like our president put to death because they are supposedly not capable of reform or whatever.
Now they could be use to generate watts for everyone else. They could give back to society what they consumed before and give 20 years of electricity in 8 hour shifts. Hey thats a pretty good deal for someone who is on death row. Generate power for everyone or die, hmmm I think they might choose a 20 year contract with one of the many power companies as a cell rather than in a cell. I see this as a good way to give less developed nations power grids and to clean up the trash of their society plus lower the cost of electricty everywhere and stop pollution. Its an all in wonder plan and everyone benefits.
SO make them Cells rather than putting them in Cells.
-Phil
Stillsuits were probably popularized (dunno if the first occurance was) in the series Dune by Frank Herbert. They are body suits that collect bodily excretions, extract the water, and enable the wearer to drink the recycled water. Well-suited for living on the desert planet of Arakkis.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
from some sci-fi publication about the size of Readers Digest in which people who would go to rock concerts would be given a little strip of metallic substance which they would place on their foreheads.
The singer would wear a body suit lined with wires. The singer would receive the energy from the crowd through this suit which would then power the mic and such.
The singer could keep in contact with the board person since this person had to control the amount of energy that the suit was receiving (think a metal mesh with electricity running through it).
Anyway, the story is about this female singer who wants to kill herself and is finally able to enlist the aid of the board guy who overloads the mesh suit (crispy critter comes to mind).
If anyone can remember the name of the story and/or the author, it would be appreciated.