Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Still Suits and Body-powered Devices

Posted by michael on from the stay-out-of-the-rain dept.

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."

3 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. When no human is present... by nsample · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The ultimate irony is that "human powered devices" are often at a complete loss when there's no human present to power them. Some uber-entrepeneurs have actually come up with devices that provide power to human-powered devices that don't have their humans attached.


    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. =)

  2. they forgot... by psamuels · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  3. wasteful, eh? by imaginate · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.