Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Hmmm. Somehow I won't be beta-testing the reverse-engineered water...
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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
MUUAADIIIBB!
And your body crumbles to ashes...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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."
Oh, yes.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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. =)
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.
Look at that hot chick over there ... overloaded and burnt out my Visor. Damn!
Stick with light cotton and layers in the desert. Black rubber, while quite stylish, is simply not workable.
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.
This is great news for dogs!
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
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
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.
I fail to see why this doesn't sound like a royal pain in the end.
-- MarkusQ
No, it just seems that way because we wash our hands afterwards.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Are you suggesting body-powered power suits, so that I would swing my arm to power the device that would swing my arms for me? Can't quite put my finger on it, but I think there's a flaw in this concept...
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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."
We'll compromise -- I'll use a hand-cranked radio to call in the transport choppers, because even if I could super-leap across the chasm, I'm too old for the super-landing on the other side.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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.
On the plus side, the noisy spectacle of my impact might distract the lizard-men long enough for you and the scantily-clad heroine to slip by them unnoticed (in spite of your boyish charm and her chromium bustierre.)
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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!
Ah, but upstream from you bears and wombats and whatnot are peeing in your spring.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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.