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Ultra Efficient Chip Cooling Passes Boeing Tests
joelgrimes writes "A company called Cool Chips plc is showing off a cooling device that claims unbelievable efficiencies using what they call 'quantum mechanical electron tunneling'. A choice quote from their press release: "A panel of Cool Chips one inch square will provide enough cooling for a refrigerator; a panel about two inches square will have the capacity to provide the air conditioning for a living room". They also mention using them to cool microprocessors. I used to think this company was nuts, but Boeing is making me think twice. Oh, and by the way, they work in reverse to make electricity from heat. Should I sell my baseball cards and buy their stock now, or can an army of slashdotters poke holes in their claims?" Fascinating stuff. Makes peltier coolers look pretty old school. In the press release they claim up to 80% efficiency, compared to 5-8% for peltier coolers and 50% for conventional refrigeration. I will say the cool chips corporate logo is baffling, though.
Now stop driving on the wrong side of the road before I take away your tea time. :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Quiet yankie, us aussies get chips (unless we're at maccas), and i got half-pissed watching starwars in gold class this arvo.
:-)
Oh yeah yoda is... hmmm... tough
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Only in America pommes frites are called french fries.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Ehm, no... that would be the northern ice cap.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
Don't blame me, I think I voted for Buchanan.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The theory is: If the ice caps recede, so will glaciers, releasing land for use. I've seen the figure that if all the ice caps and glacial areas melted, the ocean levels would rise only a few inches, not enough to be overly problematic. It is true that most ice is floating, and so wouldn't cause the sea levels to rise any (don't believe me? Fill up a glass of ice water so that the ice cube is sticking out the top and the water is at the brim... and let it melt. The water level will remain constant (minus evaporation). Another theory is that we're coming off of an ice age and so the warming is natural. Given the quality of information I think that probably saying the Truth of being at the end of an ice age or overdue for another one is probably more hype than science. My theory is: Polluting isn't a good idea, but on the other hand, there's no reason to go shoot myself immediately because Waterworld won't happen next year.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Also, yes the Kyoto agreement didn't make a lot of sense in the US, because it didn't take in to account how many
forests the US plants (or other forms of conservation). In this respect, the Kyoto agreement was fundementally
flawed.
Planting forrests is a ZERO SUM game.
The trees only consume the amount of CO2 they need to grow. When the trees die, rott or are made into paper wich is burned or rotts, they evapore the same amount of CO2 they ate before.
So to get a positive gain while you still burn oil you would need to plant each year trees in an amount big enough to eat the amount of CO2 produced by the burned oil.
Then next year the same
So: if you now continue to burn oil
Remember: for each lbs oil you burn you need one lbs of wood(in fact more) to compensate that.
Following the Kyoto suggestions, reducing energy usage, increasing efficiency of energy usage, is far the fastest way to reduce CO2
Interesting is that in some years the other countries in the world will have industries focusing on low energy technologies
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The "friends from the East" comment was sarcasm. And the United States has suggested on numerous occasions the withdrawal of significant forces from Europe, which is usually met with semi-panicked responses from the host countries.
As for why we seem to get the focus, I'd ask you to open your eyes a bit. You ignore the neo-Nazi movement in Germany, the former KLA in Kosovo, the Basque ETA in Spain, the Chechens in Russia, the Aum Shinrikyo clan in Japan, the Muslim separatists in western China, and several rebel armies in Africa. We may get the most widely-reported focus, but we're certainly not alone.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
>Well at least no American I know has ever put a "fag" in his mouth.
i guess you're not in new york or san francisco.
I would assume you mean as in "They're rising on Earth, but they're falling on Mars."
Or could this be an elaborate troll by a pro-GW advocate to try and ridicule the anti-GW lobby...
KMSMA (WWBD?)
No, the ice melting part is correct. As you stated, the density of ice is different from liquid water. In fact, it's less dense, and therefore FLOATS on the liquid water. Because of this, the ice is only partially submerged in the water, and thus only displaces a fraction of the full volume of the ice. The parent post is correct in describing that when the ice melts, the volume that it occupies will end up being exactly the same as the amount of water that was displaced by the ice cube (minus evaporation). This, as previously stated, only applies to ice that is floating. Go ahead and try the experiment. Make sure you fill the glass completely full. When the ice melts, the glass won't overflow at all. I believe this is all dealt with by Archimedes' Law of Displacement.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
We like having low poverty, high welfare for all
America has a much higher per capita GDP than European countries. Just look at the almanac.
There are not a lot of us who would like to see our governments crank up expenditure on defence to the 40% of GNP you Americans spend on it, just to catch up with you.
I don't know where you got that figure! It is nowhere even close to that.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I can't believe how many people have this attitude about environmental pollution! I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person can fail to see that preventative maintenance (i.e., reducing emissions at the source) is a fundamentally safer way to insure that we don't continue down the spiralling path of the gradual destruction of our planet's ecosystem. In order for humankind to survive (comfortably) in the long run, we're going to have to treat our planet with respect.
Do you piss on your living room carpet every day and then get a carpet cleaner in each weekend to clean up the mess? No, you install a toilet and a plumbing system!
Myth: CFCs cannot reach the stratosphere because they are heavier than air.
Fact: Air in the lower atmosphere (which extends far above the stratosphere) moves in masses, not as individual molecules. A number of studies have found CFCs and the products of their breakdown in the stratosphere (Rowland, EPA).
Myth: Volcanoes and other natural sources contribute much more chlorine than CFCs to the ozone layer.
Fact: Chlorine compounds from natural sources are soluble, and so are washed out of the atmosphere. CFCs, by contrast, are not soluble and so are able to reach the stratosphere. A number of studies have shown that the majority of chlorine in the stratosphere comes from man-made chemicals (Rowland, Taubes, Russell et al, EPA).
I don't think that the southern ice cap melting would have much/any effect. Doesn't the vast majority of that ice already float on the water?
More of the North ice cap is floating, the Southern ice cap has the continent of Antartica underneath, but plenty of floating ice around it's outside.
Yep, but even in the northern hemisphere you have ice that will cause sea level rises when it melts. Think only of Greenland.
Greenland isn't actually that big. You really need to check on a globe, not a Mercator projection map.
The point is that the ice in the largest ice caps is 2+ miles thick. Ice is usually thicker on land than on the north pole, because snow falls much more at higher elevations, and since something like 93%(forget where I read this) of the ice stays below water when floating, the ice gets big, but not as big as similar ones do inland. In addition, tides, currents, and the seasonal change in temperature affect things covered by water much more than things coverred by insulating snow. Anyway, back to my point: Lets do a little experiment. Say a 50km by 50km chunk of ice, 3km thick, suddenly melts. This size ice cover is not very much, and many times this exists in a place the size of antartica, or even greenland(well, maybe just a couple over greenland, but you get the point). 50km x 50km x 3km = 750 km^3 of ice The earth has about 362,000,000 km^2 of water cover. Divide this up(assuming equal volume of ice/water and a bunch of other simplified timesavers) and you get aproximately 2 meters more of water over the entire ocean. This is enough to drown a large percentage of the human population of earth. Check your map. Every major city in the world was founded at the intersection of two bodies of water. The ocean forms a nice junction, so most of the cities on earth will either be underwater or have nice new beachfront property.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation