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New Method To Generate Electricity from Water
spaceling writes "The BBC reports reporting on research published in the Institute of Physics Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering of the first new method of generating electricity in over 150 years. Larry Kostiuk and Daniel Kwok 'created a glass block, two centimetres in diameter and three millimetres thick, containing about 400,000 to 500,000 individual channels...[and] generated about 10 volts with a current of around a milliamp. This allowed the team to successfully power a lightbulb.'" This has also been covered all over the place.
So... if these things end up becoming cell phone batteries and what not, where are you going to get the water flow needed to separate the charges?
Shaking the phone or something? That just looks dumb
I guess that means that pi really are squared.
Heh! I noticed not a lot of RTFA in evidence. The researchers who discovered this stated where the energy comes from.
"...mobile phones or calculators which could be charged up by pumping water to high pressure."
Now we will see people becoming concerned about phones exploding under pressure bursting our eardrums, ruining hairdos, saturating women's clothes... wait, that could be a Good Thing
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
a beowulf cluster of these!:)
Now if they could find a way of generating power out of beer, that would be cool. A power keg, so to speak. Though as there's almost no way of telling Molson apart from water, it's qutie likely that the scientists were actually using beer.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Iraq is blessed with an abundant supply of water, so much so in fact that some had speculated we did not go there for the oil as much as the water.
Who in hell speculated we went to Iraq for their water??
The Fremen High Council?
Are the Bene Gesserit speculating we went there for the Spice or the Sandworms too?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Your room is cold because cold fusion doesn't generate heat, but uses it up. That's why it's called cold fusion.
With normal fusion you can simply use the heat to boil water and send the steam trough a turbine, which will turn a generator; with cold fusion you need to put the reactor in a high place and use it to turn air into liquid, which will then fall down and turn the turbine like a watermill. You can then let the liquid air to either reheat and boil away, or sell it for a profit.
Obviously, this power generation model will, when widely deployed, lower Earth's mean temperature. It is excepted to be one of the major players in a war against global warming.
Up untill recently, cold fusion was considered an unviable energy source (sink, actually), because (due to it's diametrically opposed nature to normal fusion) it requires extremely low pressures and/or cold temperatures to occur effectively. However, with recent breaktroughts with superconductors, cold fusion is now closer to a commercial application than it once was. Superconducters can be used to provide the cool neccessary for cold fusion because, after all, they are allways very cold.