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The Ubiquitous LED Becomes More Ubiquitous

LiberalApplication writes "Piezoelectric generators have been mentioned here before, regarding the military's plan to integrate them into the heels of boots for the purposes of harvesting electricity from the cumulative stompage of a soldier, but now someone has come up with the idea to combine them with LEDs and cast the entire assembly into a little block of resin. Well, a stick, really. If you were getting tired of seeing little blinky lights everywhere, you ain't seen nothing yet."

3 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Concerts... by Bugaboo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Am I the only one who thinks this would be a neat thing to embed in a clear drumstick and then use at concert?

    Hell, disperse the little ones in the crowd and turn the whole place into a giant pulsating light...

  2. Re:Bicycles... by jarran · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, they need batteries, but you might be satisfied with Hokey Spokes. They even communicate somehow and sync if you have several on one wheel.

  3. Re:[ot] tritium?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Disclaimer; I am a Physics Undergraduate & have just spent the day on a tour of JET, where they use tritium as a fuel to start a nuclear fusion reaction.

    Gaseous tritium is absolutely fine, it decays by beta emission - but the electron is so unenergetic that it can't even penetrate skin.

    However, if the tritium oxidises, it becomes heavy water which can get directly absorbed by one's lungs. In which case, it pases through the body after a few days in the standard way ;) In case of contamination by oxidised tritium, the radioactivity of the patient's urine is monitored, as beer is poured down their throat to 'flush the system out'.

    The safe dose for gaseous tritium is 10s of thousands of times higher than that for oxidised tritium; if you did crack one of those vials, I doubt much harm would come to you at all. Any tritium released into the atmosphere will quickly diffuse into space [also the reason why there's precious little atmospheric hydrogen]...