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Self-Heating Coffee Hacking
ptorrone writes "Awhile back I wrote about the new Wolfgang Puck self-heating coffee containers that took 10 years and $24 mil to develop. Well, I managed to find them in a local store and bought them to take apart to see how they work. Once activated, they reach 145 degrees in about 6 minutes. This isn't a review of the beverage, it's all about the stuff that makes the liquid hot, how it works, pictures and links to patents. I am looking in to how these could be recycled too."
I wish that worked on girlfriends...
Hot coffee hack? Wait till the ESRB hears about this!
After the article earlier about the GTA hack, /.ers will all be much more interested in hot coffee than before.
I bet you'll start seeing obnoxious pple going through all of a store's stock pushing the heat button on each of the cans so that the end customer gets cold coffee :p
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
You see, the thing that many people in the US completely miss is that the breweing of coffee was perfected in 1855 and it is senseless to mess with it. A shot of espresso made with freshly roasted / ground beans and on a well maintained machine by a well trained barrista is the apex of coffee perfection and cannot be improved upon.
Wow, spoken like a true innovator. You must work for Microsoft.
$500k = team of engineers to figure out how to make 10 million containers per month.
$24,490k = marketing guys to decide on shape of the container and what to print on the outside of it.
Off topic, but...
The energy in a matter-antimatter (proton anti-proton) reaction goes toward the production of various particles that are of sufficiently high energy to pass right through your coffee: muons, gamma rays. Neutrinos too, which don't interact.
Under the unrealistic assumption that all the energy produced goes toward heating the coffee:
2ng matter + 2ng antimatter = 4e-9 g
E = m*c^2
= 4e-9 g * (3e8 m/s)^2
= 3.6e8 g*m^2/s^2
A joule is kg*m^2/s^2, so we're looking at 3.6e5 J of energy. Approximating coffee with water, water has a heat capacity of 4186 J/(kg*K), and assuming we have 100 cm^3 of it:
3.6e5 J / 4186 J/(kg*K) / 0.1 kg = 8600 K
I hope you like your coffee vaporized.
Better to get some of the self-heating pads from army MREs.
Yeah, but they'll only work if you have a rock, or something.