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Tapping Trees for Electricity?
dr_agonfly writes "Despite many skeptics, a Massachusetts company is getting investor interest in developing a process to tap electric power from trees. MagCap is looking to boost the current power from just under 2 volts to a more useful 12 volts with investor funding." From the article: "Jim Manwell, director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Renewable Energy Resource Laboratory, questioned the potential of MagCap's plans. 'I'm wildly skeptical,' he said. 'I would need to see proof before I believed it. It strikes me as pretty questionable for a number of reasons.'"
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Broadband over electric trees?
On second thought, I don't think they have electricity in those dens. We'll be living better than ewoks!
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Ever seen "The Matrix"? What goes around, comes around.
Ah, I see. Trees produce lightning. But surely that would be more than 2 volts?
Dark Reflection
Now that's what I call Flower Power
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
...except that there will be trees instead of humans!!! I love it! Also, no need to develop a VR world to keep trees happy and growing :-)!
I pine for the day that this kind of energy production becomes poplar.
What's being tapped here are reckless investors. Personally I'm sticking with cold fusion.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Nah!
Tapping the trees for current will turn them into Triffids and they'll gobble us all up. Don't bother trying to climb a tree to get away from them, either.
at least they're not trying use them for cellular phone, they'll try to impress their own ring-tones on us
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, he could plant six of the trees in pods pods and align them in a straight row.
Boffins even have a fancy name for this, the call it "series-connecting".
However, what said boffins never understood is that you will have also have to align at 90 to an "earth power ray", otherwise the flow of juice will be too small to be useful.
Also, you will have to make sure they are far enough apart so they don't short out each other when they grow.
I bet this guy company spent a couple of thousand man hours figuring this out experimentally, so they will beat the upstart competition with the giant pumpkins to the market.
Just imagine the millions that will flow in licensing fees if the government starts to put groups of six trees along the strets in the suburbs so you can jumpstart your car on cold winter mornings.
So make sure to sell your property unless it lies on a street that is oriented at 90 to the "earth power rays".
Well, yes, but how are you going to raise millions in "investment" capital by pointing that out?
"In my 25 years of practicing patent law, I've never seen anything like this."
Ah, well, if a lawyer hasn't seen anything like it it must be a revolution in chemistry.
KFG
Sorry, couldn't help myself...
so we can all walk around with extension cords hanging off our arms?
That's not where they'll put the cord.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
is that what they call 'green' power?
Does that mean we should research away to increase that small voltage to something larger so we can all walk around with extension cords hanging off our arms?
No, that would be limbs
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
From TFA:
Wadle became interested in the concept while studying lightning coming from the ground, "which led him to believe that there's some type of power emanating from earth, which led him to trees," Lagadinos said.
Not that that chain of reasoning inspires any confidence what-so-ever in me, the free power apparently comes from the ground, not the sky...
Unless the "trees" he is talking about only have a couple branches at the top and really long, ropey leaves that seem to go to another "tree" just like it...
The only power they are working on is the power to move money from investors accounts to theirs.
'Effect' is used as a noun. 'Affect' is used as a verb.
:)
Except when 'effect' is used as a verb, or when 'affect' is used as a noun. Both are perfectly legitimate words; they just almost never mean what the writer intended
Piffle! We Druids have been deriving power from trees for the
past couple of millenia.
But the MP Tree format is much more widely distributed than OGG, it doesn't matter if OGG samples the music better, at lower bitrates... MP Trees are all over the forest, and there all kinds of MP Tree harversters out there, such as axes, saws, chainsaws, i even hear the japanese have developed a fully robotic mp tree harvester. ogg has nothing to compare to the MP Tree format, even if it Is technically superior. It's a lot like the good old Betamax vs VHS. Betamax had more scanlines, and had less signal to noise ratio, but because it's tapes only ran 30 minutes to an hour, it couldn't compete with the largely inferior VHS format which at it's lowest quality could jam pack 6 hours of recording on a single tape (later on 8-9 hour tapes were developed)