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Microchip Powered by Body Heat
An anonymous reader writes "MIT and Texas Instruments researchers have designed a chip that they say could be up to 10 times more energy efficient than current technology. The chip's power consumption is so low that devices with the chip may even be able to be recharged using the owner's body heat." The intent is to use these in medical applications like pacemakers where one would expect to have the free power source.
Two things spring to mind:
1. If it's powered by your body heat, it's going to make you colder...
2. Don't you need a temperature _gradient_ to get useful power out of heat?
The article mentions implantable devices running off body heat - how would that work? I thought to harvest energy you needed a temperature difference, where would an implanted device get that?
Just wondering...
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
you insensitive clod!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
free source? is it GPL of BSD licence?
We know. It did seem like a familiar read.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
"The chip's power consumption is so low that devices with the chip may even be able to be recharged using the owner's body heat."
Except, probably, my ex. She'd have to to crawl up onto a rock and bask for a couple of hours before something like that would work for her.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Nice REPOST
Heat is where all power goes, not where it comes from. A temperature gradient on the other hand...
... would seem to be a much more likely implanted medical device than pacemakers to use this technology. Having a pair of fully-implanted, self-powered devices that independently provide sound to each ear would seem to be a huge step forward, and readily achievable with this sort of technology.
And with a generation rapidly driving themselves deaf via iPods, a technological solution like this would seem to be appropriate and is arriving just in time.
While I don't know what kind of voltages and currents a pacemaker uses to regulate heart activity, it would seem a lot more likely that a cochlear implant would use less. Plus, there's a lot less downside risk if the device malfunctions.
I think we have. Except that in the movies, the humans weren't dumb enough to TEACH the robots to feed of body heat. Oh well. I for one would like to offer our slightly peckish robotic overlords a light brunch.
In the current Dutch issue of "Scientific American," there's an article about body microgeneration.
One proposal is to use microscopic plates separated by orthogonally arranged nanotubes. Connected to one plate and touching small feelers on the other, they would function as a piezoelectric generator for exploiting ambient motion. The idea is to apply this to similar applications as in TFA.
As far as using body heat as an RTG, the idea is of course to use the temperature gradient between the body and the ambient air.
Personally, I'm most interested in this tiny DC-DC converter they've got.
I suppose that a heart attack would be a better way to go than freezing to death.
Also perfect for powering RFID-enabled smart implants.
Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate it seems is not without a sense of irony. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTU's of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion the machines have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born, we are grown. For the longest time I wouldn't believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.
The Admin and the Engineer
Isn't this the third time we see this? [1] [2]
This is just one step closer to harnessing the incredible power generated by the hands (or finger, I guess... if that's your thing) of over-stimulated teenagers. I, for one, welcome our sticky overlords... I just won't shake their hands.
Need to up the voltage to speed that pacemaker up? No problem, just get the flu.
This research has been covered at least twice on Slashdot recently:
Researchers Design Microchip Ten Times More Efficient
Low Voltage Is Key To Energy-Efficient Chip
Maybe those should be included as related articles in the summary, or something...
Now geeks will have an excuse to snuggle up to other people...
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
In the anus or vagina.
You can't effectively harvest body heat. The efficiency of any heat engine is proportional to the temperature drop, in absolute degrees. The internal body temperature gradient is unlikely to be much more than a degree Farenheit. So any heat engine in the body is limited to an absolute best efficiency of under a quarter of a percent. And you'd have to find some working fluid that changes phase across that temperature range. Not very likely. You could do a thousand times better harnessing the heatbeat energy with a microphone. And even that's ridiculous.
Right, but unlike in that movie we have the laws of thermodynamics to protect us.
I love The Matrix, but science was not its strong point.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Good pun...
But actually, I don't see why someone hasn't developed an ATP (?) powered circuit! All you need is a cathode with an enzyme or catalyst that breaks apart sugars and steals their electrons, and any kind of anode. Given the current state of molecular engineering - and certainly cell tinkering - this should be almost easy!
Obviously this has already been buried by Big Oil, along with the Free Energy device, test-tube Cold Fusion, and the Perpetual Stirling Engine.
-- thinkyhead software and media
If the chip is manufactured at, say, room temperature or colder and
produces electric current at 98.6F,
then just make sure you don't get hypothermic - or frigid.
RR
A rather chilling thought. ...
Talk about involuntary servitude
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1082.htm
GOOGLE: "STMicroelectronics inc MICROCHIP 2008"
RR