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Carnivorous Clock Eats Bugs
Designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have created a clock that is powered by "eating" bugs. The clock traps insects on flypaper stretched across a roller system and then drops them into a vat of bacteria. The insects are then "digested" and the ensuing chemical reaction is transformed into power that keeps the rollers moving and the LCD clock working. The two offer another version that is powered by mice and an even cooler machine that picks insect fuel from spiderwebs with the help of a robotic arm and a video camera.
I won't be buying a first generation one of these, it's bound to have a tonne of bugs.
Could i please have house alarm from same company please?
Until people start hacking these and needs more power. Then starts going for human flesh.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...to your laser-blasted skeleton.
Now a car that injested all those bugs splattered on the front grill could actually be useful.
Any chance of Microsoft getting a version that would eat the bugs in VIsta? okay someone was going to say it...
Does this have any practical applications, or is it just neat?
Le français vous intéresse?
One step closer to The matrix?
or perhaps spawning ideas for Skynet?
Oh sure, everyone's in favor of bug powered clocks, but as soon as you put a pedestrian catcher on the front of your electric SUV to make city driving more efficient then OHHhhh, suddenly you've gone too far!
Favourite part: "This is so wrong it has to be right."
Original - or did he cite someone?
- Mad, ingenous - they've both left you puzzled -
Nom nom nom.
"The knee is the elbow of the leg." -- My wife
I'd love to take one of these to Alaska in the spring into the early summertime. With the number of mosquitoes living there, I'll bet enough current could be generated to do something more than just power a clock. Mosquitoes in Alaska have been known to be so voracious as to kill a moose that happens upon a swarm. Imagine what millions of these pests could do with this system - bake a chicken or turkey or even provide enough electricity to power a small cabin.
Which eats red beetles and uses the red from the crushed shells to color itself carmine red, whilst engorging itself on mosquitoes.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Nice to see that PETA is already all over this.
These bloodthirsty, gut-wrenching robots, designed by UK-based designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau thrive on killing and liquidizing flies and mice, whilst serving the purpose of⦠well, not much at all really.
They even have their own vision of insect disposal.
I wonder if they target antibacterial soap and penicillin next...
Talk about a nested series of links. I had to go through 3 separate sites- Slashdot, Endgadget, and Hack-a-Day, one linked to the other, until I got to the original New Scientist gallery photos which had many more interesting robot pictures. Oh, and the end link wasn't to page 1 of the photo gallery and the links weren't obvious each time either. For those who don't want to go the long way around, here is the original link.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Instead of linking to a blog that talks about another blog that refers to and links to the original story, why not just link to the original source to save us from 5 click throughs and give the original authors credit as well?
Original story: Domestic robots with a taste for flesh
Druuge ships, Star Control II.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
it occurs to me that there is a minor flaw in powering a robot clock on household pests- namely that the goal of a pest-eating device is to rid you of said pests. Once it eats all the flies, the clock stops working... so you have to encourage more flies. Or mice in the case of the mouse-eater. That sounds like it might have a down side.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
More direct link, more details, related contraptions (eats mice!): http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn17367-carnivorous-domestic-entertainment-robots/1
on tragedy ... it's like blood to a vampire...
'cause I need to watch things die, from a distance.. vicariously I live while the whole world dies... you all need it too, don't lie...
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I figured it was too good to be true:
Although, for now, the robots rely on mains power, Auger believes they could become truly self-sufficient.
I like technology-as-art projects, but it'd be much cooler if these things actually *were* powered by bug juice--that is, more like bug powered 75% of the time, with a battery backup or a solar panel (or both) for those days when all the flies have already been eaten--rather than just being combination clock-and-bug-zappers. I'd be interested to see their average power production vs. power consumption.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
...to be used as large features in town squares. suddenly, the death penalty and retirement homes seem alot more useful....
This is nothing new, in fact there was an even better robot 5 or 6 years ago in Popular Mechanics that did the same biological digestion-to-electricity conversion, but that one was MOBILE. So theoretically it could walk around catching and eating insects and deriving its power needs from that. Don't know what became of it though, I suppose there were no commercial applications.
Now if the digestion can be made efficient enough, and if it can catch enough food to store enough surplus energy, maybe it could be made to breed!
om before nom
mmmm...forbidden donut
Democrat school playground. Fewer moronic bad-science laws.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Obviously we don't need to worry about carcasses, but if we can turn offal into power via bacteria that eats it... Think about it. Full-circle power AND recycling.
This seems a little over kill (pun intended) to me.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You are a troll who hasn't heard of PETA?
What next? A troll who hasn't heard of Christian fundamentalists? A troll who hasn't heard of OS wars?
I guess we can only blame ourselves. After all, we answer to the political "all parties are the same" trolls and the "climate change questioners" as if they had a valid point.
And if so, does it go "nom nom nom"?
All hail Great C... and start preparing the questions (unless you are on a quest to paint Deus Irae).
I will buy a series of clocks if it takes Mousquitoes. Transportable at best so I can hang it up in my camping tent...
from the new scientist article:
for now, the robots rely on mains power
Also I can imagine that these "bacterial fuel cells" don't smell very good.
... to it's twitter feed. Hahaha.. I wonder if I can mod this to a bug zapper that powers itself?
And for the alarm, the clock says
"help me! help me! help me!"
www.eFax.com are spammers
The article also talks about a bug zapper version that uses the power to light UV lights to attract more bugs... so when the robots wanna take over instead of UV in will be porn to "kill all humans"
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
"It recharges on the fly"
n/t
-Fartnog Buttstinkle
OK, some corny ones:
-- Eating 'round the clock/eating all the time...
-- THis may be clock with "too much time on its hands", hehehe...
-- These roaches have "all the time END the world"
This can be a NEW RAID Roach Motel (poisonous/sticky trap box) slogan/jingle: "Roaches CLOCK IN, but the DON'T CLOCK OUT".
(Used to be "RAID Roach Motel: Roaches check IN, but the DON'T CHECK OUT".
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Everything that eats is bound to take a crap as well. Probably regular as clockwork too.
This is exactly the kind of thing we need to see more of. Energy is all around us, just waiting to be harvested. All of those little bits could add up to a lot of energy. Reminds me of those tiles that generate energy when walked on, or those breaks in Hybrid cars that re-charge the battery upon breaking. How about those watches that use your body's motion to charge. When Tech gets cheap enough I suspect we will see more and more "perpetual" energy in our lives(though there is really no such thing as perpetual energy).
So instead of replacing batteries, you'll have to replace the flypaper? I'd imagine that being a lot more inconvenient.
of the insect Matrix!
Ewww!
Not sure how easy it would be to teach the table to flush though...
My iPhone needs more flies to finishing playing this video.
My eight core, dual GPU PC runs on a large bucket of cockroaches every day.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This strikes me as a logical inversion of the "time eater" clock covered in Slashdot last year. In that timepiece, a giant bug, which the maker called a "chronophage", appeared to climb along the top of the clock, eating the seconds as they passed by. It seems only natural that time should get its revenge by eating bugs in return.
video.
"The pair offers an alternative design fueled by mice."
That's so cool and so wrong at the same time. Because if you can feed it mice, then why not cats and dogs, or maybe a couple of humans...? The last thing I want is people to figure out that other people are useful as fuel. Too many humans on the Earth, looming energy crisis... could be more brutal than a George Romero movie.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Try this on pg 108 via Google books:
Fuel Cell Projects for the Evil Genius
By Gavin D. J. Harper
Then what keeps the fly paper strap turning? Does that also works on power extracted from bugs?
I assume that the clock itself doesn't know when there are bugs on the fly paper, so the fly paper strap has to keep moving constantly.
And all of this works on the power of one or several bugs?
Impressive if it's true...
is a water bottle with the top part cut off and placed on top upside down, with a sweet substance like sugar water or juice inside. When the bugs go in, there's a funnel to direct them into the bottle, but when they go out, there's only the small hole to get out of. Most bugs never find it.
I guess I could mount the bug module as an auxiliary power source for my Roomba which has already been modified to run on pizza crumbs and Mountain Dew spills.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Oh my god, I passed through a cloud of radioactive particles and I've been shrunken down to the size of a field mouse! Now my clock is systematically hunting me down using its video camera, and giant, piercing claws!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! ...snort...hummm? Oh sorry hon, I guess I was having a nightmare, it was terrible...there was this clock and...