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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.
Any chance of Microsoft getting a version that would eat the bugs in VIsta? okay someone was going to say it...
The power generated might be enough to run one headlight. But what would really be interesting is capturing some of the speed energy to help charge the battery. But with using wind.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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
That would be what Regenerative Brakes are designed for. Since Winds is fairly inefficient and actually increase fuel consumption.
The power generated might be enough to run one headlight. But what would really be interesting is capturing some of the speed energy to help charge the battery. But with using wind.
I'll do you one better. Attach a sail to the car so that almost all of the "speed" energy is harvested. Fans harvesting electricity from the "wind" generated by the engine propelling the car is less efficient than the engine just making the electricity.
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
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!
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.
Won't work.
Well, it would work, but you'd always lose in the overall equation. By putting something in line to capture the "speed energy", you are forced to put more power out to make the speed.
blah, blah, blah, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change states, blah, blah, blah.
To expand on the idea, you could put a giant windmill on top of a car that could produce enough electricity to drive with. Unfortunately, it would take more electricity than you produce to make it move, because of the added resistance of the windmill.
Now, having a deployable windmill that could charge the battery while you're parked is a completely different idea, and almost practical. :) Just like solar, it depends on where you are, and what the environment dictates. Alaska in mid winter isn't exactly good for solar. Most cities don't have a good sustained wind at ground level. Florida along the coast should be great for either, but you'll run out of sun and get extra wind when a hurricane blows through. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
This seems a little over kill (pun intended) to me.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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?
The power generated might be enough to run one headlight. But what would really be interesting is capturing some of the speed energy to help charge the battery. But with using wind.
damned dirty hippies, can't you just accept some tihings need to die in larger quantites to increase our survivability.
.' Windows 98 crashed I am the blue screen of death no one hears your screams... `.
"It recharges on the fly"
Support PETA today!
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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.
isn't that kinda like what the alternator is doing?
using the internal combustion engine (which produces speed, aka "wind", which is a resulting effect of the engine pushing the vehicle through the air) to keep the battery charged?
And there is less wasted energy using the belt drive vs wind... since the air isn't actually moving it's the vehicle that's moving, throwing a propeller to capture the wind would be akin to putting a sail up (or as is used in drag races, a parachute), which would only have the effect of hindering the vehicles energy efficiency rather than helping it's energy usage.
Ewww!
Not sure how easy it would be to teach the table to flush though...
Yes sir, mister AC, sir.
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
I realize that culture20 didn't wrap his comment in sarcasm tags but really...
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
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.
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...