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DARPA To Turn Humans Into Batteries
DARPA is working on a project that will convert energy from the human body to power a variety of military gadgets. From the article: "Obviously, our bodies generate heat — thermal energy. They also produce vibrations when we move — kinetic energy. Both forms of energy can be converted into electricity. Anantha Chandrakasan, an MIT electrical engineering professor, who is working on the problem with a former student named Yogesh Ramadass, says the challenge is to harvest adequate amounts of power from the body and then efficiently direct it to the device that needs it." If I remember the movie correctly, this didn't turn out so well for the humans.
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You combine it with a form of fusionm duh.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
So who is going to take over if we don't have AI yet?
Tasty wheat, etc.
DARPA turned us into generators.
There is no spoon
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
Are we going to build it... or already part of it? Which pill to take?
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
If you take the blue pill you will stay in the matrix so it can use your electricity.
But be warned "leaving the Matrix can be traumatic"
So how will our future look like....
or will it just be 1984ish..... or maybe we will part of the brave new world...
At least for now Idiocracy is winning... Even on /.
That Seiko watch I had about 10 years ago must have been from the future since it was able to power itself from a human battery. So far, no sign of them taking over the world either.
How about a Human Hamster Wheel? http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://hamsterwheel.randolphblogs.net/files/2008/03/img_0301-small.jpg&imgrefurl=http://hamsterwheel.randolphblogs.net/&h=346&w=519&sz=67&tbnid=83eGg0QncG5AvM:&tbnh=87&tbnw=131&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dhamster%2Bwheel%2Bgenerator&hl=en&usg=__7lqrQ-jbWTtsjojaOOj4a0a03Sc=&sa=X&ei=12lATJKnAY6oOKjs5NwM&ved=0CCsQ9QEwBg
Wow, that URL makes my head hurt!
In the military, pulling Hamster Wheel duty ranks down there with Latrine duty or KP duty . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Why is mankind so obsessed with harvesting energy from the rarest sources in the universe? Why not start with the most abundant sources?
Hope is the currency of fools
I'm a D Cell battery!
My work here is dung.
Insert witty, esoteric Matrix quote here.
if they target heat energy from human bodies, i can think of 3 or more realistically 10 ex girlfriends who wont have anything to worry about!
Holy shit...I guess I DID take the red pill...
Now...where's Trinity..I have a job for her...
Do they have it yet?
anything that results in me learning Kung-Fu in 10 seconds might be worth it.
Anyways, I hope a practical device for charging personal carry device while walking comes out of this. I would like to charge my phone while walking into work.
Actually, even if it was a device that looked like a know brace, but generated power while walking would be ok place to start.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Auditorium A/C designers know that - about one watt per kilogram resting, triple that when aerobic. Many portable electronics devices can run off a few percent of that energy. It would be nice to capture that energy mechanically, thermally, or chemically.
I recall a few Universities had gotten research grants to develop gadgets and batteries that would run based on the chemicals that are released upon death. The idea was that when a soldier was slain, their body would naturally power a GPS device to assist in body recovery.
So combine that work with this, and you have electronics running even when the heat and movement power is no longer available.
Isn't keeping front-line troops fed-up a problem already? I mean the guys that ave to carry their own food. Harnessing energy from their movements will just increase their food requirements further.
I wonder if any of these energy gathering methods work without eating more food to gather this energy...
I hear the maintenance of the foot pumps can be a problem, but otherwise they're quite stylish.
If you want (a) power; (b) biometric identification; (c) biological status/health monitoring, consider the Rectal Thermocouple... This will normally generate substantial additional power in combat as an added benefit. :-)
OK, so humans become mobile power sources.
I really don't want to see a guy on the side of the road with wires shoved up his arse trying to jump his car to start because his battery is dead.
*clench* "Try it now!"
That said, I guess the BDSM scene can now do something useful after attaching the alligator clamps to their nipples.
If they can't get us to fission spontaneously, i'm not at all impressed.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
A patent on that would be a license to print money.
Someone send these people a copy of The Matrix please. Include a nicely worded letter telling them to pay attention to the subplots....
It's fine. As long as they don't combine the energy with a form of fusion, we're safe.
When can I get my stillsuit?
Now I'm going to have to down 5-hour Energy Drinks just to listen to my iPod!
imagine if your 'battery' needed to power, say, st. louis, for a few seconds? see you on the other side of it?
not much doubt about the usgs seismic reporting machine being FUDged just by looking at the day to day pattern.
Aren't soldiers already complaining about the weight of all of the junk they have to carry? Devices that take away their mechanical energy, or reduce the temperature difference between them and the surrounding environment, seem like a good way of making things harder.
Maybe they won't have to carry all of the extra batteries, which will help. But power-generating shoes are inherently mushy and feel like running through mud, as is all of the other ways of generating power from human movement. It's not free energy.
The ______ Agenda
Somebody watched too many sci-fi movies..... or maybe the Matrix is the new reality?
Dura-cell is PEOPLE! (said in best Charlton Heston voice)
If it means the Duracell bunny can have a day off then I'm all for it.
If these guys were serious about powering implants, they'd be using ATP or glucose. Heat and vibrations are nice, but a few more steps down the thermodynamic pipeline.
Plus, the good piezoelectrics are not exactly made of bio-friendly metals.
Kinetic watches have been around for quite a few decades. Not sure about thermal though.
Hope we see civil appliances soon.
Is that evolution has selected for a very efficient biological machine. If you are going to harness energy from movement, then you're going to require additional energy, in for the form of biological consumables, which have to be stored, transported an prepared. By extracting energy from the organism, you have to make the assertion that the organism can obtain its own fuel easier than you can. At 100w/sqm, and efficiency rates of 14%, You're looking at 3.5w per backpack of solar collection. Can your body output 3 watts? In nearly every example, its better to give the electronics their own source.
It is important to note that enery isn't "wasted" it is expended. And to put anything on yourself to collect it, is going to up your expenditure of energy. DARPA is essentially trying to strap windmills onto aircraft... (which doesn't work, because they add weight and drag)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Thats an inspiring name,
I want to move to India and change my name to Youshoud Ramdatass.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Nobody has had much success using Hydrogen as a source of energy.
Maybe try the next most abundant thing in the universe? That one certainly flows freely on Earth.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Seriously, I'm not trying to troll here. Has anyone done the calculation for the number of kilocalories produced when an average human burns? Like how many litres of water could be raised to boiling from this process?
That might be an interesting number to bring out in discussions like these.
powered combat armor / ESP / KI based weapons.
For years the GOV has had solders with EPS powers doing top secret stuff.
Humans where used for CPU power but the hollywood bosses cut that part.
Some men are AAA, some are lantern batteries.
Have gnu, will travel.
So we are batteries that (take periodic) leak(s)?
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cause chances are you always have a body with you....besides...we're not talking about making power somewhere in the universe..we're talking about making power on Earth...where Humans...for better or worse...are far from rare.
by 2050 embedded devices will allow us to immerse ourselves in a sea of not just visual data, but also computer-generated sounds and sensations.
Want theme music in your life? There's an app for that.
The humans get their energy from the nutrient filled goo. DUH. Where do they get the nutrients for the goo you ask? From the dead humans! DUH.
Obviously it's a depleting system with fewer and fewer humans to be gotten each time around. But one can also assume that when the sky was blacked out there was vegetation and vegetable and animal organics. The machines could have found a way to convert that into sugars (along with the other dead humans of course) and nutrients to feed the humans.
There is quite a bit of organic energy already here.
The original idea was that the matrix was a distributed system using human brains as nodes. That's why the humans were jacked in. When you think about it that way, the whole movie becomes at least two times better.
The hollywood people decided that would be too confusing to the audience, and thus the reason for the humans to be hooked in became a thermodynamic WTF.
hehehe that's almost as ridiculous as turning iPhones into phones!
We used to have self winding watches now they want self winding soldiers. Next they will want land mines that gather solar energy and store it in such a way that a powerful explosion takes place over and over again.
Speaking for myself, and the asphyxiated co-workers in nearby cubes, I can assure that the human body has a lot of potentialrr. I only wish I knew if the correct pronunciation was "meh-thane", or "mee-thane".
...There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Energy taken out of the system has to come from somewhere. Some energy, sure, can be "harvested" without effort on part of the human host - temperature differences, compression energy while walking, the sort of thing that can't be avoided.
Any power generation on a significant scale, though, will cause the person generating it effort. Like, say, a bicycle generator, or winding up an alarm clock. Even something passive, like putting an induction generator (think: "shake powered flashlight") on your belt will add to the weight you carry, the inertia you have to overcome. More effort on your part.
Matrix calling Neo. Come in...
We're frickin' generators dammit!
If the energy is coming from vibration that's mechanical energy, not chemical.
We are the 198 proof..