Dallas’ Southern Methodist University is now recycling energy with one of the first commercial electricity generators that use thermoelectricity—the act of drawing power from waste heat. The machine operates by using heat given off by other processes (such as manufacturing) to boil liquids, which then turn into steam, which then turns an electricity-generating turbine.
There’s clearly something going on with the Swiss and hot water: first “extreme jacuzzi-ing” on top of Mont Blanc, and now they’re going to use waste energy kicked out by servers to warm a swimming pool. It’s a simple concept: take the heat from the server room air-conditioners at a new data centre, and direct it through heat exchangers to the water in the town pool. The town, Uitikon, will get a hot pool and all they had to pay for was some of the connecting gear since the heat would otherwise have been vented. Cool! … or rather, hot! Darn eco-friendly too. [Sydney Morning Herald]
In honour of the upcoming Tahoe reader meetup on April 5th at Alpine Meadows, I’m going to be doing end of season reviews of some outdoor gadgetry that’s been floating around the cabin. First up, these electric socks originally designed to keep North Atlantic fishermen warm. The idea: Wool/Poly blend Socks with wiring and thin resistors that run from the D cells mounted in the top of the sock liner to under the ball of the foot. Sweaty feeling, and any activity causes sock droop as the batteries overpower the elastic. Yet, warmish. And US$22.
Remember the US Military ray gun that makes people feel like they’re on fire? Well, 60 Minutes sent out a reporter to see if he could take the heat. Standing in plain view of the ray gun made his body feel like “scalding water,” so David Martin attempted, with little success, to hide behind a piece of plywood and later a mattress. Some claim they can only take the heat ray 4 – 5 seconds, so when David tried it we think he only made it 2 seconds, even if he did say, “ONE ONE THOUSAND TWO ONE THOUSAND THREE ONEEEAAHHHHRRHHR” [CBS via TechEBlog]
Who didn’t like Super Soakers as a kid? You pump it a lot, it builds pressure, then it shoots liquid. In many ways, they were very similar to humans, which is why Lonnie Johnson, its inventor, is looking for ways to use harvest waste heat from humans to power a tiny Johnson system. The full name is the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy System, and it could be up to 60% efficient (standard car engines are only about 30% efficient) at the right temperature.
The latest edition of Nature magazine details a new method scientists have derived for converting heat energy into electricity, using silicon to instigate the conversion. Researchers have more investigations to carry out, but if preliminary findings are indicative of what is to come, appliances that charge using your own body heat may be on the horizon.
Even though we’re comfortable with sitting on a toilet seat that someone just vacated (and vacated their bowels on), it still comes as a surprise just how warm that seat is—the ass must be a bit higher than 98 degrees. This thermochromic toilet seat, however, lets you know exactly how warm the seat is, with a bonus effect of showing you exactly which part of the seat was in contact with the previous occupant. As you can see from the picture, the man before was a widey. Almost as good as the hypercolor shirts of yore, which let us know of Kelly’s extracurricular activities in a visual manner. [Canadian Design Resource via Boing Boing]
Our father told us that the best way to test whether a steaming cup of anything was cool enough to drink was to just drink it. It wasn’t until the fifth time we were in the hospital that we discovered that the man wasn’t our father. If we had these heat-sensitive On/Off mugs, which change from the Off position when cool to the On position when hot, we’d still have our original tongues. However, as Joel from BBG points out, the heat-sensitive plastic lining has a tendency to wash off – leading to a scenario where a practical joker could paint the mug black and write OFF on the side, then pour in a cup of boiling hot coffee. [Charles and Marie via Technabob via Boing Boing Gadgets]
It’s been a while since Apple originally acknowledged freezing with their new aluminium iMacs. But since then,many users are still having problems. AppleInsider has started to wonder if the problem is not a software error, but a hardware issue caused by overheating.
One specific symptom that some users have experienced is a series of graphical glitches before their computer freezes up. Such glitches are the same you’d see in an overclocked video card that’s running too hot. And apparently upgrading to Leopard often exacerbates the problem, at least according to one Apple thread—which makes sense, since Leopard takes advantage of video chipset processing throughout normal OS functions, adding fuel to the not quite literal fire. Anyone out there having problems? [appleforum via appleinsider]
Those freaky scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute are always thinking up cool stuff, and now they’ve figured out how to turn body heat into electricity. It works by taking advantage of the difference between two temperatures, but until these Fraunhofer dudes got ahold of the idea, the required temp range was too great to use body heat. If you think about it, there’s still quite a bit of difference between room temperature and 98.6°. We thought of an even better way to power up gadgets using this technology.
Notice the picture of a hand resting on this device here which looks like it’s cranking out enough juice to power that laptop sitting next to it, but we’re thinking this would be a perfect device for Chen to stick down his pants. The ladies are saying it’s pretty hot down there. [Digital Journal, via Med Launches]
