Researchers at Penn State have cooked up a new plastic that can be cooled by simply running a current through it. It uses the electrocaloric effect to rearrange its individual atoms when charged, allowing for heat to more easily come and go. By wrapping up a chip in the stuff and zapping it with current, researchers hope they’ve found a way to make more efficient heatsinks for laptops and other gear with small, hot enclosures. Right now the process requires too much voltage to be feasible (120v, rather than the couple of volts your laptop battery could give it), but manufacturing improvements could make it ready for prime time, and Intel seems interested.
Moshi’s Zefyr is a portable cooling pad for the MacBook that provides a near silent fan, powered by USB, and offers a temperature drop of roughly 3 degrees Celcius. The Zefyr is designed to place your MacBook at an ergonomically beneficial tilt, and when not in use, the Zefyr collapses to better fit in a bag.
One PC case modder has taken his battle with heat to a whole new level using a design that is 100% passively cooled. That is to say, the entire case is one gigantic heatsink. Unfortunately, numerous problems were encountered during the project and in the end, a faulty motherboard and power supply issues made a proper test of the case problematic. So, even though the mod is flawed, there are plenty of ideas that can be gleaned from the process itself that could result in something a little more practical. Hit the link for instructions. [Metku via Hack n Mod via Gearfuse]
