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.
One of the occupational hazards of Google Street View is, I guess, having the camera obscured by something. It could be a pterodactyl, perhaps, flying low for a closer view, it could be a giant Monty Python-style animated brogue homing in on the car as if it were a roach ripe for the squishing. Or it could be a plastic bag. One minute it’s dancing around, American Beauty-style, the next it’s spread-eagled over the camera rather like an over-amorous spinster at a barn dance. This is what College Road in Fairbanks, Alaska, looks like, according to Google Street View. [Google Maps via Google Sightseeing]
iLounge brings up this interesting, and true-sounding, story of iPhone peripheral manufacturers getting pre-briefed on specs for the 3G iPhone before the device is even announced. It makes sense since these companies need the specs to make cases that actually fit, but only need as little detail as possible to do so. Here’s what one of these manufacturer says the new one will have: slightly different tapering on the edges, a different speaker/mic hole setup, slightly different sensor arrangement (possibly even a front camera), and a red, white or black colour scheme.
About those bioplastic bags – you know, the ones you’ve been using to assuage your eco-conscious guilt – turns out not only are they not as green as you think, they could also be partially responsible for the global food crisis. A worldwide effort by bag-heavy industries to replace petroleum-based plastics with plant-based plastics could actually lead to more environmental problems, according to a study by the Guardian UK.
Denmark has a disgusting problem. The waste produced by the country’s 20 million pigs is slowly choking the environment—which has prompted a local company named Agroplast to devise a unique solution. Specifically, they have developed a means of processing animal waste (pig urine most notably) and transforming it into plastics that could be used in just about everything—including plastic dinnerware.
