It seems that everyone is looking for ways of scavenging power from, well anywhere. This physics professor challenged his doctoral student to improve the design of a thermoacoustic engine driven by waste heat to make sound energy. This, in turn, vibrates piezoelectric devices to generate electricity.
There are sources of waste heat everywhere, and for the […]
I have been a follower of the work in Terahertz radiation for a long time. Terahertz radiation lies in a range of frequencies from about 500 Gigahertz (above the highest cell phone range) to far infrared, or about 1700 Gigahertz. The significance of the terahertz frequency range is that you can get a great amount […]
The desalinization of seawater has been a Holy Grail for tinkerers forever. Finding a cheap, fast, mobile method of removing salt from water may be the most important scientific challenge for this century. I think by now we all can see the handwriting on the wall. Lake Lanier is about as gone as the water […]
This article points to the possibility of using heat to make a thermal logic gate, which could be a great way to make a new type of computer that is powered by a heat source. At first pass, it didn’t really strike me as that significant. After all, just because you can build a logic […]
This technology may well be the breakthrough that eventually clears the list of folks waiting for an organ transplant. Researchers at the University of Missouri print ‘bio ink’ particles (droplets which contain 10,000 to 40,000 cells) onto paper, and then allow these particles/spheres to grow and fuse together. The growing mass slowly morphs into a […]
This snippet of an article published in the Applied Physics Letters may be the harbinger of something of huge importance. While graphene is a sheet of nanoparticles, and therefore not immediately relevant, the area of work (specifically in the thermoelectric arena) is one of great impact. If you think about all of the available direct […]
Nokia has made a great leap in the world of haptic technology- touch feedback. They have created a touch screen that touches back! Using piezo technology, the screen “jostles” your fingers (.1 mm, hardly a big whack, but enough apparently), along with a click sound, to give you the feedback that you actuated the key.
I […]
This is a great example of out of the box thinking. It uses the excess energy of a beating heart to generate enough electricity to recharge the batteries in a pacemaker or batteries in an LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device) or other implanted body helper.
I must say that inventors have been tap dancing around this […]
Anyone remember the movie Firefox? In it, Clint Eastwood played a psychically wounded pilot who is tasked with stealing the latest Soviet super weapon jet, which was partially controlled by thoughts. Think “rocket fire” (in Russian of course), and a rocket fired.
This little esoteric piece of technology that the good scientists at NIST have come […]
After a lifetime of almost no real progress in batteries, the changes are coming fast and furious now. This technology of carbon graphite foam takes the place of the heavy lead plates in a conventional lead acid battery, and is perhaps one of the best solutions to long term storage and […]
