Category Archives: Gadgets and Tech
Seems like the world is just so keen on alternative energy, that everyone’s now taking the human body too to be a power house of sorts! Piezoelectricity is quickly catching on with concept designs sprouting up every now and then, creating new ways to harvest human-energy to power devices. Recently, the Auckland Bioengineering Institute’s Biomimetics Lab recently came up with a wearable battery that charges up on the go. Flexible, light-weight and inexpensive, this could just be the best way to keep your portable devices like mobile phones and mp3 players charged up all the while!
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Pedalling has never been too much of a refreshing activity before. Pushing on your bicycle pedals is sure to have you break out into a sweat. Recently, we came across pedal power being used to roll out a refreshing product that’ll set your taste buds tingling. Perfect for the outdoors, especially festivals, fairs and other similar events, this pedal-powered smoothie maker requires no grid connections. Built by RE-Innovation, this smoothie maker uses a flexible power drive that helps keep the blender away from the bicycle itself, reducing vibration.
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A human being is a walking-walking powerhouse. By simply walking down a street, a person generates energy, unknowingly, which obviously is wasted given that ways to harness energy as such are yet in their development stages. College student and designer, Olivia Lenz hates this waste of energy and has designed a suit that could help harness it all, capture the same and store it as electricity. Specifically designed for astronauts who spend most of their time out in space and constantly require electricity to power up all those gizmos they carry along, this spacesuit integrates piezoelectric properties that allow the wearer to generate energy from movement.
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Up ahead, logging on to your Facebook page and pouring out your heart on your “wall” won’t be so much of a polluting act, with Facebook drawing plans to open up an energy-efficient data centre. This one built in collaboration with Dell, HP, AMD and Intel, the big-shots in the computing world, will have a boosted energy efficiency of up to 38%! The data centre will also help save up and lower costs by 24%. Part of the Open Compute Project that has everything from the building’s design to the technical specs on public display, the initiative will help Facebook clean up its act and lighten its carbon footprint.
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Give an innovative mind a damaged GameBoy, and you’d probably have something like this. Take Andrew for instance, who was given a damaged GameBoy to which he added a touch of immortality. Andrew split open a solar powered garden lamp and used the photovoltaic cells from it for the GameBoy. The GameBoy now soaks in the sun’s heat and juiced up, staying on forever, without running out of energy, so long as the sun shines. The solar powered GameBoy uses two AA rechargeable batteries that store all the energy it gets from the sun.
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Pin-hole cameras have always been subject to school science fair projects and such. They never have been used for serious photography, not when you’ve got those SLRs and DSLRs around these days. Kelly Angood however decided to give the pin-hole camera a better view of life, and used recycled carboard to create one that can take some pretty amazing pictures! The camera requires a medium-format film (120mm) and is capable of snapping away long-exposure pictures. That’s not all. The creator is eager to have more people indulging in building their own pin-hole cameras and will soon have a downloadable and printable Hasselblad camera that uses 35mm film, a cheaper option to the 120mm and also a lot easier to develop.
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Software firms are forever developing new browsers and we’ve seen web-wars on just which browser beats the other on forums and just about everywhere. Here’s an aspect of web browsers no one really paid attention to before, energy efficiency. Bill Gate’s baby Microsoft has now given birth to the newest browsing sensation, the Internet Explorer version 9 that is said to be the most energy efficient internet browser. After passing through a bunch of tests, competing against Google Chrome 10, Firefox 4, Opera 11 and Safar 5, the Internet Explorer 9 has outshined them all. The Internet Explorer 9 is said to keep your battery life in mind, and is efficient given that it consumes lesser energy than the rest!
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French start-up firm, Wysips, is now offering to turn your mobile phone display into a portable solar panel of sorts that can bask in the glory of the sun and generate renewable energy. The firm uses transparent photovoltaic film that’s placed on the surface of your mobile phone screen. The bigger the screen, the more the energy your phone can soak in. this see-thru solar panel is a one-of-its-kind and can push up solar energy generation like never before. Also in case of touchscreens, the film is simply place below the screen that resides below the capacitive touch layer, causing no effect to the phone’s touch sensitivity.
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The first energy-neutral home built in Santa Monica, California, the PUNCHouse Project 234, a net-zero home owned by television journalist Lisa Ling and her husband, Dr. Paul Song now has an added shot of green, this time from Panasonic that pitched in nine energy-efficient ventilation fans to enhance the health and sustainability of the house. Eager for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Homes Platinum Certification, this 3,800-square-foot house uses an airtight system that, besides keeping pollutants out, also traps some in, that can ultimately be hazardous for the people living there. The fans help with ventilation and are ENEGY STAR certified, helping remove biological pollutants, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and other polluting factors found in homes.
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Researchers at the Michigan State University have come up with a prototype for an internal combustion engine that could revolutionize the world in future, with 90% lesser emissions than the engines of the past. Built with a disk-shaped wave generator, the size of a saucepan, this engine requires no transmission system, cooling system or emission regulation of fuels and uses a rotor, with a wave-like pattern carved into channels that let in fuel and air. Using a shockwave effect that compresses the mixture, this one makes a car’s wheels spin perfectly well.
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