Tag Archives: inventions

The Latest Technology in Cheap Energy Storage Is Manufactured with Pasta Makers

by Prokippxv Posted on December 27, 2013

A startup based in Manhattan called Urban Electric Power is taking a stab at the energy storage problem. And rather than just store energy, the company is going one step further, by manufacturing completely non-toxic batteries rather than the usual corrosive chemical-filled variety.

One big problem with renewable energy—including wind, solar and wave energy—is storing it. If we could stock up on energy when the sun is shining brightly or the wind is blowing, then we could continue to produce power at night or during windless days. Stored energy can also offset demand for energy at peak times, when utility companies have to ramp up production.

Urban Electric Power is approaching this issues by updating an old battery technology. Energy.gov explains:

Inexpensive, non-toxic and widely available, zinc has long been known to be an excellent electricity storage material because of its high energy density. Invented more than 100 years ago, the zinc anode battery is still used today. Yet, for all its benefits, zinc has one major shortcoming — dendrite formation develops over the battery’s life, causing the battery to short after a few hundred cycles.

Basically, researchers have hit a roadblock when attempting to tap into zinc’s energy-storying potential because of that material’s annoying tendency to clump up. To get around this problem, Urban Electric Power designed a simple solution: just stir the zinc. Scientific American reports:  

The key to preventing that degradation turns out to be flow. In the case of Urban Electric, that means little propellers attached by magnets to the bottom of the plastic container holding a series of zinc–manganese dioxide pouch cells. The fans circulate a fluid that keeps the flaws from forming, and the ions flowing in and out of the electrodes. That fluid also turns out to be cheap: water. The convection from a little bit of water flowing around the pouch cells prevents the formation of tiny fibers on the zinc electrode, known as dendrites, that kill off a typical alkaline battery. “We use very little flow,” Banerjee says. “It’s really just stirring.”

The design is so simple that the creators use little more than homemade pasta makers, restaurant-grade stirrers and rolling pins to make the chemical materials, SciAm adds.

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Underwater Kites Can Harness Ocean Currents to Create Clean Energy 
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The Latest Technology in Cheap Energy Storage Is Manufactured with Pasta Makers

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In 1949, a Physicist Proposed Using Skyscapers And a Roof to Control NYC’s Climate

by caringk63 Posted on December 27, 2013

Image: San Antonio Light via Paleofuture

Long before we started worrying about global climate change, people were wondering how they could control the climate of major cities. Wouldn’t it be nice, they thought, to have a climate-controlled metropolis? No scorching summers, no freezing winters…just a nice pleasant time, all year round.

In 1949, Archibald Montgomery Low, an engineer and physicist, proposed a plan to keep New York City nice and temperate. It involved putting a giant roof over the entire city. He wrote about the plan in San Antonio Light, saying:

CLIMATE “TO ORDER” — One of the things to come, Professor A. M. Low points out, is likely to be the weather-controlled city. Using the famous New York skyline as a “model,” the artist’s conception, above, embodies some of the best scientific thinking of our time. “Roofs” like the one pictured may be constructed over cities and linked to skyscrapers to provide scientific control of weather. Open cross section of “roof” shows weather experts busy controlling temperature, etc.

This isn’t the first time someone has proposed something like this. In 1952, the Edwardsville Intelligencer ran a piece envisioning our climate controlled future, as Matt Novak at Paleofuture quotes:

Weather-conditioned” communities in the future are perfectly feasible, according to a professor of architecture.

Ambrose M. Richardson of the University of Illinois announced that his graduate architecture students already are working on a model of plastic pillows, helium-filled and joined to make a mile-high floating dome.

Next spring Richardson intends to try the idea with a small dome covering about an acre of land.

He said the next step may be covering 10 or 15 acre areas such as football stadiums and baseball parks. Larger domes – made of thousands of transparent pillows each only a few feet square – covering whole communities would be only a step away.

Obviously, roofing New York City—or really any major metropolis—isn’t exactly feasible. Today, we’re more focusing on keeping the global climate from running away from us than on keeping the citizens of New York nice and comfortable.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Origins of Futurism
The Jetsons and the Future of the Middle Class

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In 1949, a Physicist Proposed Using Skyscapers And a Roof to Control NYC’s Climate

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This New Charger Checks To See If Your Phone’s Been Hacked

by DenaeTina858 Posted on October 4, 2013

Photo: closari

The increasing ubiquity of smartphones has made these little computers an appealing target for hackers. Most phones operate on one of the two main mobile operating systems—Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android—and Android’s open nature, along with the ease with which it lets you download off-market software, has made it hackers’ favored target.

This isn’t a huge problem, if you’re careful. But, if you are downloading a lot of software outside of the official channels, you may be opening the door to your phone’s innards to malware. Quartz:

About 15% of the apps flagged by Verify Apps are commercial spyware, a diverse set of monitoring apps that range from tracking internet behavior to improve advertising to the very malicious keyloggers that collect personal information entered by the user and report it to the malware creator.

Many software hacks and bugs rely on code that prevents the computer’s built-in security from detecting the problem, either by tricking the anti-virus software into thinking the hack is harmless or by somehow masking it from view. To combat this kind of attack, says MIT Technology Review, the company Kaprica Security has designed a mobile charger that will scan your phone for malware while juicing its battery. Tech Review:

For the user, the charger is simple: plug it into the wall, and plug the phone into the charger. The charger then conducts a quick preliminary scan of the phone; if all is in order, it shows a green light.

If you leave the phone plugged into the charger, it will reboot at a time you’ve preconfigured—3 a.m., for instance—and start a more thorough process that sends the phone’s operating-system files to the charger for an analysis that takes about four minutes.

…If a problem is detected, the charger will alert you with a red light, and—depending on the user’s preferences—the charger can automatically repair the phone by using a previous “good” version of the operating system it has already stored.

The idea behind the charger is that, being independent of the phone, the charger wouldn’t be fooled by the tricks meant to confuse the phone’s protections.

That being said, we can’t help but be a little bit nervous about a company with a name like Kaprica Security. What if the charger is actually just paving the way for the Cylon invasion?

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This New Charger Checks To See If Your Phone’s Been Hacked

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This Gadget Charges Your Phone With Fire

by Larry Daichea Posted on October 3, 2013

Sometimes it’s nice to unplug and get away from it all. But just because you’re not connected to the internet doesn’t mean you won’t use your smartphone. It can be a flashlight, for lighting the way; a map and and a compass, for navigating; or a camera, for capturing scenic vistas. But if you need power to get home and that ever-important battery starts to wane, suddenly the wonder tool can seem rather useless.

There are options for recharging in the field, from hand-cracked chargers to portable solar cells. But a new device that just cleared its Kickstarter funding goal has a different take. The FlameStower, says Laughing Squid, uses the heat from a fire to generate electricity.

According to the FlameStower team, “The FlameStower Fire Charger works with the energy of your cooking or camp fires. Once the blade is in a fire, the thermal energy is transferred to the Thermoelectric Generator (TEG). The opposite surface of the TEG is in contact with the water reservoir – hot side gets hot, cold side stays relatively cool, and the temperature difference generates electricity.”

This isn’t the first portable device designed to produce electricity from fire—there’s also a purpose-built cooking stove or a small fuel cell. While the FlameStower is geared towards outdoor enthusiasts, there are other uses for these sorts of chargers, too. They could be useful during natural disasters, particularly for responders who drain their batteries finding their way, keeping in touch and documenting damage, or in countries without well-developed electrical systems.

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This Gadget Charges Your Phone With Fire

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These Complex, Beautiful Board Game Pieces Are 5,000 Years Old

by y3kyabkl Posted on August 16, 2013

The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest known board games, but newly discovered pieces may be even older. Photo: The British Museum

If you think that board games with fancy pieces and weird dice and other complex features are a relatively modern invention, archaeologists would like to have a word with you. Over the years, field research has unveiled the complexity of ancient gaming. Today, Discovery News is reporting on what may be some of the oldest gaming pieces ever found:

Found in a burial at Başur Höyük, a 820- by 492-foot mound near Siirt in southeast Turkey, the elaborate pieces consist of 49 small stones sculpted in different shapes and painted in green, red, blue, black and white.

“Some depict pigs, dogs and pyramids, others feature round and bullet shapes. We also found dice as well as three circular tokens made of white shell and topped with a black round stone,” Haluk Sağlamtimur of Ege University in İzmir, Turkey, told Discovery News.

The pieces date to around 5,000 years ago, they say, and were dug up in two sites, one in Syria and one in Iraq. The region is known as the Fertile Crescent and is traditionally thought to be one of the birthplaces of modern agricultural human societies. Discovery has a whole photo gallery showcasing the pieces.

The pieces are old, really old. But there’s another game, the Royal Game of Ur, that’s about contemporary—it dates from around 4,800 years ago in southern Iraq. And then there’s an Egyptian game, Senet, that is at least that old, if not older. Researchers think that basic board games may have been invented up to 11,000 years ago.

According to a story in Discovery News from last year, early board games were a status symbol:

“Many of the first board games appear to have been diplomatic gifts to signify status,” co-author Mark Hall told Discovery News. “We have early examples of quite splendid playing pieces belonging to elite, privileged people.”

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These Complex, Beautiful Board Game Pieces Are 5,000 Years Old

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Sail-Powered Ships Are Making a Comeback

by Constantinee9g Posted on August 1, 2013

A c 1835 lithograph of the clipper ship Challenger. Photo: Library of Congress

“Clipper ships were not a specific design, they were a state of mind,” says John Lienhard, an engineer from the University of Houston. “And that state of mind lasted only a decade.”

Bristling with a staggering array of sails and built for speed, clipper ships were the “greyhounds of the sea.” And now, because of rising fuel costs and limits on gas emissions, says Businessweek, clippers—sails and all—may be on their way back.

Rolls-Royce Holdings is best known for producing engines that powered planes from the late Concorde to the current Airbus superjumbo. Now the British propulsion giant is working with partners to develop a modern-day clipper ship, as it bets that regulations curbing air pollution emissions will increase fuel costs for conventional ocean freighters and herald a New Age of Sail.

In the mid-19th century, says Lienhard, soaring prices for cargo shipping made it more profitable for vessels to be swift instead of bulky—a change that drove the temporary reign of clippers.

So masts rose into the sky. Hulls developed a knife-edged bow. And the widest beam was moved over half-way back. Economy and long life were literally thrown to the winds. Ships began to look like they’d sailed out of a child’s dream. They were tall and beautiful. Acres of canvas drove them at 14 knots.

The ships, says the Australian National Maritime Museum, “won the admiration and envy of the world. Hundreds of Yankee clippers, long and lean, with a beautiful shape, and acres of canvas sails roamed the globe carrying passengers and freight.” The end of the high shipping fees in 1855, though, sunset the era of the clippers, says Lienhard.

The origin of the clipper ship can be found in the mindset of the 19th century entrepeneur that was driven by market competition and profit. Profits depended on how quickly a cargo reached the market. This created a demand for fast vessels and a willingness to push the boundaries of design and technology.

Now, those same market forces are pushing shipping technology once more—tying the old to the new in a bid to face new challenges with old ideas.

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Sail-Powered Ships Are Making a Comeback

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Meet Your Local Farmer Bot

by kowalski099 Posted on July 23, 2013

Photo: hobvias sudoneighm

Robots are taking jobs wherever you look, from light construction to energy infrastructure installation to stocking shelves. But one of the greatest transformations to come of the ongoing robot revolution may be in the effect they have on one of humankind’s oldest professions. Yes, that one, probably—but also farming.

The idea of the automated farm of the future is by no means novel, but only recently has it become feasible. In recent decades, some more experimentally inclined farmers have toyed with self-driving tractors and other ways of automating conventional farm tools. But the real rural robot revolution will likely be very different says Taylor Dobbs for PBS’ NOVA Next.

While the self-driving tractors make for a fantastic show, they are just the beginning. Precision agriculture is still in its early stages. If these were the early days of the personal computer revolution, Mulligan Farm would be a small garage in Silicon Valley in the 1970s. And like that moment in history, the possibilities for precision agriculture today are seemingly endless.

“The near future of American farming,” says Dobbs, “may, in some ways, more closely resemble the distant past.”

Instead of a massive machines slowly combing over vast swaths of land, scores of individual laborers will work their own small sections, one row, one plant at a time. The only difference is they will be robots, working day or night, continuously streaming data about growth rates, soil fertility, water usage, and more to the farm office.

Robotic tractors, says Dobbs, could be replaced by little crawlers and flying drones. New Scientist last year showcased a prototype of a little farmer bot.

New Scientist:

Whereas other automated systems are designed to replace people with electronics – tractors that drive themselves, for example – Dorhout’s approach is to improve the farming process. By providing assistance, a robot swarm allows farmers to focus on the science and business side of their operation. “The farmer is like the shepherd that gives the robot instructions,” says Dorhout. Robots are also able to transcend the limitations of farm equipment to maximise efficiency, for example by planting in a grid instead of rows.

Steady progress is being made in robot agriculture, says the Associated Press in a review of the nascent field. But, the AP writes, so far we’ve seen just the beginning: “Most ag robots won’t be commercially available for at least a few years.”

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Meet Your Local Farmer Bot

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