Hasta La Gadget!

Aside from generating heat, most electronic devices also emit electromagnetic fields. A rapid prototyping enthusiast named Dennis Siegel has found a way to tap into those fields and store them as usable energy by way of AA batteries. Think of his harvesters as the real life equivalent of the mutant Bishop.

Siegel wrote about his project on his website but he didn’t go into detail about his build process, only that he used “coils and high frequency diodes” to capture the electromagnetic fields. He also said that he made two different types of harvesters that convert electromagnetic fields of different frequencies. Using the harvesters couldn’t be simpler. They’ll automatically gather and store energy as long as there’s an electromagnetic field nearby. The harvesters also have an LED that glow in proportion to the strength of nearby electromagnetic fields. If you still can’t follow that, watch this creepy dude:

Siegel didn’t mention if he’s interested in making a commercial version of his project. But even if he is he still has a long way to go – his current prototypes need literally an entire day to charge one AA battery. Still, it’s nice to imagine that someday our gadgets will be powering each other and even themselves.

[via Dennis Siegel & Fast Co. Design via Visual News]

Whether you like it or not, electric cars are part of our future, and I hope that my next one will be able to function without the need of any gas. Distance races are quite important, because they allow teams to showcase and iron out the faults in rapidly-developing electric vehicle technologies.

The tiny two-seat Evonik Wind Explorer electric car has traveled across Australia, which covers about 3,100 miles from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Coast. Incredibly, the trip used less than $15 in electricity. The EV was run by rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which are capable of being juiced up by a mobile wind turbine, producing enough energy to travel 174 to 224 miles a day.

The Evonik car was constructed out of lightweight carbon fiber, and has a kite that gives it an added boost in the wind – but wouldn’t be very practical in the city.

I wonder when I’ll be able to use this kind of vehicle to travel around daily.

[via Wired via designboom]

Speakers now come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, so it’s quite a feat when someone announces that they’ve developed a speaker that no one else has thought to make before (except maybe these guys). That’s the position Fujifilm currently finds themselves in with their Beat diaphragm speakers.

The Beat Diaphragm is a portable speaker technology made up of ultra-flexible materials. It’s so flexible, in fact, that you can curl and roll it up when you’re done using it. At Tokyo’s nano tech 2013 tradeshow, Fujifilm also showed off the speakers in a variety of form factors, including shiny flat panels, and even in a Japanese folding fan.

The speaker is constructed with a soft polymer on the surface, which makes the rolling-up action possible. However, when sounds from 20Hz to 20kHz are coursed through the speaker, the material hardens. Additionally, the sound is provided by piezoelectric ceramics.

The potential for this is huge, although the technology has yet to find its way into any actual products you can buy.

[Tech-On! via Engadget via Dvice]

The Antarctic is a crazy place. The ice on the cold continent slowly moves toward the ocean at a rate of a quarter-mile every year, so establishing fixed structures isn’t necessarily feasible. However, a new kind of research station that’s set to open on February 5 has legs, and it can walk over the ice to avoid falling into the ocean.

Dubbed the Halley VI, the research station consists of eight stations that are connected together, all of which have these special legs so that the different pods can move in unison. The station consists of laboratories and sleeping quarters, with the larger red station acting as a communal living area that sports some pretty cool things, such as a climbing wall and a herb garden.

The legs consists of retractable hydraulic pumps that allow the structures to beat the rising snow level, and if the station needs to move, a bulldozer can tow the entire thing to a new location with ease. Honestly, they look like something straight out of Star Wars, and could be considered a smaller, more agile version of the AT-AT, but we digress.

Halley VI will be the most sophisticated research station to lay land on Antarctica, and while the laboratories on board are important, designers were specifically focused on making the station as cozy as possible. Architects made sure to select colors that were “refreshing and stimulating,” as well as putting daylight bulbs in lamps to simulate sunlight in order to prevent stress and depression during those long Antarctic winters.

[via io9]

Futuristic Antarctic research station can walk on ice is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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OK, so basically, self-replicating robots are a no-no when it comes to robotics, because you don’t want them to start taking over the planet and exterminating humans. I for one, don’t welcome our robotic overlords.  iRobot and Raytheon recently filed a patent which could be the source of something scarily robotic. Thankfully, this isn’t exactly what they’re after, but it wouldn’t take much to make so-called “von Neumann machines” a reality with this device in hand.

The patent for the Robot Fabricator is for a machine that would allow products of all sorts to be autonomously constructed. Its capabilites would range from the creation of seed components to the assembly of finished products without any direct human involvement.

While we’re still quite far from the scenario of what happened in the Dune novels by Frank Herbert, in which machines enslaved humanity, things could still go very wrong very quickly. If such a device got into the wrong hands grippers, robots could be popping up everywhere. Scary, huh?

[via 3Ders via DVice]