Hasta La Gadget!

Are you unimpressed by the current crop of portable battery chargers on the market? Boy, you’re hard to impress. But even with your high standards, there’s a good chance you’ll be interested with the Epiphany OnE Puck. It doesn’t need electricity, light or salt water. All it needs is a hot or cold object, and it’ll pump out electricity in return.

Epiphany Labs claims that its device is a Stirling engine, which works by cooling down fluid trapped inside it. In the process of cooling, some of the thermal energy from the heat source is eventually transformed into electric energy. The company didn’t go into details about the specific components of the OnE Puck, only that if you apply sufficient heat – say, from a cup of steaming hot coffee – on its red side or if you significantly cool down its blue side – as shown above – then it will be able to generate up to 5W of power, enough to charge most smartphones.

A pledge of at least $115 (USD) on Kickstarter lets you reserve your own OnE Puck. As of this writing, the fundraiser has already raised more than half of its $100,000 target with 55 days to go. But if I were you, you might want to wait until Epiphany Labs provides more details about the device before pledging. After all, they haven’t answered the most important questions: What are its minimum and maximum temperature tolerances? Can you hang it over a bonfire or place it in your freezer? And exactly how hot (or cold) does an object have to be to cause the device to generate enough charge? Can Lambert of Technabob get one for free? So many questions.

[via CNET]

Interactive furniture is pretty uncommon. After all, your first consideration in making a piece of furniture is to create something that’s sturdy, durable, and comfortable. Aesthetics usually comes second.

And then there’s the Thermochromic Table. It looks like a simple, minimalist table and bench at the outset, but it’s the finish that sets it apart from the rest.

Because of its thermochromic coating, different parts of the table might temporarily ‘change’ in color once it comes contact to someone or something hot. For example, a person’s hand or steaming cups of coffee, as you can see in the gallery below.

These tables are made by Jay Watson Design and costs £1,850 (~$3,000 USD). Or you could just buy some thermochromic paint pigment and cover your own furniture with it.

[via Geekologie]

Lovin’ the bold look of those new Nikes? If you’re up to date on the athletic shoe scene, you may notice that sneaker designs can give way long before your soles do. A new decaling technique could enable you to “erase” labels and other artworks overnight without a trace, however, letting you change up your wardrobe without shelling out more cash. A prototype device, called Shader Printer, uses a laser to heat (at 50 degrees Celsius, 120 degrees Fahrenheit) a surface coated with a bi-stable color-changing material. When the laser reaches the “ink,” it creates a visible design, that can then be removed by leaving the object in a -10 degree Celsius (14 degree Fahrenheit) freezer overnight. The laser and freezer simply apply standard heat and cold, so you could theoretically add and remove designs using any source.

For the purposes of a SIGGRAPH demo, the team, which includes members from the Japan Science and Technology Agency and MIT, used a hair dryer to apply heat to a coated plastic doll in only a few seconds — that source doesn’t exactly offer the precision of a laser, but it works much more quickly. Then, they sprayed the surface with -50-degree Celsius (-58 Fahrenheit) compressed air, which burned off the rather sloppy pattern in a flash. There were much more attractive prints on hand as well, including an iPhone cover and a sneaker with the SIGGRAPH logo, along with a similar plastic doll with clearly defined eyes. We also had a chance to peek at the custom laser rig, which currently takes about 10 minutes to apply a small design, but could be much quicker in the future with a higher-powered laser on board. The hair dryer / canned air combo offers a much more efficient way of demoing the tech, however, as you’ll see in our hands-on video after the break.

Continue reading Shader Printer uses heat-sensitive ‘paint’ that can be erased with low temperatures (hands-on video)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Household

Shader Printer uses heat-sensitive ‘paint’ that can be erased with low temperatures (hands-on video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  SIGGRAPH  | Email this | Comments

We’ve seen a number of different devices that can harvest energy from various sources, but none quite like this new chip developed by a team of MIT researchers. It’s able to harvest energy from three different sources simultaneously: light, heat and vibrations. The key to that is a sophisticated control system that’s able to rapidly switch between the three sources at all times to prevent any of that energy from going to waste (and not draw too much power itself), with energy from the secondary sources stored in capacitors to be picked up later — as opposed to existing systems that simply switch between sources based on what’s most plentiful. As doctoral student Saurav Bandyopadhyay explains, efficiently managing those disparate sources could be a “big advantage since many of these sources are intermittent and unpredictable,” and it could in turn lead to the chip being used in a range of different applications where batteries or existing energy harvesting methods just aren’t enough: everything from environmental sensors in remote locations to biomedical devices.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Science

MIT researchers develop chip that can harvest energy from multiple sources originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Jul 2012 15:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PhysOrg  |  MIT  | Email this | Comments

It’s summer in Texas, and I’ve lived here my entire life. That means I know a thing or two about hot. A group of physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has landed themselves in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating a temperature that makes a Texas summer sound like winter in the Arctic Circle.

The physicists created the highest man-made temperature in history at 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers were able to produce such a massive temperature only for a fraction of a second using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the lab. The physicists sent gold ions flying in opposite directions around the 2.4-mile collider at a velocity near the speed of light.

The gold ions collided inside one of the six test chambers and the collision produced a substance known as quark-gluon plasma. This is described as a nearly frictionless liquid is about 250,000 times hotter than the core of the sun. It still feels hot here in Texas, regardless.

[via LA Times]