We all know that proper hydration is important. Every cell in your body depends on water to function properly and, when you run low on H2O, systems start crashing. Most of us drink enough fluid to stave the bad stuff off, but when you exercise and start sweating, the equation gets a little more complicated.
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Would you drink your sweat? Obviously, we’d all choose to drink water if we had a choice. But if there’s no clean water, would you drink sweat instead?
The Sweat Machine was created by engineer Andreas Hammar upon the request of Unicef.
It essentially purifies human sweat to turn it into drinking water. It’s not being used as a tool to tackle water shortages, but as a means to raise awareness on the issue.
Unicef recently brought out the machine to offer a glass of fresh sweat to visitors and footballers at last week’s Gothia Cup soccer tournament.
The Sweat Machine uses water filtration technology called Membrane Distillation that was developed by HVR and The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It uses a plastic cassette where the sweat to be filtered is heated into vapor and made to circulate between two membranes. This separates non-volatile substances effectively.
Hammar explained that a sweaty t-shirt can provide about 10ml of water, or just about a mouthful. Just think of how many sweaty shirts you’d need for a full glass of water.
[via Gizmag]
Valve has a surprisingly varied staff roster. Mike Ambinder is the company’s very own experimental psychologist and he’s been outlining some of Valve’s work with biofeedback technology, including eye-motion controls for Portal 2 and perspiration-based gaming adjustments on Left 4 Dead. Mentioning these developments at the NeuroGaming Conference last week, Ambinder notes that both are still at an experimental stage, but that “there is potential on both sides of the equation, both for using physiological signals to quantify an emotion [and] what you can do when you incorporate physiological signals into the gameplay itself.”
In Left 4 Dead, test subjects had their sweat monitored, with values assigned to how much they were responding to the action. This data was fed back into the game, where designers attempted to modify (and improve) the experience. In a test where players had four minutes to shoot 100 enemies, calmer participants would progress normally, but if they got nervous, the game would speed up and they would have less time to shoot. When it came to the eye-tracking iteration of Portal 2, the new controls apparently worked well, but also necessitated separating aiming and viewpoint to ensure it worked. With Valve already involving itself in wearable computing, it should make both notions easier to accomplish if it decides to bring either experiment to fans. Venture Beat managed to record Ambinder’s opening address at the conference — we’ve added it after the break.
Filed under: Gaming
Source: Venture Beat
Sweating is part of the summer. No matter where you are, especially with the heatwaves of this year, you’ve probably sweat quite a bit over these last few months. If you tend to sweat a lot from your pits, and would like it to stop soaking your clothes, you could always microwave them so that they completely stop sweating.
miraDry uses microwave energy to zap your armpits and kill off 22,000 to 30,000 sweat glands in that area, reducing the amount of sweat that you generate when you get hot. It’s supposed to work in 90% of patients and reduce sweating by 82%. The effect is supposed to last for a year, but you’ll need a couple of sessions for this to work well.
Aside from evaporating your sweat glands, it will also evaporate some of your cash as this procedure costs $3,000. For some reason, it doesn’t sound like a good idea to mess with you body’s biological processes this way. What happens if you overheat? Sweating is a nature’s way of cooling us down.
[via DVice]
The only reason why summer sucks? Sweat. It gets everywhere—your pits, your face, your back, your crotch—and turns summer into a slimy, sticky, smelly season. How do you stop it? Deodorant? Air Conditioning? No, mere mortal, a magical microwave sweat zapper gun! More »
Just when we needed a modern-day equivalent of sailing down the Nile while being fanned by Assyrian slaves, we get this: the Black Element Cyclone Edition gaming mouse, which has a 6,000 rpm rotor directed right at the point where slick skin meets plastic. Pictures of the device have been floating around the web for a while, but we’ve just heard from its creators — TT eSports, Thermaltake‘s sub-brand for peripherals — that it’ll be available in US stores any day now (or officially, “in August”) priced at $80. The patent pending design promises to keep noise down to a sub-environmental 21.7dB, while delivering an airflow of 2.6 cubic feet per minute — which, if you’re lucky, should be enough to not only keep your digits dry but also reach your palm. The fan can alternatively be removed, in which case you’ll be left with a 6,500 dpi laser sensor, an adjustable weight of up to 22.5 grams, “military-grade” grip coating and an abundance of natural oils.
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals
Thermaltake cures clamminess with $80 Cyclone Edition gaming mouse originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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