From The New York Times Magazine's innovations issue:
Physicists at Wake Forest University have developed a fabric that
doubles as a spare outlet. When used to line your shirt — or even your
pillowcase or office chair — it converts subtle differences in
temperature across the span of the clothing (say, from your cuff to your
armpit) into electricity. And because the different parts of your shirt
can vary by about 10 degrees, you could power up your MP3 player just
by sitting still. According to the fabric’s creator, David Carroll, a
cellphone case lined with the material could boost the phone’s battery
charge by 10 to 15 percent over eight hours, using the heat absorbed
from your pants pocket. Richard Morgan
HT:
Freakonomics who writes:
The New York Times Magazine‘s “Innovations” issue is a good read. Of the 32 innovations listed, the most interesting to me were Nos. 14, 15, and 16. The appeal of the middle, anyone? Or maybe I’m just a fan of Catherine Rampell, who wrote two of those three.
Here they are:
The Shutup Gun When you aim the
SpeechJammer at someone, it records that person’s voice and plays it
back to him with a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This seems to
gum up the brain’s cognitive processes — a phenomenon known as delayed
auditory feedback — and can painlessly render the person unable to
speak.
Kazutaka Kurihara, one of the
SpeechJammer’s creators, sees it as a tool to prevent loudmouths from
overtaking meetings and public forums, and he’d like to miniaturize his
invention so that it can be built into cellphones. “It’s different from
conventional weapons such as samurai swords,” Kurihara says. “We hope it
will build a more peaceful world.” — Catherine Rampell.
Physicists at Wake Forest University have developed a fabric that doubles as a spare outlet. When used to line your shirt — or even your pillowcase or office chair — it converts subtle differences in temperature across the span of the clothing (say, from your cuff to your armpit) into electricity. And because the different parts of your shirt can vary by about 10 degrees, you could power up your MP3 player just by sitting still. According to the fabric’s creator, David Carroll, a cellphone case lined with the material could boost the phone’s battery charge by 10 to 15 percent over eight hours, using the heat absorbed from your pants pocket.
