(AA) In today's world of high-tech portable gadgets, iPods and cell phones, we've become dependent upon readily accessible electric outlets to power our devices and charge our batteries. But now researchers at the University of Washington have discovered nature's alternative to the power outlet: living trees.
That's right, living trees. UW engineers Babak Parviz and Brian Otis have invented an electrical device that can be plugged directly into any tree for power. "As far as we know this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree," said Parviz. The research was based upon a breakthrough study last year out of MIT, when scientists found that plants generate a voltage of up to 200 millivolts when one electrode is placed in a plant and the other in the surrounding soil. Those researchers are already designing devices which act as forest sensors powered entirely by this new method. But until now, no one has applied these findings to the development of tree power. It all began last summer with UW undergraduate student Carlton Himes (also the study's co-author). He spent his summer wandering around the woods surrounding campus, hooking nails to bigleaf maple trees and connecting them to his voltmeter. Sure enough, the trees registered a steady voltage of up to a few hundred millivolts. The next step for the UW team was to build a circuit to run on the available tree power. Because the voltage generated by the trees can be so small, the resulting device -- a boost converter -- was specialized to take input voltages of as little as 20 millivolts to be stored to produce greater output. The device's produced output voltage ended up being 1.1 volts, which is enough to run low-power sensors. Of course, the researchers were quick to point out that the technology is still a long way off from being able to power normal electronics. "Normal electronics are not going to run on the types of voltages and currents that we get out of a tree," Parviz said. At the very least, these findings open the door for new generations of electronics which might eventually be efficient enough to take advantage of tree power. It certainly excites the imagination. Maybe in time we'll be witness to weekend picnickers lounging in local parks with their iPods and cell phones plugged into the surrounding foliage. Photo: Engineers Babak Parviz and Brian Otis demonstrate with students how a device can be plugged into a tree for power. (Photo: University of Washington)
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![]() by Terrence Aym, Helium "Superstorms can also cause certain societies, cultures or whole countries to collapse. Others may go to war with each other." (CHICAGO) - NASA has been warning about it…scientific papers have been written about it…geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice core samples… Now "it" is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and is causing life-threatening havoc with the world's weather. Forget about global warming—man-made or natural—what drives planetary weather patterns is the climate and what drives the climate is the sun's magnetosphere and its electromagnetic interaction with a planet's own magnetic field. When the field shifts, when it fluctuates, when it goes into flux and begins to become unstable anything can happen. And what normally happens is that all hell breaks loose. ![]() (CBS) A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a "national cyberemergency," and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year. Internet companies should not be alarmed by the legislation, first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), a Senate aide said last week. Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "We're not trying to mandate any requirements for the entire Internet, the entire Internet backbone," said Brandon Milhorn, Republican staff director and counsel for the committee. Instead, Milhorn said at a conference in Washington, D.C., the point of the proposal is to assert governmental control only over those "crucial components that form our nation's critical infrastructure." Portions of the Lieberman-Collins bill, which was not uniformly well-received when it became public in June 2010, became even more restrictive when a Senate committee approved a modified version on December 15. The full Senate did not act on the measure. ![]() (Robert Krulwich, NPR) You're not going to like this. I didn't. Nobody I've shown it to has. But the designers who thought it up, James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, are provocateurs, so they don't mind if you hate what they've done. So here it is: meat-eating furniture. Let's begin with their digital wall clock, which doesn't need a battery or a plug because it gets its energy from eating flies. This carnivorous clock ("8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days," says co-designer Professor Chris Melhuish, of Bristol Robotics) is just a prototype. It doesn't catch enough flies to power the motor on top and the digital clock. But this is just a first step. (Clay Dillow, Popsci) The future of carrier-based warfare quietly took to the skies over the weekend as the U.S. Navy successfully conducted the first-ever flight of its vaunted X-47B unmanned aircraft at Edwards AFB. The tailless, fighter-sized drone aircraft, designed by Northrop Grumman for carrier-based takeoffs and landings, spent half an hour in the air late Friday executing basic navigation maneuvers and otherwise proving that its design is airworthy and ready for further development.
The flight took off just after 2 p.m. local time and lasted just 29 minutes, reaching an altitude of only 5,000 feet. But for designers at Northrop Grumman and the Navy, it marks an important milestone for unmanned flight. The X-47B is the precursor to what the Navy hopes will be a fleet of unmanned, combat-capable aircraft that can launch from the deck of an aircraft carrier to carry out a range of missions. That, of course, is a big deal not just for the Navy but for the future of robotic aerial warfare, which thus far has been restricted to land-launched drones like the Predators and Reapers operating in Afghanistan and Iraq. |
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