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What could possibly make a hat with a Tesla coil attached to the top even cooler? The Tesla coil plays the Mortal Kombat theme song, and the only thing that could make this hat cooler would be if it shot lightning bolts at your opponents, Raiden style!
–via Geekosystem
Who needs a generator when you’ve got the Nissan Leaf, an 100% electric car that can power your house for 2 days via the “Leaf-to-home” system, a converter that attaches to your home’s electric panel and allows for the car’s lithium-ion battery to provide power when it may be otherwise unavailable.With the people of Japan still recovering from the recent disasters, Nissan feels that a symbiotic relationship between electric car and home may be just the thing to keep the lights on when everything else around you is falling to pieces. Link -via PopSci Image via Tom Rafferty at Wikimedia
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory announced today that they have observed a rare property in a special class of metals called multiferroics: they have both magnetic and electric properties, which normally don’t happen in the same material. Ferromagnets are, of course, magnetic metals, and ferroelectrics are materials that have a permanent electric polarization.
Now, scientists have found a new way that electric and magnetic properties can be coupled in a material. The group used extremely bright beams of x-rays at Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) to examine the electronic structure of a particular metal oxide made of yttrium, manganese, and oxygen. They determined that the magnetic-electric coupling is caused by the outer cloud of electrons surrounding the atom.
“Previously, this mechanism had only been predicted theoretically and its existence was hotly debated,” [Brookhaven physicist Stuart] Wilkins said.
In this particular material, the manganese and oxygen electrons mix atomic orbitals in a process that creates atomic bonds and keeps the material together. The researchers’ measurements show that this process is dependent upon the magnetic structure of the material, which in this case, causes the material to become ferroelectric, i.e. have an electric polarization. In other words, any change in the material’s magnetic structure will result in a change in direction of its ferroelectric state. By definition, that makes the material a multiferroic.
You’ll find more technical information at the Brookhaven National Laboratory site.
Nikola Tesla was born in what is now Croatia on July 10, 1856, which is 155 years ago today. It’s a good day to take a little time and find out more about this extraordinary man.
Few inventors contributed more to advances in science and engineering in the early 20th century than Nikola Tesla. As one of the Fathers of Electricity, Tesla did groundbreaking work on alternating current (AC) power system, electromagnetism, hydroelectric power, radio, and radar to name a few. Many of his inventions (Tesla obtained some 300 patents in his lifetime) became the stuff we take for granted today: when we flip a switch to turn on the light, we owe a lot of that electrical magic to Tesla.
As fate would have it, Tesla, one of the world’s greatest inventors, died penniless and in obscurity. Even today, many people mistakenly attribute many of his inventions to others (Edison, for example, is in the name of many power companies in the United States – ironically, they use the AC system devised by Tesla rather than the more inefficient direct current or DC system espoused by Thomas Edison; Tesla also invented the fundamentals of radio transmissions before Gugliegmo Marconi).
Today, there’s quite a bit of resurgence in Tesla’s popularity, which is helped in part by his mystique as a “mad scientist.” Amongst his more outlandish ideas, Tesla worked on death rays to knock out enemy airplanes out of the skies, pocket-sized resonance machine that could topple buildings, ways to send electricity through the upper atmosphere, force-fields to protect cities, and so on.
Read the story of Tesla’s life and inventions, along with plenty of photographs, in an excerpt from the book Tesla: Master of Lightning by Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth. Link
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have created a metal alloy composed of nickel, cobalt, manganese and tin. This “multiferroic composite” can convert heat into electricity!
In this case, the new alloy — Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10 — undergoes a reversible phase transformation, in which one type of solid turns into another type of solid when the temperature changes, according to a news release from the University of Minnesota. Specifically, the alloy goes from being non-magnetic to highly magnetized. The temperature only needs to be raised a small amount for this to happen.
When the warmed alloy is placed near a permanent magnet, like a rare-earth magnet, the alloy’s magnetic force increases suddenly and dramatically. This produces a current in a surrounding coil, according to the researchers, led by aerospace engineering professor Richard James.
One possible application for this alloy is in automobile exhaust pipes, which vent a lot of heat that could be recycled into electric power for the battery. Read more at Popsci. Link -via reddit
Photo: Murdo Macleod
Whisky. Is there anything it can’t do? Here’s what the Scots are going to do with the byproducts of whisky-making process:
It is the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, and now whisky is to be used to create electricity for homes in a new bioenergy venture involving some of Scotland’s best-known distilleries.
Contracts have recently been awarded for the construction of a biomass combined heat and power plant at Rothes in Speyside that by 2013 will use the by-products of the whisky-making process for energy production.
Vast amounts of "draff", the spent grains used in the distilling process, and pot ale, a residue from the copper stills, are produced by the whisky industry each year and are usually transported off-site. The Rothes project, a joint venture between Helius Energy and the Combination of Rothes Distillers (CoRD) will burn the draff with woodchips to generate enough electricity to supply 9,000 homes. It will be supplied by Aalborg Energie Technick, a danish engineering company. The pot ale will be made into a concentrated organic fertiliser and an animal feed for use by local farmers.
Sure gives a new spin on "drunk with power," doesn’t it? Link via GOOD
Forget the water hose! Firefighters of the future may simply "zap" fire out of existence with an electric wand:
Currently, firefighters use water, foam, powder, and other substances to tame flames. But a team from Harvard University’s Whitesides Research Group has shown that electric fields can snuff out fires too—potentially reducing water damage as well as environmental threats posed by fire retardants.
The scientists connected a thin wire to a 600-watt amplifier—roughly as powerful as a high-end car stereo and about as big as a file cabinet—plugged into the wall.
The "wand" system generated an electric field with the strength of a million volts per meter, "approximately the field necessary to generate a spark in dry air," said chemist Ludovico Cademartiri, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
Whenever the researchers brought the electric wand close a burner emanating thin jets of fire up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) tall, the flames almost instantly went out.
Bonus: if they say “Aguamenti” when extinguishing the fire: Link
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And you thought your home wiring was weird! Caution -don’t try this at home, or anywhere else. -via reddit
The exoskeleton of the oriental hornet is a solar collector and generator that converts sunlight into electricity! A team led by Marian Plotkin of Tel-Aviv University discovered the wasp’s power plant properties, but don’t know why the insects produce electricity.
Their research revealed that pigments in the hornet’s yellow tissues trap light, while its brown tissues generate electricity. Exactly how the hornets use this electricity is still not entirely understood, Plotkin noted.
“When I was running my experiment, people told me it was never going to work,” she said. “I’m so happy at the results.”
While solar cells using human-made substances are usually 10 to 11 percent efficient at generating electricity, the hornet’s cells are only 0.335 percent efficient. For instance, the hornet still gets the vast majority of its energy from food.
Link -Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!
(Image credit: Blickwinkel, Alamy)
Comments Off Kazuhiko Minawa of the Enoshima Aquarium in Japan developed a method of powering Christmas tree lights using an electric eel. Since at least 2007, his idea has been put to use in a local shopping center. Link -via Boing Boing
Psst! Wanna be better at math? The answer may be shockingly simple: just give your noggin a little jolt!
The electricity generated by a 9-volt battery might be all there is between you and the mathematical brilliance of a Newton or an Einstein.
OK, we can’t guarantee you’ll be that smart, but, amazingly, British scientists have now shown that low voltage current applied to the right part of the scalp can spark changes that boost the brain’s math abilities. What’s more, that mild jolt can lock in your improved mathematical prowess for as long as six month, according to new research published in this month’s issue of Current Biology.
The findings come too late for those of us who already suffered through middle school algebra, but maybe future generations will benefit.
The researchers, led by Roi Cohen Kadosh from the University of Oxford, suspected that a little electricity directed at the right parietal lobe – a brain region at the top of the head and known to play a role in numerical calculations – might juice up a person’s math ability.
Want to relieve yourself in front of John O’Connor’s shop? Urine for a shock of your life.
Tired of having his property urinated upon by drunken revelers, the peeved shopkeeper decided to take the laws into his own hands with a measure so drastic it’s shocking:
A shopkeeper who is fed up of drunken revellers urinating beside his store plans to give them the shock of their lives by wiring up an electric current to the pavement.
John O’Connor said he could no longer put up with his premises being used as an outdoor toilet by a steady stream of late-night partygoers.
‘If anybody persists and continues with the anti-social behaviour they’ll get a shock, they’ll know all about it,’ he warned today.
Just a little am”pee”rage? What could possibly go wrong? (Got any more puns? I’m all tapped out) Link (Photo: Eamon Ward)
Did you do anything productive over the past month? I ask because YouTube user JoshuasCorner blew up 5 watermelons with powerful electrical discharges. How many did you explode?
via DVICE
Did you know that Tesla once rubbed two cats together in an attempt to generate electricity or that Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant in an attempt to discredit Tesla’s theories?
Tesla earned a spot among the great minds of the early electrical era, but, despite his genius, he ended up ostracized from the science community and died impoverished. Learn more about Tesla’s interesting life in under three minutes with a little help from this clever video.
The Vincent substation along California’s State Route 14 is crucial to bringing wind and solar power to the Los Angeles Basin. Photo: Joe McNally
If you think about it, it’s a marvel of modern engineering that most of us aren’t even aware of "The Grid". Yet it is what made modern life possible. When you watch TV, work on the computer, or even turn the light on, you’re using the electricity and that juice comes to your house via the electrical grid.
"The electrical grid is still basically 1960s technology," says physicist Phillip F. Schewe, author of The Grid. "The Internet has passed it by. The meter on the side of your house is 1920s technology." Sometimes that quaintness becomes a problem. On the grid these days, things can go bad very fast.
When you flip a light switch, the electricity that zips into the bulb was created just a fraction of a second earlier, many miles away. Where it was made, you can’t know, because hundreds of power plants spread over many states are all pouring their output into the same communal grid. Electricity can’t be stored on a large scale with today’s technology; it has to be used instantly. At each instant there has to be a precise balance between generation and demand over the whole grid. In control rooms around the grid, engineers constantly monitor the flow of electricity, trying to keep voltage and frequency steady and to avoid surges that could damage both their customers’ equipment and their own.
When I flip a switch at my house in Washington, D.C., I’m dipping into a giant pool of electricity called the PJM Interconnection. PJM is one of several regional operators that make up the Eastern grid; it covers the District of Colum bia and 13 states, from the Mississippi River east to New Jersey and all the way down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It’s an electricity market that keeps supply and demand almost perfectly matched—every day, every minute, every fraction of a second—among hundreds of producers and distributors and 51 million people, via 56,350 miles of high-voltage transmission lines.
So it should worry you that the grid is sick. America’s electrical grid infrastructure is a patchwork of networks built with antiquated equipments. Over decades, this infrastructure has fallen behind the nation’s ever-growing demand for electricity. So, how do we fix it? (And for those of you who shout "no more oil" should know that our "addiction" to foreign oil has nothing to do with electricity – oil is predominantly used for transportation, not electricity).
Joel Achenbach of National Geographic wrote a fascinating article about the Electrical Grid (with fantastic photos by Joe McNally): Link – Thanks Marilyn!
The US Air Force has developed a gadget that will give troops operating in the field access to electricity. Just hook it onto a power line:
An engineer at an Air Force research lab in Dayton, Ohio, has figured out how to harness electricity from power lines via a system called RAPS. RAPS is a connecting device that’s attached to the end of a long cable. When the device is thrown over a power line, a blade at the end pierces the power line and completes the circuit that brings electricity down to the soldier. And that can mean a lot in the desert or jungle.
Link via OhGizmo! | Photo: US Department of Defense
Resistance Begins at Ohm – $14.95 by Chris Murphy
It’s summer and you know what’s perfect for the hot weather? How about some Science T-shirts and Funny T-shirts over at the NeatoShop? With hundreds of selections priced reasonably at $9.95 to $14.95, you can spread the LOL on the cheap.
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The city of Presidio, Texas, has only one aging transmission line connecting it to the US electric grid, so power outages are very common.
To battle chronic power outages and electrical fluctuations, the city is coming up with an unusual solution: a Texas-sized battery backup!
The hoped-for remedy is a battery, a Texas-size battery, which could eventually end up playing an important role in wider use of green power generation such as solar and wind. The U.S. $25 million system, which is now charging and is set to be dedicated April 8, will be the largest use of this energy storage technology in the United States.
The four-megawatt sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery system consists of 80 modules, 8,000 pounds (3,600 kilograms) each, constructed by the Japanese firm NGK-Locke. They were shipped to Long Beach, California, in December and transported to Texas aboard 24 trucks.
The cost of the battery system includes $10 million just to construct the building in which it will be housed and the new substation it requires.
According to a Japanese farming folklore, mushroom harvest will be good when there’s a lot of lightning.
Sounds like nonsense? Not so fast: scientists have discovered that electricity does make some species of mushroom multiply.
As part of a four-year study, scientists in northern Japan have been bombarding a variety of mushrooms in lab-based garden plots with artificially induced lightning to see if electricity actually makes the fungi multiply.
The latest results show that lightning-strength jolts of electricity can more than double the yield of certain mushroom species compared with conventional cultivation methods.
"We have tried these experiments with ten types of mushroom so far and have found that it is effective in eight species," said Koichi Takaki, an associate professor in engineering at Iwate University.
"We saw the best effects in shiitake and nameko mushrooms, while we also tested reishi mushrooms, which are not edible but are used in certain types of traditional Chinese medicine," he said.
Wait for it…
We think we live in such modern times, with fabulous inventions that make our lives easier and provide great convenience. But some of those inventions might not be as modern as we think. Take a look at these five inventions that may have been around for thousands of years before we “invented” them.
A jet engine in the first century B.C.? Perhaps. A jet engine in the first century A.D.? Definitely. The aeolipile is a rocket style jet engine that spins when it’s heated and is the first-ever device known to use steam for a rotary motion. Although it was “invented” in 1698 by Thomas Savery, the original may have been invented in the first century B.C. Roman architect Vitruvius’ De architectura, a work on then-modern architecture written around 25 B.C., includes a device called the aeolipile. However, it has never been verified that his aeolipile (which translates to “ball of Aeolus,” who was the god of the wind, so it’s kind of a generic name that could apply to various inventions) was the aeolipile that we know existed in the first century.
That’s the aeolipile that Hero of Alexander wrote about, including a detailed description of how to construct one. The invention credit is usually given to Hero instead of Vitruvius.
That Hero was a pretty smart guy. He also invented the vending machine long before we were prying Kit Kats out of them in our office break rooms. Hero rigged it so that when a coin was dropped into a slot, it fell on a pan, and the weight of it on the pan triggered a lever that opened up a valve that let some holy water flow out to the person who dropped the coin in. The pan kept tilting until the coin fell off of it, and when that happened the valve closed and the water would no longer dispense. The first modern-day vending machine came about in the 1880s, so you could say that Hero was well ahead of his time.
We’ve long thought that the first astronomical clocks didn’t show up until the 14th century in Europe. That all changed in 1900 when a group of divers discovered shipwreck thought to date back to 150-100 BC. A lot of the loot was stuff you might expect from that era – statues, busts, instruments and utensils. But then one of the divers spotted what looked like a gear stuck in a rock, which was eventually found to be just one of many pieces of the same thing. Upon closer inspection and much analysis (decades of analysis, in fact), it was determined that the gear and its 80+ other pieces were part of a complicated mechanism that precisely calculated the position of the sun, moon, planets and other astronomical information. It was capable of predicting an eclipse right down to the hour that it would occur. Astronomer John Seiradakis has called it the “pocket calculator of its time.” Its construction was so perfect and exact that many historians and archaeologists believe that the Antikythera Mechanism was just one of many similar devices – we just haven’t discovered the other ones yet.
Here’s curator Michael Wright with his working replica of the Antikythera Mechanism – it’s pretty interesting stuff. Photo from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.
We’re not sure about this one – it’s just a theory. But there is some speculation that the ancient Egyptians may have understood how to harness electricity. The entire argument is based on stone reliefs inside the Dendera Temple complex in Egypt. What the etching appears to depict, to some, are bulbs, filaments and insulators. It also looks like a lotus flower and a snake. The argument could probably stop there – obviously humans are programmed to spot patterns in things and could easily see a now-everyday object in an ancient etching when it’s really not there. But English scientist J.N. Lockyer (he discovered helium) pointed out that the tombs were conspicuously soot-free – if Egyptians were using candles or torches, there would no doubt be some evidence of it on the walls or ceilings. But there is no evidence. A lot of people believe that the Egyptians used a series of mirrors to reflect the sunlight into the temple, but others say that their mirrors were too weak to do any such thing. Thus, the argument continues. What do you think? Photo from Wikipedia user Liftarn.
Along the same line as the Dendera Temple light is the Baghdad Battery. In the mid-1930s, a number of artifacts thought to date back to 200 BC were found in Khuyut Rabbou’a, a village near Baghdad. The combination of objects – a five-inch long clay jar and a copper cylinder that encased an iron rod – led researchers to believe that the ancient artifacts were actually used as batteries. Batteries for what, we still don’t know. Unlike the Dendera light though, there’s some evidence that these really were batteries – replicas have been made that did, in fact, conduct an electric current, sometimes as much as two volts. One theory is that the batteries were hidden inside of idols to give tiny little shocks to people, scaring people who didn’t understand the trick and often forcing them to give up secrets or confess to crimes. Photo from the BBC.
I went to China and took an electrical adapter with eight different plug-ins, and still managed to stay at one hotel in which none of them fit. Why are there so many types of electrical plugs and sockets in the world? When household electric use began in the late 1800s, different areas of the world settled on basically two voltage systems, 110-120 and 220-240 (with some exceptions). Then each nation had their own reasons for developing the plug-in system they have.
But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?
For example, Britain incorporated fuses in the appliance plug instead of the wiring system because of a shortage of copper at the time.
You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn’t introduced until 1946, and didn’t see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who’s got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.
Despite widespread global travel, the expense of rewiring electrical grids all over the world means there won’t be any standardization of plugs anytime soon. Read the whole story at Gizmodo. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
Lightning Packs is a company that is developing backpacks that generate electricity with the motion of their users. As the user walks, the spring-mounted backback bounces slightly, turning a gear on a generator. It is the brainchild of Lawrence C. Rome of the University of Pennsylvania, who hopes to market his idea to the U.S. military:
“Soldiers now carry GPS receivers, night vision goggles, headlamps, communication devices, and more. And with this technology, means of powering them becomes critical. Soldiers carry eighty pound backpacks, up to twenty pounds of which are spare batteries. Now, with the Suspended Load Backpack, electricity can be generated to power the equipment directly or to charge a lightweight rechargeable battery,” Dr. Rome said.
When walking, the Suspended Load Backpack can generate up to 7.4 watts, more than enough power to simultaneously power an MP3 player, night vision goggles (or 3 LED headlamp), a PDA, a CMOS image decoder, a handheld GPS, Bluetooth, and a GSM terminal in talk mode.
Link via Gizmodo (where there’s a video)
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photograher who takes pictures of electrical charges. His exhibit “Lightning Fields” is currently on display at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to directly apply electricity to film. The above image is entitled “Lightning Fields 128, 2008.”
Previously on Neatorama: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Henry VIII Photos
This picture of birds on wires by photographer Paulo Pinto looks like music notation. So Jarbas Agnelli naturally wanted to find out what that music sounded like.
Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn’t the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.
-via Bits and Pieces
(Links open in a new browser window/tab)
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Juggling with Bowling Ball I kid: that's not a bowling ball, but it sure does look like one! Link |
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Dog Hates the Happy Birthday Song! |
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Physics Fun: Jell-O + Electricity = FIRE! Link (Includes the phrase "electrically active Jell-O mound" that is PURE WIN) |
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Cell Phone Reunion From the geniuses over at CollegeHumor: Link (NSFW language - the ending makes it all worth the wait) |
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The Crazy PS3 Kid Banned From Playing PS3 His range of emotion is amazing! Christian Bale, watch out! Link |
For more the web's most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
Photoshoppery by: Dr. Monster [Flickr]
Inspired by the legendary "A Day at the Science Fair" (not a polite link, but very funny) thread at SomethingAweful, Travis Pitts of Zom-Bot made this quick and dirty (and very funny) image: Link – via The Zeray Gazette
And yes, I think that’s probably Disaster Girl or her twin sister.
Everyone talks about alternative energy these days but mostly in terms of water, wind and solar. What about cars, cows and tornados?
To meet our future energy requirements, we need to rely on a huge range of alternative sources. Let’s not forget the whimsical beginnings of our efforts to harness electricity (I’m referring to the kite of Benjamin Franklin). It’s only fitting that electricity generation technologies come from left field.
"There’s only three things I’ve ever been afraid of: electricity, heights, and women." – Thanks özi!
Update 1/15/09 by Alex: Let’s do this instead – a thumbnail with a link to the video clip. It’s a fascinating excerpt from the IMAX movie Straight Up: Helicopters in Action
Israeli energy company Innowattech has created a new type of road that generates electricity as cars drive on it:
The supercharged surface is embedded with piezoelectric crystals, which transform kinetic energy from passing vehicles into an electrical current. With widespread adoption, the technology could feed energy back into the nation’s burgeoning electric vehicle grid, transforming congested roadways into a clean green source of energy.
The amount of electricity produced isn’t that much (400 kilowatts per kilometer or 645/mi), and there’s no mention on how cost effective it would be. But given the sheer amount of roadways we have (the US has over 4 million miles of roads and streets in its highway system alone), it’s an interesting albeit niche approach to generate electricity.
