Author: matt

Envia Systems Battery – 400Wh/kg

Electric cars are great, but battery technology continues to be holding them back from mainstream acceptance, the limiting factors being battery capacity and cost.  Many companies are working on this problem, and Envia Systems recently announced they’ve achieved an energy density of 400Wh/kg, roughly 2-3X the energy capacity per unit of weight as current batteries on that market and at a lower cost.  You can expect to see this on the market around 2015, with the result being 300-mile range electric cars for maybe as little as $20k.  Read more over at gigaom.

What is in a ‘burger’?

When you order a hamburger from a fast food restaurant, what do you think you’re eating?  Just meat?  Yeah, you wish.  The actual percentage that’s real muscle tissue ranges from 2-15%.  What’s the rest?  Ammonia-treated trimmings, or ‘pink slime’ as it’s been described.  McDonald’s recently announced they’ll stop using pink slime, now what about the rest of them?  Check out the video below, and for more on this, read this article at Care2.

 

Flexible Thermoelectric Fabric

Thermoelectric devices have been around for a long time, and offer the awesome ability of converting a heat difference (one side of the device cold, the other hot) into electrical energy – or reversing the process and using electricity to create that thermal difference (great for car-powered refrigerators, for example).  Now, researchers at Wake Forest University have taken this basic technology and transformed it into a multi-layer, flexible felt-like fabric.  Possible applications could include wearable electronics (though the ambient air temperature needs to be significantly lower than body temperature), or simple things like wrapping pipes in this.

Portable electronics have always struggled with their power sources, with design having been a tradeoff between storage capacity and size/weight/cost.  Being able to generate energy on the move would be a big benefit.

Read more on this over at Design News.

Transcendenz Augmented Reality

I’ve always felt that Augmented Reality (AR) will transform what it’s like to experience the world, but after watching this video about Transcendenz, I find my perspective and vision of AR transformed.

Watching this, I realize that AR has even more potential than I suspected.  This technology, if used fully, has the potential to really change what it means to be a person.  What does that mean for the future?  Will we have ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’? An augmented class of citizen?  But more importantly…with some many directions this technology can be used, who will control it?  That’s the scary part…

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