Scientists invent "slime" – could be used in medical, energy, robot applications
lightsource.ca
lightsource.ca
This is a bit far fetched as it does not mention any power density figure. Being compressed likely squeezes out micro watts. Off by at least 6 orders of magnitude.
What's interesting is that these materials can be used as sensors, building small voltages/sending small currents when deformed.
> The weight from each step across Pavegen tiles creates a small vertical movement of 5mm-10mm compressing an electromagnetic generator and creating a rotary motion to produce 2-4 joules of off-grid, clean energy.
Seems useless though. Every dollar spent on this sort of fancy flooring, which is doubtlessly more expensive than carpet and/or foam rubber mats, is a dollar that isn't being spent on solar panels.
Their page opens with:
> Generate energy, boost engagement, and discover rich data insights
It's probably more about data collection with greenwashing on the side.
https://energy-floors.com/products/kinetic-dancefloor/ implies one tile is rated at up to 20 W output. The 44 tiles Coldplay has would then be up to ~800 W (some of them seem less accessible). I guess I don't know enough to figure out how much it saves compared to the emissions of lugging it around, but I'm kind of skeptical it actually "boosts sustainability".
Reality: It will be used for sex.
Now I can see it...this stuff dumped down the drain, mixed with refuse and the occasional decomposing organic material...who knows what it could produce
EDIT: Forgot to add, the researchers referred to it as a "Ferroelectric soft material".
Cue Brian Cox thoughtfully staring into oblivion.
Like really, people can't understand 155 miles/250km, or 8.8 miles/14.2km?
155 miles = 1409090.9 Bananas
8.8 miles = 80000 Bananas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Parrots
:)
In the case of the distance measurements used, those are numbers beyond distances most humans will ever personally travel. In the modern era, many likely travel that distance in cars fairly regularly, yet then there's an intermediary. The human themselves are not traveling 100+ miles. Even in those cases, it's often changed into another form, such as "a couple hours drive." Very few actually walk 100+ miles and have any concept of that type of distance from their own human perspective. Used to be a part of Boy Scouts, and even in an organization focused on hiking, the amount that ever actually went on a 50 mile hike was rather small.
They also use abstract units without much actual connection to humans themselves. What's a mile? How about a km? A unit decided by committee based on the distance across the Earth.
"In August 1793, the French National Convention decreed the metre as the sole length measurement system in the French Republic and it was based on 1/10 millionth of the distance from the orbital poles (either North or South) to the Equator, this being a truly internationally based unit."
When it gets smaller and closer to your actual life, people can actually visualize those ideas. It's a concrete object, you may have actual experience with, and a sensation of how far that is, and amount "noun" it takes to interact with. (time, effort, ect...) It's rare that anybody ever even looks at anything labeled "this distance is a mile", "this distance is a km", or something similar. The most frequent would be road markers. How often do most people walk down the highway and try to "human scale" remember how far a mile is? "That's like the distance from downtown to that highway onramp" or something similar.
For a lot of humanity, there's suspicion that most likely cannot even tell me how far it is across their town. A distance that's interacted with semi-regularly. It might be the numbers you quote. Perhaps it's 8.8 miles. However, most can probably not just state that number, and would likely use an intermediary form like "a couple hours walk", or "a 15 minute drive by car."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016773222...
I don't understand cyclic voltammetry, but it seems from Fig 4a this tops out at about 75 µW/cm²?
On a serious note these material discoveries are neat to see but seldom do we see any real world applications come out of them. I am absolutely ready for the next game changing tech to come out. The next battery. Or finally fusion power. A space elevator. Anything. My guess is the next big change will be personal robots becoming main stream. First in business then in our homes. We were promised clothes folding laundry machines a couple years back that never happened. I need my laundry bot asap.
The one paper I co-authored whilst mostly drunk on a Mediterranean island would have been described as "new statistical model could save billions of lives!" if we hadn't called the university out on it. It would have been a grand extrapolation of a nothing.