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Author: John
Pay Attention!
… or “Why you should stay off the track during competition!”
A Greek Atlantis?
Well, I guess if your looking for the lost cities of Atlantis the area around the Mediterranean is a good place to start.
An international congress devoted to the myth of the lost continent of Atlantis opened Monday on the Greek island of Milos, attended by seismologists, geologists, geographers, philosophers, historians and archaeologists from five existing continents.
Greek island hosts three-day conference on Atlantis myth
The Atlantis 2005 confrence page is located here: International Conference on The Atlantis Hypothesis
Hey, I’d like to go to Milos, it looks like a nice place. I’ve always wanted to learn how to SCUBA dive and that looks like a nice place to learn. Plus, it would be quite a kick to find a lost city while I’m looking at fish.
Shades of TRON
With these you can build your own ‘Light Cycle’ (Come on people, we remember the movie TRON don’t we?)
Anything that lets people see a bike better is fine with me. They are so darn hard to get out of your fenders…
Seebeck Effect Powered Fan
Why not get more work out of your wood stove? this device uses the Seebeck Effect to run a fan that will move air from your stove to other parts of your room. Its a clever idea alright, it’s pretty much the same thing that powers space craft except your not using burning wood as your heat source – your using the natural decay of nuclear materials.
As I encourage everyone to play with science whenever possable, I’ll tell you how you can make your own Seebeck Effect electrical generator.
You’ll need the following:
- A steel nail – 4″ long will do
- Some copper wire – stranded about the diameter of a coathanger
- A candle – nice sized on a sturdy base
- A volt meter of some sort – you could use a small motor if you wanted but you might not see any movement on your first try
- Something to hold the nail with, it’s going to get hot.
Strip the insulator from the copper wire and wrap some around the nail.
Around a four inch nail I’d wrap about six inches of wire in a space of apx. one inch.
Connect the leads of the meter to the nail and the wire and hold the wrapped part of the nail in the flame of the candle.
You should see a small voltage show up on your meter. Pretty cool, eh?
Yes, you can build bigger ones out of better materials but at some point you end up melting your experiment. I suppose if you had some good thermocouples (thats what the bimetal junctions are called) and some very low voltage LEDs you could build a sundial that you could read from inside your house. Leave a comment if I lost you anywhere.
Anyway, the bimetal strips in the little fan are doing the same thing as the wire and nail, just that they are built of metals that have a better energy coefficient. A pretty good use of science if you ask me.
Self Hheating Can Hacking…
I saw a whole stack of these at the grocery store a few weeks ago and the first thing through my mind wasn’t “Hum, I wonder if the coffee tastes good?”. Hell no! It was “Oh yeah! Self heating cans! I have to buy a few and take them apart!” Well my lack of money got the better of me and I put the idea of exploring new tech away for a while. I figured it was an exothermic reaction of something coming in contact with water. I used to play with that when I was a kid. I have a bit of fun my heating cupric sulfate over a flame until it turned from blue to white. Once it was cooled if you added water to it you would get quite a bit of steam and some nice ‘SSSS’ sounds to boot! What fun. Well, I lived in the sticks what else was I going to do? (Someone ask me about ‘ Pink Fizzing Smoke’, now that was fun! 🙂 )
I know you get the same thing from one of the heaters in an MRE, but that uses iron powder to do the same thing. I think the by product of that is hydrogen though. Not what you want being generated in your car on the way to work. (“Mmm, that coffee sure smells good [FWHUMP!!!] AIEEE!!!” Yeah, that would be PR nightmare wouldn’t it?)
These use calcium oxide and water to make heat, I don’t think there is any gas created by this reaction. Any chemists out there care to comment?
MAKE has a great pictorial on how the new Wolfgang Puck self heating coffee cans. Go buy a few before they are all recalled because of an idiot who can’t read the directions.
Wolfgang Puck self heating can hacking…