Using Kinetic and Thermoelectric Power to Keep Your Cell Phone Battery Charged

Music fans can now charge mobiles at festivals using their Power Pocket denim shorts – via body heat and movement (Picture: Solent)

From Britain’s University of Southampton comes a pair of pants with a pocket for keeping your smartphone battery charged.Britain, is an island situated to the north-west of Continental Europe.

It’s called, naturally enough,  the “Power Pocket” and it charges a phone with the energy you create when you move about (called kinetic energy), plus the energy you create with your body heat (called thermoelectric energy).

The European phone company Vodafone worked with the university researchers. It’s all part of an ongoing trend to turn your clothes into clean, renewable sources of energy!

There’s US$40 billion Hidden in This Picture. See It?

You can’t. Not from this angle. But it’s there just the same.

This is a government building and every kind of government building, including your school, uses energy to heating, cooling and lighting.

According to the federal government, the government buildings in the US (schools, hospitals, offices, etc.) could save a total of US$40 billion is they were retrofitted to make them more energy efficient.

That’s not chump change.

To achieve those savings will require changing the thermostats, lights, fans, furnaces, etc. of thousands of buildings -- no small task. As you probably know, the federal government is deep in debt, so there’s a lot of resistance to spending money on something that does not absolutely, positively have to be done.

But just think about the payoff -- US$50 billion!

Sure Does Look Like an Ordinary Washing Machine

But it’s not. What are the two things you need to wash your clothes? Water, right? And laundry detergent

The washing machine in the picture uses neither. It’s a new kind that uses only hot air.

Saving water obviously is a good thing. And so is not using chemical detergents.

But while this washing machine -- from a company called LG -- will scrub your clothes clean with steam, call us a skeptic until we see it in action. What do you think? Can hot air clean your dirty socks?

This Mask + a Smartphone App = Knowing Exactly the Quality of Air You’re Breathing

Everyone wants to breathe clean, fresh air. But until now, there’s really been no way of knowing how fresh is the air you are breathing at any point of the day.

Take a look at this guy and his mask and ask yourself: Would I wear one of these if it told me the quality of the air I was breathing right then and there?

This mask was designed by people in Shanghai, China as part of a contest sponsored by Frog Design. Its developers were inspired by Shanghai, China’s air quality, there is never good, and by the government, which can not be trusted to provide reliable information on air quality.

The mask both filters pollution out of air (so you’re not breathing it) and records the level of pollution where you’re standing (or walking). The readings given off by our mask get fed wirelessly into a system that you can access on your smartphone. The more people wearing these masks, the more reliable the information.

Earth Preservers wants to know: would you wear this mask if it gave you reliable information on the quality of air you’re breathing?

View poll on GoPollGo

This Billboard Produces Clean Water from Humidity in the Air

The billboard serves a dual purpose, acting to draw students to the newly established engineering university UTECIn a world where hundreds of millions of people do not have access to clean water, and where drought is a constant threat , this billboard could be the start of something big. 

Peru is a country located in western South America.. Lima is the capital and largest city.Located on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, this billboard collects humidity from the air and runs it through a series of filters in order to produce clean, fresh drinking water.

On the billboard itself is a message from Lima’s University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC)  about how imaginative engineering can solve the world’s problems.

You might not think that “air water” (a phrase Earth Preservers just made up) could help people in living in very dry areas, but as this BBC News story notes, even in a desert, air humidity can be more than enough to supply local people with drinking water.

Just imagine!

To learn more, watch this video from UTEC.