Category Archives: Gadgets and Tech
Smartphones running out of juice isn’t a new phenomenon, and no matter just how brilliant the technological upgrades get in these phones, the battery life always seems to fall short! Now, Apple received a patent for solar energy generation systems for smartphones that could change the way iDevices in the future charge up on the go! From what we’ve made out of Apple’s plans, the company might just have photovoltaic panels on phones soaking up energy from the sun to illuminate the display! It isn’t long before we finally have a bunch of new generation Apples making use of solar energy, and this patent acquirement could indeed be Apple’s baby-steps into a cleaner and more energy-efficient smartphone industry.
[Ubergizmo]
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LG seems to have struck gold with energy-efficient television technology recently. The company’s newest baby, a Full HD 47-inch panel is claimed to be the world’s most energy efficient television till date. Using a single vertical edge backlight to achieve 400 nits of brightness with just 28W of power, this one’s more energy efficient than any other television above the 40-inch size limit and consumes lesser energy than 20-inch PC monitors! In what could be an industry-changing development, LGs new television technology could help pull down those soaring electricity bills our home has been shedding.
[Engadget]
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Mobile phones come packed with battery woes, and the most of us face the phenomena of our phones ditching us at the worst possible moment, with the battery dying out as we helplessly look around for a charging source. Quirky recently unveiled the Ray, a solar powered portable charging device for your portable devices. Simply place this interesting little charger on a surface well-exposed to sunlight and plug your mobile phone or portable device using the USB connector. The Ray works great while placed near a window too, so if you do enjoy a lovely view from your workspace, this one’s the ideal way to juice your mobile phone!
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Insects are a known and sworn enemy of farmers all around the world, who at times resort to insecticides to keep the menace away from our soon-to-be-consumed food. Instead, AgriSolar recently unveiled a more environment-friendly way to keep away insects from crops in place of those harmful insecticides that enter our food chain, ruining the eco-system gradually. The new system uses a lightbulb that glows bright with a specially set color spectrum powered by solar energy. This attracts bugs and disorientates them all in a 20-acre radius. Once attracted to the bulb, they ultimately lose orientation and fall in a water-filled collection bin that drowns them.
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Flying cars might be well off in the future, though the world seems to have come pretty close to flying carpets these days! In our childhood, all we could do was dream of flying away on a carpet just like Aladdin, hoping we had pretty Jasmine for company. Now a Princeton graduate has come up with a 4-inch piece of plastic that could be the cornerstone of flying carpet technology! Using tiny conducting threads that electrify the plastic, this one propelled ahead a centimeter a second and requires air pockets to move forwards. Also, the inventor has plans to come up with a solar-powered version of the same.
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Escalators are known energy-suckers. A City University London professor of mechanical engineering, Jack Levy, has come up with a unique way to cut short energy bills that owe their enlarged sums to escalator use. Levy’s escalator design, called the Levytator, uses a loop-like construction and is claimed to be the world’s only escalator that supports curvature. Common-day escalators have their redundant steps move underneath those in use. The Levytator simply loops the up and down escalators in a continuous path, allowing passengers to go up and come back down without having to step off! This simply wipes out the need for two separate escalators, one for upward mobility and one going downwards!
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Ever wondered what the world looked like from the highest point on the planet, the peak of the colossal Mount Everest? Well, researchers and scientists from Italy decided to give the world a first-hand view of it all from the comfort of your home, without having to scale the mountain itself. By simply placing a high-resolution solar-powered camera on the peak, the scientists have successfully begun streaming live picture feeds from the mountain, updating every 5 minutes. The camera, a Mobotix M12, uses solar energy to power up and functions well even at the nerve-freezing temperatures it usually is subjected to at the peak.
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And if you’ve been under the impression all along that tanning does good just for your skin, here’s a technological breakthrough that has left us smiling like a bunch of happy hyenas! Designed by Hosung Jung, Junsang Kim, Seungin Lee and Yonggu Do, this solar-powered printer uses the tanning process to print stuff on paper, instead of using the typical ink cartridges! Using heat energy from the sun itself, this little printer tans the paper, making it an eco-friendly way to printing and documenting.
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Holding a phone to your ear while you drive around isn’t all that great an idea and its things like these that cause those tragic accidents more often than not. Behold the Bluetooth head phone kit for cars powered by solar energy! Compromising of a single unit, the kit includes the Bluetooth device and the solar unit that collects energy from the sun to power up the system. All you need to do is stick it inside your windshield and pair it with your mobile phone. This one allows for convenient call answers, making using a phone while driving easy as cake.
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NASA plans to hit the sky, its playground, yet again, this time with the world’s largest solar sail ever conceived. One of the three projects been selected by NASA for the Technology Demonstration Missions, the solar sail measures a whopping 100 square feet (9.29 square meters)and spans 409 square feet, or 38 square meters. The sail could be used to gather orbital debris over a period of several years and included to a satellite’s payload, activating towards the end of the mission dragging the satellite out of its orbit.
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