Alternative methods to charge your mobile, Pee as you go

Scientists working at the University West of England (UWE) in Bristol, UK, have found out a way to power a mobile phone with Human pee.

The team has been able to recharge a Samsung phone by placing the fluid through a cascade of microbial fuel cells. Using this process, enough energy is generated to send text messages, browse the World-wide-web and also make a short phone call.

As outlined by the scientists in charge, the next step is to fully power the device with urine…Presumably cleaning their hands straight afterwards.

Dr. Ioannis Ieropoulos has worked for a long time with microbial fuel cells; he’s believed to be an expert in harnessing energy from abnormal options. The potential applications of his work are very appealing from an environmental perspective.

Dr. Ieropoulos said, “We’re very excited as this is a world first, no-one has harnessed energy from pee to try this so it’s an exciting finding. Using the ultimate waste product as the supply of energy to produce electrical power is roughly as eco as it gets.” Eco-friendly tech is, obviously, the great doctor’s main area of interest.

The microbial cells work as a energy converter, they turn the natural substance directly into electricity, via the metabolism of live bacteria. The electrical power is the by-product of a microorganism’s natural life cycle, meaning that as they ‘eat’ the pee, they create power the energy that powers the phone. Now that is what we call ‘pee as you go’.

Toilet humour aside, the team have engineered a world first, as nothing as large as a mobile battery has ever been charged using this method before.

There are, at the present, no plans to market this tech on a huge scale, but maybe someday we can be signing a ‘P’ mobile contract, the trick, as they say, will be pissistance.

PS – I’m apologetic about this one. The work and its implications are actually astonishing. All credit to the UWE team. Though, I always wanted to do one of those ‘And Finally’ type tales and now I finally get to. Please forgive me, one and all.

SOURCES:

 

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/urine-could-charge-mobile-phones-152225132.html

Alternative methods to charge your mobile, Pee as you go

With numerous Kenwood radios, what kinds of connectors and earpieces work on these models?

The most effective types are the 2-pin connector along with the multi-pin connector. The two pin model features 2 connector pins and the multi-pin model features multiple pins. Any difference in functionality may be a topic of customer discretion.

 

The 2-pin connector’s piece includes an in-line PTT (push-to-talk) key and a built-in mic. It also has a surveillance audio tube and comes complete with the clothing clip. This Kenwood earpiece is available for just over £20 (excluding shipping and handling fees).

 

The multi-pin connected earpiece is a different form of connector completely. However, the earpiece is similar, as it also includes an in-line PTT switch, a built-in mic, surveillance tube and clothing clip. The cost is a little bit extra than the 2 pin variety.

 

Both sorts of Kenwood earpiece can be improved by paying extra money which enable it to include features like a ‘swivel’ earloop, for better easy use and luxury, a noise-reduction characteristic and a steel clothing clip (replacing the plastic version).

 

The kinds of connectors compatible with Kenwood two way radios are limited in comparison with some other manufacturers, but Kenwood identify when to concentrate on a particular area, because at times less is more.

 

Kenwood two way radios may only link via two types of connector, but their gear is among the most effective in the world. A Kenwood 2 way radio consumer doesn’t have to spend undue time searching his/her options and researching them before purchase, provided the connector/earpiece falls into one of their two aforementioned different types, then the equipment will work fine.

 

EarpieceOnline have been manufacturing excellent accessories since 2007 and they have a good history of trust, customer reliability and leading edge equipment. For this reason, Kenwood earpieces are popular and frequently sell on the internet.. 

 

For More information on the full range of Kenwood earpieces visit earpieceonline

With numerous Kenwood radios, what kinds of connectors and earpieces work on these models?

How to transmit pictures from my digital camera to my Kindle fire hd without having a PC?

The brief answer is no, you can’t. I’m sad, but that is just how it is.

On the other hand, all hope is not lost despite this dreadful news. There are two main avenues you may go down.

The first is to simply message the photos to yourself and download them to your Kindle. This method works fine if you simply need a few holiday snaps or pictures of the little nephew’s birthday or what, but its not much use for the large amount of photos.

The next method is a little more refined. With a hard drive, you are able to transfer photos comparatively easily from one device to another, this will allow you to transfer a greater amount of photos and will likely take a lot less time.

The best option, I think, is likely the second, especially if you hunt down the “eye-Fi” SD card, fitting with most up-to-date cameras (though, as always, it’s certainly best to double check). Sime, of The Digital Photography Educate blog, was clearly impressed. In his review, he said,

“With the Eye-Fi X2 card, I could upload full res photos from my NEX 5  to my iPhone and then do what I wanted with them [Instagram / Facebook / Flickr etc] when you’re using the X2 card, you can connect the camera directly to your iPhone / iPad without having to use a Wifi router etc… You can also use the Eye-Fi app on your phone [iPhone and Android] to upload your images to your computer / Flickr etc. Yep – works, works well”.

He then gave an individual account of that Eye-Fi’s usefulness, which I’ve re-printed below.

“My wife and I went to the zoo with our almost-three year old a couple of weeks back and I had a look through her images afterwards, realising that there were images from her camera dating back to… well, when I gave her the camera! She’s currently using a 32GB SDHC card in there, and just leaves everything on the card! When I asked if she had copied any on to her computer, I was told “That’s too hard / I don’t have time / Where’s the cable” (Yes, a combo of the three, I didn’t press for details…;) So – I cunningly swapped out the existing card for the Eye-Fi card, loaded the app on her Macbook and added it to start when her computer starts, but to hide in the background (This is an option in the application) so basically, the camera connects to her laptop whenever it can and copies the photographs across – they are there, ready to use. Guess who won ‘awesome technical husband of the week award?’ (Obviously a lot of you are tech savvy, but well… )”

In no way let it be said that I disregard a question of yours without producing a proposal of my own.

If you’ll allow me a quick tangent, there is the line in a single of those beloved books of my teenage years ‘Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood & Sweatsocks’ by Mick Foley (which is the great book about life in general, even if you are not a wrestling fan) where Mick says, “I had always felt that it is not good enough to shoot something down – It was best to have a solution”. Take that and work with it, reprobates.

How to transmit pictures from my digital camera to my Kindle fire hd without having a PC?

A bone conducting earpiece, what makes it special to other types

Music is a large part of everyday life also it has been for nearly as long as People have been on this earth. I often point to the finding of a 40,000-year-old flute dating back to that ice age as evidence for this, but truthfully, the facts you need is all around you, every day. We recall ballads and music long after the folks who first composed them have died and rotted away (a plan which I find curiously soothing) and also the music industry, love it or hate it, is actually a large business.

 

On the other hand, whilst the ice age musicians probably lived in a world of stark violence, frozen, featureless wastelands and harsh, ‘kill or be killed’ inter-cave politics, they by no means required to contend with road works, transport lorries, screaming infants or drunken crowd-rousers on their way to the stag night. Fortunate buggers.

 

Today’s listener has to accommodate all that and more, that may make listening to your music not only difficult, but also dangerous.

 

Now, though, modern science has stumbled across a means in which you can still listen to the favorite songs, even when you’re wearing earplugs (no, I’ve not been sniffing discarded paint cans once more). It’s called bone conduction technology and no, despite the marginally strange name, it in truth does not harm…

 

Based on recent research, exposure to any sound over 100 Dbm wears away a film known as a myelin sheath and leaves your internal ear susceptible to problems like tinnitus and temporary deafness, that may be the start of even more significant problems. Bone conduction technology is made to bypass the most sensitive portions of the ear and reduce the danger of inner-ear damage.

 

How? Well, in order to know that, we need to first identify with how our ears essentially work. (HERE COMES THE SCIENCE-Y BIT) Basically, sound travels though the air, these sound waves are intercepted by quite a few structures within the ear and are ultimately translated and transmitted into our brains (if it helps, imagine it like the encoding/decoding of digital information, like that which leads the actions of the wireless mouse).

 

The sound waves first meet a bit of cartilage (yes, similar stuff a shark’s skeleton is made of), which allows to concentrate the sound, this is called a pinna (but you may call it your outer ear without looking too ridiculous). 

 

Then, the sound waves pass into your central ear, that is filled up with air and also includes both your acoustic canal plus your eardrum (my little brother burst his when he was little and almost burst mine crying about it). The eardrum vibrates, passing the sound through to the ossicles, that are three small bones (that are actually pretty vital to the sense of balance, I am told). These tiny bones transmit the signal to the cochlea, that’s a fluid-filled infrastructure that ‘encodes’ the signals for our brain to ‘decode’.

 

Bone conduction tech vibrates the bones of your skull, distributing the sound directly to the cochlea and bypassing the rest of the ear completely. The nerve impulses transmitted to your brain are precisely the same, but the sensitive instrument of our ear does not need to deal with the trouble of, to quote Anchorman’s Brick Tamland “LOUD NOISES!”

 

This process seems to be completely safe; in fact, the legendary deaf composer Beethoven employed a elementary version of this process in order to compose his most famous works. He attached a rod linking his piano and his head and, as such, was able to listen to the song he was playing.

 

So here you go, rather than exposing your delicate ears to louder and louder volumes, just to drown out the environment noise, it is possible to alternativily stick your earpugs in and play your music at the proper volume. Make no bones about it (groan!)

 

for more information on the full range of bone conductor earpieces visit www.earpieceonline.co.uk

A bone conducting earpiece, what makes it special to other types

Could we have discovered the biggest fish ever seen on the earth?

A combined Scottish-Canadian team has verified that the primitive sea animal leedsichthys problematicus is the biggest boned fish yet to travel the seas of the world.

Mounting to lengths of 16.5 m over a projected escalation period of forty years, the Jurassic-era sea animal would have outgrown even today’s huge whale sharks. Although its grand mass, yet, leedsichthys is believed to have been a filter feeder, just like baleen whales, basking sharks and whale sharks are these days.

Discovered from the late 19th century and officially named (after English farmer and fossil collector Alfred Leeds) in 1889, remains of leedsichthys have been unearthed right through Europe, and in South America.

The ‘problematicus’ portion of its scientific brand stems from the indisputable fact that leedsichthys fossils are notoriously tricky to recognize. That is due to the indisputable fact that leedsichthys’ skeleton #was not# made entirely of bone. Large portions #of the# animal’s internal structure were actually #made from# cartilage, just #as a# shark’s bone structure is. Cartilage #does not# mineralize as willingly as bone and, as the result, fossil cartilage is fairly uncommon.

Out of context, the fossilized bones can signify a challenge to palaeontologists. Over the years, remains of leedsichthys have even been posited as belonging to bone-plated fossil stegosaurus!

Because leedsichthys vertebrae was cartilaginous, it may be very difficult to see how long the fish may have been, with some unsupported estimates signifying that it was as long as 30 metres.

However, each time a new, more complete, fossil was found near Peterborough, UK, scientists were finally able to take an exact measurement. Professor Jeff Liston, of our National Museum of Scotland, said, “We sat down and checked out a good range of specimens, not only at the bones, but their internal development set ups as well – just like the expansion rings in plants – to find some ideas with the ages of these animals, as well as their estimated sizes,”

The team ultimately resolute that a tiny adult leedsichthys would grow to 8 or 9 m after some 20 years and, in another 20 years; it could get to about 16.5 m in length. This is larger than the whale shark, the biggest bony fish living these days, despite persistent and credible reports of whale sharks developing as long as 14 m in length.

This information is thrilling to scientists and natural history enthusiasts as it guarantees a functional insight into the alterations in ocean life that occurred up to and during the Jurassic era.

Scientists now believe that filter-feeding sea animals began as quite small animals, before growing to massive sizes we all know nowadays. The outstanding mass of leedishthys problematicus thus implies that there was a huge surge in the plankton populace of that Mesozoic seas.

The discovery also requires a serious change to the records.

 

SOURCES:

Could we have discovered the biggest fish ever seen on the earth?

Stallone To Play ‘Rocky’ Yet again

Rumours thrive that Sylvester Stallone is going to be playing the character of ‘Rocky Balboa’ again, in a new movie set in the ‘Rocky’ world.

The incredibly popular character Rocky Balboa initially appeared in the Oscar-winning 1976 film ‘Rocky’ and is the central hero in no less than six films to date.

MGM films have basically offered the brand new project, currently known only as ‘Creed’ to director Ryan Coogler.

The future film is invariably a spin-off as opposed to a direct sequel.

Michael B. Jordan, star of this year’s ‘Fruitville Station’ along with HBO television drama ‘The Wire’, would play the grandson of returning series character Apollo Creed. The planned plot would call for young Creed to enter the world of boxing, with Stallone’s Balboa playing the position of his guide.

Director Ryan Coogler, who worked with Jordan in the aforementioned ‘Fruitville Station’ film, is claimed to be enthusiastic about the idea and is hoping to co-compose the script.

Apollo Creed, as portrayed by Carl Weathers, was firstly presented as Rocky’s rival. In his initial role, Creed (who was apparently based on a combination of Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard and Joe Louis) was the World Heavyweight Boxing Champ also like the confidence entrepreneur. When challenged with the lack of proper opponents, Creed decided to put his trophy on the line against a neighborhood, unknown fighter.

The first film largely centred round the chosen fighter Rocky Balboa as he trained for the largest fight of his life. In the later films, Apollo Creed became a tutor plus a close pal to Rocky.

Weathers played Creed in every ‘Rocky’ film until ‘Rocky IV’, where the character was killed in a match with Russian boxer Ivan Drago (portrayed by Dolph Lundgren).

Despite the character’s downfall, he is significantly mentioned in both follow-up movies and remains popular with fans of the series.

The final film in the initial Rocky series, ‘Rocky Balboa’ was released in 2006 to a strong critical and profitable reception. In 2010, Sylvester Stallone was inducted into the Worldwide Boxing Hall of Fame and Museum for his formation and portrayal of Rocky, also like the many tributes he has paid to boxers and also the sport of boxing in his career.

SOURCES:

http://www.sylvesterstallone.com/stallone-inducted-into-boxing-hall-of-fame/

http://uk.movies.yahoo.com/stallone-to-play-rocky-again-in-spin-off-creed-053257511.html

Stallone To Play ‘Rocky’ Yet again

Tablets set to outsell PCs by the end of the year

Editors Note – The writing was on the wall the very first time Steve Jobs stood up on the stage in 2010 and showed everyone the future of computing. The tablet has changed just how we take part in games, compose letters and work out of the office, So this news story about a drop of 13 percent in sales of laptops and a rise of 7% in sales of tablets, isn’t surprising three years on. This is only going to improve for the little tablet pc with apple consistently innovating, microsoft starting to move into the market with their windows 8 tablets and google’s android spreading out its market share quicker than anybody else, it is difficult to see how a laptop or maybe the desktop can compete.

 

The number of laptops sent from producer to retailer fell by 13.9 per cent worldwide over the period, while volumes of desktop computers shipped dropped by 7.4 per cent, according to estimates by Canalys analyst firm.

Year-on-year, PC shipments to European, Middle Eastern and African markets showed a decline of three per cent. Western Europe in particular proved challenging for vendors, with a decrease of 10 per cent over the year.

Volumes to the Asia Pacific region declined 0.5% year-on-year to just over 40 million units, with figures for the region affected by a six per cent fall in shipments to China, which accounted for almost 45 per cent of the Asian market.

Apple remained the top PC vendor for the quarter, with a 17.1 per cent market share with over 18.5 million units. This is a 4.5 million unit lead over Lenovo, its closest competitor in the market, but still a dip from the 19 per cent market share the Californian company enjoyed in the second quarter of 2012.

Lenovo, the Chinese multinational, gained market share in notebook and desktop PC shipments over the quarter. It also bucked trends by reporting strong annual growth in EMEA (34 per cent), the US (28 per cent) and especially Latin America (93 per cent) and performed well on the tablet side of its business, where it shipped an estimated 1.5 million units.

“It is striking how successful it has been in globalising its PC business and breaking the one million unit barrier is an important milestone for its tablet shipments,” said James Wang, an analyst with Canalys.

“Lenovo is on an upward curve with its tablets, expanding in mainland China and Latin America, where there is little competition from the likes of Google or Amazon.”

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10226694/Tablets-set-to-outsell-PCs-by-the-end-of-the-year.html

Tablets set to outsell PCs by the end of the year