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T-shirt charges your phone by absorbing ambient sound

T-shirt charges your phone by absorbing ambient sound
First there were tie-dyes, then there were hypercolors. Could piezoelectric fabrics that charge your mobile phone while you wear them be the next big T-shirt fad? That's what the French telecom company, Orange, is counting on, reports the Telegraph. The shirts utilize ambient sound as a catalyst to produce electric voltage, and are being rolled out just in time for the Glastonbury Music Festival in Britain. Developers hope that the shirts will offer a convenient, eco-friendly way for festival goers to charge their phones while they're rocking out away from the grid. The material used in the shirts is made from a product called piezoelectric film, which is capable of transforming sound waves into an electric charge via the compression of interlaced quartz crystals. Prototypes for the technology are being called "Sound Charge." After a weekend of mosh pits and camping out, the shirts will undoubtedly need to be washed.

DeepLeap: The Fast-Paced Time-Wasting Word Game! What Do You Do With Old Bumper Cars? - Yes, you read that right; these little beasties are street legal. Yes, you read that right; these little beasties are street legal. They run on either Kawasaki or Honda motorcycle engines and co-opt vintage bumper car bodies into the most awesome form of mini-car we've seen in too long. There are seven of these little monsters floating around California , and they're all the creation of one man, Tom Wright, a builder in the outskirts of San Diego who figured the leftovers of the Long Beach Pike amusement park needed a more dignified end than the trash heap. They were originally powered by two cylinder Harley Davidson Motorcycle engines but they rattled like heck because of the two cylinder vibration and Tom replaces them with four cylinder Honda or Kawasaki 750's and a couple have been measured as capable of 160 MPH, which is terrifyingly fast in machines with such a short wheelbase.

How to Quit Facebook Without Losing the Best Facebook Features Almost everyone uses Facebook, but almost everyone agrees that the social network has quite a few problems. Chances are, most Facebook users have encountered some feature or flaw--from overarching privacy concerns to assorted interface annoyances--that made them reconsider their membership in the social network. Nevertheless, Facebook users tend to stick around because they believe that the benefits outweigh the costs--and because they don't know how to leave the service without losing a few valuable features, such as games or public photo albums. Luckily, you can export or replicate many of Facebook's most useful features with ease, so you can quit Facebook without losing what you love about it. If Facebook is your all-in-one stop for socializing online, you're probably better off staying with the service and hoping that the company fixes a few issues in the next redesign. Export Info From Facebook Organize Events Move Your Photos off Facebook

Body Painting by Craig Tracy | Pondly Article by James Pond I am the owner of Pondly.com / art lover / electrical engineer / software developer / MBA in e-business student. I blog for pleasure and love to share my Internet findings. Web site: Body painting is form of art in which Craig Tracy excels. Shapes of models’ bodies are an inspiration for this artist who was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Website You may want to check out Body Painting by Barbara Pichiecchio and Alessio Frederico Sample: Do you want more visual fun? You might also like

Double-Sided Design Solves Painfully Universal USB Problem | Designs &Ideas on Dornob Sometimes something begs for a simple solution. The nearly-ubiquitous USB port is perhaps the technological poster child for an obvious failure to work both ways (right-side-up or upside-down) despite looking perfectly symmetrical on both sides. Thankfully, and finally, this has been tackled from two directions (appropriately enough): one more idealistic, one more realistic, but both ingenious. Ma Yi Xuan is a student designer who has solved the problem in theory, and in reality by UltraTek‘s new Flipper. In the student version, there is a piece on either side of the interior that slides out of the way to reveal a data connection – which half moves depends on what way the plug is placed into the accepting slot. If you have not encountered the error of normal-style USB plugs, well, it is becoming a bigger issue the more we compute on a daily basis.

Rent a Tiny Sleepbox At Moscow Airport. For Sleeping. Images credit Arch Group/Ivanov Ilya. When I first wrote about the Sleepbox two years ago, I was dubious that it would ever see the light of day, noting "It is an interesting exercise in seeing how small a space one can comfortably live in, but one suspects that the opportunity for, um, misuse might keep this idea of the 15 minute hotel room from going mainstream." But it has, with a working prototype set up in Moscow. Designed by the Arch Group, about the only change from the original proposal is that it is made of wood instead of plastic (common for prototypes, and the minimum time has increased from 15 minutes to half an hour. They appear to have given up on one my favourite features of the original concept, the automatic bed-changing system: [bed] is equipped with automatic system of change of bed linen. Instead they have gone for conventional linen. The architects write: Imagine the situation where you are in a modern city, you are not a local resident, and you have not booked a hotel.

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