Another form of power.
The wearable technology unobtrusively generates electricity from the natural motion of walking and uses it to charge a wide range of portable battery-powered devices. The Harvester resembles an orthopedic knee brace, weighs about three pounds, and extracts up to seven watts of electricity from each leg - roughly the amount needed to simultaneously operate 14 mobile phones. The next generation of the device will be much smaller, lighter, and even more efficient.

http://www.bionic-power.com/tech.html

I heard an article on that.

They claim a set, one on each knee joint, produces a steady 5 watts of power. Not bad. Particularly when you find out it doesn't make walking any harder. Neat trick.

As I understand it they don't use the joint motion in most of the normal stroke but rather just the very last of each cycle when the body is having to expend energy to decelerate the joint. This is usually entirely wasted energy.

The commentary from users was that after taking them off they missed them because they had to start decelerating the joint at the end of each stroke for themselves so it felt like they were having to work harder Not wearing the generator units.

I could see a day when all your electronic gear was on a central energy harness that took power from a set of these units and automatically kept the GPS, cell phone, PDA, laptop and a flashlight all topped up and ready to go.

The military is looking closely at similar devices. In part because a study revealed that the average infantryman carries something like five to seven pounds in batteries. If they could get by with a couple of pounds of batteries and these units were only a pound a piece they would be ahead of the game in weight and, because they wouldn't need resupply so often, you could cut the number of supply convoys.

Word I hear is that the real kicker will be solar powered extraction of atmospheric water. That could cut the number of transport convoys by a bit more than a third.

Wasn't there a story about a kid who grew up on a moisture farm?

"Word I hear is that the real kicker will be solar powered extraction of atmospheric water. That could cut the number of transport convoys by a bit more than a third."

That wouldn't be that hard actually with the cool tubes (in computers)and chips found in 12v freezers. I may experiment around one day to try to collect the moisture using fans and heat exchangers to see if I can generate water. the only draw back to these systems is the humidity has to be higher, in the desert it's a little more harder. But that's a great idea and I'll look into that.

I know but the health and food industry would fight you. You can't sell wheel chairs if there are no crippled people. That's how screwed up our world is. Focused on money, not what's happening around us.

"...the World would be a better place if all of these scientists working on redundant alternative energy sources like this worked on ending World Hunger or curing Cancer."

There is no intention of curing World Hunger, nor has there ever been. Withholding or doling out food is as perfect a non-violent way of controlling countries as you are likely to find.

Why do you think Monsanto (with U.S. backing) is forcing Third World countries to buy its GM seed, even when they adamantly don't want it?

And I doubt that we're going to cure cancer anytime soon, as we are adding more contaminants to the world's air, water, soil and food on a daily basis. When there are MILLIONS of people with cancer, there is a reason; it's not spontaneous generation from nothing.

Sue

there's no money in cures...lots in treatments.

Plus all the money that gets raised to find cures just goes back into advertising and manufacture of ribbons.

I swear, Hacksaw, you're as cynical as I am, or close.

Sue

Same with Pink.

I also have a beef with all these different organizations all trying to cure different kinds of cancer. Just pool the resources and cure 'cancer' for pete's sake!

It's like that group project you had to do in High School only everybody in your group did their own thing and the final product was crap.

No offense, but what do you think cancer research centres do, if it's not research into curing cancer?

There is a lot more money spent on finding a cure for cancer than there ever will be on knee-brace powered cell-phones, IMO.

Perhaps we would all be better off if guys like Marconi had been told by the powers that be "Forget about this communicating-via-radio-waves nonsense and work on finding a cure for cancer." Perhaps we should have told Alexander Fleming "Stop p***ing around with mould samples and work on finding a cure for cancer."

As it is, we continue to waste our money on developing renewable energy sources that might someday be used by farmers in Third World countries to power LED lamps that would allow their kids to do homework in the evening, and even give them access to radio broadcast classroom instruction in their own language on how to improve their crop yields.

Which just might, you know, lead to that cure for world hunger and all....

I'm with Hacksaw on this, the money is in the treatment, not the cure. Cancer is an industry, a cure would put a lot of folks out of business. Susan, it seems more than a couple of us have a cynical side.