> If installed in floors, it could produce clean energy when people walk on it.
This is a bit far fetched as it does not mention any power density figure. Being compressed likely squeezes out micro watts. Off by at least 6 orders of magnitude.
What's interesting is that these materials can be used as sensors, building small voltages/sending small currents when deformed.
falcor84 31 days ago [-]
Generating electricity from people stepping on the floor is actually already a thing with current technology - https://www.pavegen.com/
cjbgkagh 30 days ago [-]
AFAIK They even had schools designed to limit the students bypassing these generators. Something about having the role of a child being to generate a miniscule amount of electricity seemed very dystopian to me.
https://energy-floors.com/products/kinetic-dancefloor/ implies one tile is rated at up to 20 W output. The 44 tiles Coldplay has would then be up to ~800 W (some of them seem less accessible). I guess I don't know enough to figure out how much it saves compared to the emissions of lugging it around, but I'm kind of skeptical it actually "boosts sustainability".
BriggyDwiggs42 31 days ago [-]
Oh no is it just solar roadways again
falcor84 31 days ago [-]
They have a solar product too, but their main approach is this:
> The weight from each step across Pavegen tiles creates a small vertical movement of 5mm-10mm compressing an electromagnetic generator and creating a rotary motion to produce 2-4 joules of off-grid, clean energy.
The solar tiles make me concerned but I suppose I don’t immediately see an issue with the pressure tiles. I hope they turn out useful. Really just down to the life expectancy of the tiles.
is_true 31 days ago [-]
I would love to walk over one of those, my guess is you would feel more tired after, similar to walking on sand
soulofmischief 31 days ago [-]
For sure, any energy taken out of the system is coming out of your pockets. How much it taxes each individual is the question, and who profits from that energy extraction. But if we're talking a couple joules I don't really see how this is worth it. Comes across as more environmental individualism propaganda
lupusreal 30 days ago [-]
It is already common for flooring material to yield when stepped on, for ergonomic reasons. Normally that energy all becomes heat. In principle at least, you could capture some of it as electricity without causing pedestrians to exert extra effort.
Seems useless though. Every dollar spent on this sort of fancy flooring, which is doubtlessly more expensive than carpet and/or foam rubber mats, is a dollar that isn't being spent on solar panels.
gs17 30 days ago [-]
I suspect the real selling point isn't genuine sustainability.
Their page opens with:
> Generate energy, boost engagement, and discover rich data insights
It's probably more about data collection with greenwashing on the side.
is_true 30 days ago [-]
Didn't thought that. But yeah, I'm sure foot traffic would rise in if you have that outside your shop, specially for a toy store. Tiles that light up when you step on them, or that light up and you have to step on them.
frostyel 31 days ago [-]
[dead]
rcxdude 30 days ago [-]
2-4 joules is basically nothing. There is no chance something like this pays back the energy used to make it within its usable lifetime. It may have some use in niches where you need to power some low-power electronics away from the grid, but those also don't tend to be areas with a lot of foot traffic.
rcxdude 30 days ago [-]
It's a scam with investor's current understanding of technology.
user432678 31 days ago [-]
> if installed in floors, your employees could be tracked, exposing less efficient team.
xeonmc 31 days ago [-]
Expectation: "This will have innumerable applications in medical, energy, and robot applications!"
Reality: It will be used for sex.
zelias 30 days ago [-]
I always wondered how "living slimes" made their way into various low level video game sewer systems.
Now I can see it...this stuff dumped down the drain, mixed with refuse and the occasional decomposing organic material...who knows what it could produce
danwills 31 days ago [-]
While this seems cool and fascinating, I think it'd be good to call it something other than 'slime'! That word is already taken, several times over.. why not get creative? "Electro-squeeze-goo"? "Piezoelectric-paste"?
biofox 31 days ago [-]
There's a pervasive idea amongst science communicators that you have to use common childlike words to make science accessible -- there's a fear that technical words are elitist and exclusionary. The end result is that every science documentary is now presented like a kids TV show, even when it's targeted at adults.
EDIT: Forgot to add, the researchers referred to it as a "Ferroelectric soft material".
xarope 31 days ago [-]
And this is how we get "the length of 5000 olympic pools", "the length of 200 747s placed nose to tail" etc.
Like really, people can't understand 155 miles/250km, or 8.8 miles/14.2km?
falcor84 31 days ago [-]
I also never understood who the 747s need to be placed nose to tail. I think if I was in charge of measuring via planes, I would place them nose to nose and tail to tail.
namanyayg 31 days ago [-]
Why? Imo the only correct way is wingtip to wingtip because it looks the most aesthetically pleasing.
falcor84 31 days ago [-]
But that would allow you to pack more in the same distance. Oh, damn, you now nerd-sniped me to consider the Kissing Number of 747s.
31 days ago [-]
svilen_dobrev 30 days ago [-]
"so", boa said, "in parrots i am much-much longer"
Not really. In the abstract that's just some number. It's the same issue with money. The numbers involved don't mean anything. 1, 2, 3, 4, large number. Most measurements that actually tend to mean anything tend to be human scaled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_scale
In the case of the distance measurements used, those are numbers beyond distances most humans will ever personally travel. In the modern era, many likely travel that distance in cars fairly regularly, yet then there's an intermediary. The human themselves are not traveling 100+ miles. Even in those cases, it's often changed into another form, such as "a couple hours drive." Very few actually walk 100+ miles and have any concept of that type of distance from their own human perspective. Used to be a part of Boy Scouts, and even in an organization focused on hiking, the amount that ever actually went on a 50 mile hike was rather small.
They also use abstract units without much actual connection to humans themselves. What's a mile? How about a km? A unit decided by committee based on the distance across the Earth.
"In August 1793, the French National Convention decreed the metre as the sole length measurement system in the French Republic and it was based on 1/10 millionth of the distance from the orbital poles (either North or South) to the Equator, this being a truly internationally based unit."
It's a 1000 of those, whatever that means. Truly international.
When it gets smaller and closer to your actual life, people can actually visualize those ideas. It's a concrete object, you may have actual experience with, and a sensation of how far that is, and amount "noun" it takes to interact with. (time, effort, ect...) It's rare that anybody ever even looks at anything labeled "this distance is a mile", "this distance is a km", or something similar. The most frequent would be road markers. How often do most people walk down the highway and try to "human scale" remember how far a mile is? "That's like the distance from downtown to that highway onramp" or something similar.
For a lot of humanity, there's suspicion that most likely cannot even tell me how far it is across their town. A distance that's interacted with semi-regularly. It might be the numbers you quote. Perhaps it's 8.8 miles. However, most can probably not just state that number, and would likely use an intermediary form like "a couple hours walk", or "a 15 minute drive by car."
fujinghg 31 days ago [-]
That is exactly the problem. When my family watch science documentaries I die inside a bit. They seem to have left with some insight but they managed to slap about 20 words together and some fancy scenes and extrapolations and turn it into an hour of garbage.
Cue Brian Cox thoughtfully staring into oblivion.
biofox 31 days ago [-]
For a nice reminder of how science communication used to be, there's always the BBC archive:
To be fair Open University still do a lot of decent stuff which goes deeper than documentaries. It's quite well hidden: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/
I don't understand cyclic voltammetry, but it seems from Fig 4a this tops out at about 75 µW/cm²?
14 31 days ago [-]
My kids just want to know if they can play with it and spill in on the carpet or car seat or couch so they can create hours of work for me cleaning up their slime.
On a serious note these material discoveries are neat to see but seldom do we see any real world applications come out of them. I am absolutely ready for the next game changing tech to come out. The next battery. Or finally fusion power. A space elevator. Anything. My guess is the next big change will be personal robots becoming main stream. First in business then in our homes. We were promised clothes folding laundry machines a couple years back that never happened. I need my laundry bot asap.
falcor84 31 days ago [-]
It's probably going to take a bit longer, but there's a lot of ongoing progress in this area. A recent approach is actually called ASAP - https://agile.human2humanoid.com/
itronitron 31 days ago [-]
Maybe we need a washing machine that acts more like a car wash. Basically you take a shower with your clothes on and then stand under a giant fan to dry off.
xarope 31 days ago [-]
+1. Forget self driving, where are those darn ironing and folding bots? Talk about hours saved.
fujinghg 31 days ago [-]
I hate marketing releases for scientific papers.
The one paper I co-authored whilst mostly drunk on a Mediterranean island would have been described as "new statistical model could save billions of lives!" if we hadn't called the university out on it. It would have been a grand extrapolation of a nothing.
metalman 31 days ago [-]
I like that the lead scientist is testing the material for basic saftey by useing it as a hand salve for apres rock climbing, as that fits in exactly with one of the more interesting use cases.
last comment in the article...
lazyweb 30 days ago [-]
As predicted by Mass Effect 1: Introducing Omni-gel.
sandslides 31 days ago [-]
So Ghostbusters II is now reality? :)
lucyjojo 30 days ago [-]
could it help to make better robot skin?
standardly 31 days ago [-]
Gelatinous Cube! I knew it was an inevitable reality. I for one welcome our slime overlords
This is a bit far fetched as it does not mention any power density figure. Being compressed likely squeezes out micro watts. Off by at least 6 orders of magnitude.
What's interesting is that these materials can be used as sensors, building small voltages/sending small currents when deformed.
https://energy-floors.com/coldplay/
https://energy-floors.com/products/kinetic-dancefloor/ implies one tile is rated at up to 20 W output. The 44 tiles Coldplay has would then be up to ~800 W (some of them seem less accessible). I guess I don't know enough to figure out how much it saves compared to the emissions of lugging it around, but I'm kind of skeptical it actually "boosts sustainability".
> The weight from each step across Pavegen tiles creates a small vertical movement of 5mm-10mm compressing an electromagnetic generator and creating a rotary motion to produce 2-4 joules of off-grid, clean energy.
https://www.pavegen.com/what-can-pavegen-power
Seems useless though. Every dollar spent on this sort of fancy flooring, which is doubtlessly more expensive than carpet and/or foam rubber mats, is a dollar that isn't being spent on solar panels.
Their page opens with:
> Generate energy, boost engagement, and discover rich data insights
It's probably more about data collection with greenwashing on the side.
Reality: It will be used for sex.
Now I can see it...this stuff dumped down the drain, mixed with refuse and the occasional decomposing organic material...who knows what it could produce
EDIT: Forgot to add, the researchers referred to it as a "Ferroelectric soft material".
Like really, people can't understand 155 miles/250km, or 8.8 miles/14.2km?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Parrots
:)
155 miles = 1409090.9 Bananas
8.8 miles = 80000 Bananas
In the case of the distance measurements used, those are numbers beyond distances most humans will ever personally travel. In the modern era, many likely travel that distance in cars fairly regularly, yet then there's an intermediary. The human themselves are not traveling 100+ miles. Even in those cases, it's often changed into another form, such as "a couple hours drive." Very few actually walk 100+ miles and have any concept of that type of distance from their own human perspective. Used to be a part of Boy Scouts, and even in an organization focused on hiking, the amount that ever actually went on a 50 mile hike was rather small.
They also use abstract units without much actual connection to humans themselves. What's a mile? How about a km? A unit decided by committee based on the distance across the Earth.
It's a 1000 of those, whatever that means. Truly international.When it gets smaller and closer to your actual life, people can actually visualize those ideas. It's a concrete object, you may have actual experience with, and a sensation of how far that is, and amount "noun" it takes to interact with. (time, effort, ect...) It's rare that anybody ever even looks at anything labeled "this distance is a mile", "this distance is a km", or something similar. The most frequent would be road markers. How often do most people walk down the highway and try to "human scale" remember how far a mile is? "That's like the distance from downtown to that highway onramp" or something similar.
For a lot of humanity, there's suspicion that most likely cannot even tell me how far it is across their town. A distance that's interacted with semi-regularly. It might be the numbers you quote. Perhaps it's 8.8 miles. However, most can probably not just state that number, and would likely use an intermediary form like "a couple hours walk", or "a 15 minute drive by car."
Cue Brian Cox thoughtfully staring into oblivion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bb6yTPZrnA
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@OpenLearn_OU/videos
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016773222...
I don't understand cyclic voltammetry, but it seems from Fig 4a this tops out at about 75 µW/cm²?
On a serious note these material discoveries are neat to see but seldom do we see any real world applications come out of them. I am absolutely ready for the next game changing tech to come out. The next battery. Or finally fusion power. A space elevator. Anything. My guess is the next big change will be personal robots becoming main stream. First in business then in our homes. We were promised clothes folding laundry machines a couple years back that never happened. I need my laundry bot asap.
The one paper I co-authored whilst mostly drunk on a Mediterranean island would have been described as "new statistical model could save billions of lives!" if we hadn't called the university out on it. It would have been a grand extrapolation of a nothing.