Tag Archives: Drew Prindle

Planting Flowers with Shotguns – Yes, Really…

By   —   December 16, 2013
Flower Shells
**UPDATE: After enjoying a large amount of media coverage, Flower Shells has just launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo. You can currently pre-order a box of four shells for $50 dollars.

Still toiling away with trowels and rakes to tend your unruly garden? Skip the hands-and-knees routine and show your soil who’s boss with Flower Shells.

What’s a Flower Shell you ask? It’s exactly what it sounds like: a shotgun shell loaded with flower seeds. And no, just to clarify, you don’t stuff these things in the ground like little biodegradeable bulbs and wait for ‘em to sprout either – you actually load them into a shotgun and blast them into the soil like Rambo. The shells are standard 12 gauge (0.729 in, 18.5 mm) shotgun ammunition, but instead of being filled with birdshot or buckshot, they’re loaded with one of twelve different seed types.  You can currently blast your choice of cornflower, daisy, poppy, sunflower, clematis, columbine, lavender, sweet pea, lupine, carnation, peony, or an assortment of wildflowers.

To ensure that you’ve got the proper level of firepower for the seeds, the amount of gunpowder in each shell has been reduced in proportion to the type of seeds it’s loaded with. That means they’re ideal for violently reseeding your garden beds, but probably not so great for home protection and self defense. Then again, threatening intruders with a face full of hot peony seeds might be surprisingly effective, but we don’t recommend that you give it a shot (no pun intended).

Unfortunately, Flower Shells aren’t in large-scale production at this point, but it’s creators have made and tested a handful of them, which you can see in the video below. We’ll keep you posted on availability, but for the time being you can find out more at FlowerShells.com

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/flowershells-let-plant-garden-shotgun/#ixzz2q1me2Zaz
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MIT students develop wearable cooling device that could make air conditioning obsolete

MIT students develop wearable cooling device that could make air conditioning obsolete

By Drew Prindle

Published November 03, 2013

Digital Trends
  • wristify-mit
    MIT

We come across quite a lot of cool technology, but it’s not every day that we find something that can literally cool you down.

Developed by four engineering students at MIT, Wristify is a prototype wearable device that leverages the physical phenomenon known as the Peltier effect to reduce your body temperature.

The Peltier effect, named for French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier who discovered it in 1834, describes the phenomenon of heating or cooling caused by an electric current flowing across the junction of two different conductors. As the current moves from one conductor to another, the transfer of energy causes one side to heat up and the other to cool down.

Wristify is basically a series of these junctions (called a Peltier cooler) powered by a small battery and attached to a wrist strap. When placed against the skin, the device makes you feel cooler by reducing the temperature of your wrist a few fractions of a degree per second for a couple seconds at a time. Over the course of a few minutes, this process will cause you to perceive a whole-body cooling of a couple degrees Celsius.

The team developing the device is still tinkering with it to figure out the optimal cooling cycle, but at this point in time they say the most effective method is to cool your wrist by 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7F) per second for five seconds, and then turn off for 10 seconds.

The chief benefit of this device is that it offers a more personalized approach to temperature control, one that’s vastly more efficient than current heating and cooling methods. It takes millions of watts to raise or lower the temperature of an entire building, but Wristify can run on a small lithium battery. If everybody had one of these things on their wrist instead of relying on air conditioning or heaters all the time, the potential energy savings could be massive.

Of course, it’s still just a prototype, but the idea recently won the $10,000 top prize in MIT’s annual Making And Designing Materials Engineering Competition, and the team plans to put all that cheddar toward further development of the device.

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