Thermal

Mu aims to offer thermal imaging cam for cheap

When you own an older home, it's common for aging insulation, warped windowsills, and other pesky problems to let the cool or hot air out and drive the energy bill up. To help homeowners locate these weak spots (and for many other uses), Mu Optics created a low-cost thermal imaging camera that allows users to see the world according to temperature -- anywhere in the range of -86 to 285 degrees Fahrenheit.

The thermal imaging device features USB charging and battery life of more than 3 hours (an hour for video recording). The optics offer 160x120 resolution -- which may sound very small, but most thermal cameras deliver a similar view -- for pictures and video up to 30 frames per second.

Five live viewing modes enable the owner to see things such as temperature information for a specific area, a thermal and regular camera view blend, and other combinations. Check out some of the neat thermal videos produced by the camera on Vimeo.… Read more

Thermal imaging may help fight obesity

All fat is not equal. Brown adipose tissue, more commonly called brown fat and abundant in both newborns and hibernating mammals, is the good fat, playing a prominent role in how quickly our bodies burn calories.

Brown fat also produces as much as 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body, according to scientists at the University of Nottingham, so these scientists have developed a thermal imaging technique to measure not only a person's brown fat stores but also how much heat that fat produces.… Read more

Heat shield is new type of 'invisibility cloak'

Researchers are taking the notion of a light-deflecting "invisibility cloak" into the realm of heat.

A paper in the journal Optics Express yesterday describes a method to control the diffusion of heat similar to how researchers cloak objects to render them invisible.

By controlling how heat flows, the paper's authors intend to build materials that keep electronics cool or concentrate heat for solar power generation. Prototype thermal cloaks for microelectronics are expected to be ready within months.

In the past few years, researchers have made advances in specialized materials that scatter light, sound, or seismic waves which … Read more

Hot nanotubes blast chemo-resistant cancer cells into oblivion

When it comes to cancer cells, a particularly confounding breed called cancer stem cells have proven difficult to kill. Because they divide so slowly, chemo drugs do them little harm, and they appear resistant to heat therapies that are generally good at killing most cells. Some cancer drugs even appear to promote the growth of cancer stem cells.

Now, three years after they found that the heat from 30-second laser blasts can kill kidney cancer stem cells, researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center say the same treatment works to kill breast cancer stem cells as well.

Torti's team … Read more

A 'thermal battery' for villages in India

SOUTH BOSTON--From this grungy warehouse converted into a startup incubator, Sam White and Sorin Grama plot how to chill milk for poor Indian villagers.

The four-year journey of their startup, Promethean Power, has included several trips to India and dramatic engineering detours. Now finally, their rapid milk chillers, which feature a novel energy-storage technology, will be installed at three milk processing centers in India in the coming months.

The two company co-founders had originally intended to build a solar-powered milk chiller that would improve the lives of Indian farmers and advance renewable energy. But despite engineering some nifty power electronics, … Read more

QuickField Student is for engineers in training

QuickField Professional is a Finite Element Analysis tool for creating and analyzing electromagnetic, thermal, and stress simulations. It's used in many science, physics, and design classrooms and labs. QuickField Student is a free version with reduced functionality and a limited number of nodes. It can simulate basic problems in engineering and physics as well as display QuickField models. It's a great choice for engineering and physics students who use QuickField at school. QuickField Student helps users familiarize themselves with the full program as well as letting them view materials at home.

QuickField Student opened with a welcome message … Read more

Low-cost solar PV claims solar thermal victim

Solar Millennium said today it has begun insolvency proceedings, the second German solar manufacturer to do so this month.

The company has been trying to sell its pipeline of large-scale concentrating solar projects in the U.S. But because Solar Millennium was not able to negotiate desired terms, it had to enter into insolvency to "save existing assets," the company said in a statement.

Solar Millennium is considered a concentrating solar power pioneer. The news of Solar Millennium's financial woes is the latest event in a wrenching industry shakeout that has caused bankruptcies at a number of … Read more

Little Printer chews your feeds into a bite-size newspaper

It's not pareidolia. You're actually looking at the face of the Little Printer, a tiny output device coming in 2012 that curates your online subscriptions and spits them out as a snackable newspaper.

The Little Printer occupies as much room on your shelf as an alarm clock, but the wireless server inside the molded plastic and brushed steel faceplate connects to an accompanying smartphone app with which you choose the services you want in your morning or evening report; multiple feeds are available, including your daily agenda, news headlines, personal messages, games and puzzles, and birthday reminders extracted from Facebook.

The guts of the Little Printer are simple; a roll of paper sits on a spool and a thermal printer heats up chemicals that change color when exposed to heat (the same inkless printing technology is used on sales receipts, giving you an idea of the output quality limitations)--maybe that's why every message starts and ends with a happy face.… Read more

Spain, Abu Dhabi royals gather for molten salt solar

It's not often that a solar installation gets the royal treatment, but in the case of Torresol's molten salt solar plant that's exactly what happened yesterday.

King Juan Carlos of Spain and Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, along with Masdar CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Sener President Jorge Sendagorta, and several other royals from the United Arab Emirates, oversaw opening ceremonies at a 19.9-megawatt solar plant in Fuentes, Andalucía, Spain.

The plant, which uses molten salt thermal storage to generate electricity, is the result of Torresol Energy, a … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1509: Hey, Windows Phone 7, how much does a polar bear weigh? (Podcast)

Today on the show, we discover that Windows Phone 7 does have a life in the wild -- at least one phone does, anyway. Also, Plants vs. Zombies are taking over the world and BT, Steve, and I are headed for a Tetris showdown. RIM continues to try to defend its co-CEO setup (why!?) and fans rage, rage, against the dying of the cheap Netflix plans. We direct them elsewhere: toward the studios who want so much for streaming content in the first place.