I was able to get my hands on one and I must say, I was a bit perplexed at first, and you are probably wondering yourself how exactly the idea works. If you have gone into a BestBuy or Target recently, you will walk by this thing and do a double take. It is intriguing at first glance and you just have to walk over and play with it and stick your hand in the large hoop. So how does it work? The Air Multiplier uses friction in the air to push out its cool breeze. Around the rim of the circular fan is a little opening from which jets a very thin stream of air at 55 mph. That thin stream of air pulls more air into the stream thanks to the aforementioned friction. This is called entrainment – a new word I just learned.

The air that gets pushed away from the ring towards your  face creates an area of low pressure – not quite a vacuum, but the same effect – in the ring. If you stick your hand in there you can kind of feel it. That low pressure pulls in more air from behind the machine which is then in turn drawn into the air stream. That’s called inducement. I knew this word already

The engineering challenge is in keeping that stream of air flowing smoothly. When I asked an engineer on the process  he told me there were a lot of calculations involved. I’m no mathamatician so I won’t make myself look like an idiot by explaining a bunch of numbers he gave me, but I can describe a better way of thinking about it. Imagine, if you will, a water hose or a faucet. If you turn on the tap half way, then the flow out of the hose is smooth, right? It stays together in a stream when it exits the end of the pipe. If you squeeze the hose or block the faucet in some way making the exit smaller, or if you turn the tap on full,  the water sprays all over the place, right? In a fan, you want a smooth airflow (obviously) which stays aimed at whatever you point it at for without going all over the place, wasting energy in turbulence. The Air Multiplier appears to have achieved this with those complicated equations. The “multiplier” part of the name refers to how much efficiency it saves. It sends approximately 15 times more air at you thanks to taking advantage of these physical processes than it actually has to drive through its own internal spinning turbine.

There you have it! Now you can tell all your friends and family how it works. But before you run out and buy one, I want to put you a little at easy before you see the price:

• Completely unique design – this eye catching fan looks more like a giant magnifying glass than a fan. It’s simply the coolest fan you have ever seen.
• Safe (no external moving parts) so your pet or toddler can examine it with no worry of injury
• No doubt, it’s great at fanning delivering a breeze on par with most fans it’s size

The bad:

• It’s not cheap, with the 10 inch model going for $299 and the 12 inch fo $329
• It isn’t the quietest fan I’ve heard, but definitely not the loudest, so if you are looking for a silent fan, you may want to look at other alternatives.

Dyson’s Fanless Fan – How Exactly Does That Work? originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on April 13, 2010.

Soldiers are said to “sometimes carry more than 30 pounds of batteries to run GPS units and other critical gear,” so a company called Ardica took this opportunity to not only make a similar jacket for soldiers, but also for civilians like me and you that charge our phones and keep us nice a warm. Ardica’s Moshi Power System has a heated lining and able to power your gadgets. Ardica’s military pack is said to store hydrogen fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries into a flexible case. However, the Moshi only uses batteries since you can’t find fuel cells just anywhere. Seven batteries are linked inside a foam sleeve. It slips into the jackets back and holds enough power to simultaneously drive heat-creating conductive yarn and send a current to a USB cord in a pocket. It provides up to 25watts of power and keep you warn up to 8 hours at a time!

One reveiwer was able to test it out and it really kept him warm. “A toggle on the left side of the jacket activates the power pack. When I pressed the toggle, the first place I felt the heat was on my back. Then, within approximately ten minutes, the side panels began to heat up. I pressed the toggle again, activating the highest level of heat. Soon, I was feeling pretty toasty; I didn’t want to take it off. But after walking around for an hour and ice skating in Central Park – the closest I could get to treacherous outdoor activity in the city – I was pulling my scarf away from my neck and putting a lot of faith in my antiperspirant. I lowered the heat to the lowest level, which did the trick within a few minutes.”

As mentioned, there is one USB cord hanging out of a pocket when you get it that is connected to the battery pack. Unfortunately, you will need a compatible USB cord or and adapter to plug in a device to use it. Luckily, the company offers a compatible “Technology Connector” which has all sorts of connections to plug up your devices. This adapter is selling for $50. The company says the jacket provides roughly 8 hours of heat at the lowest level, 3 hours at the hottest level, and claims to provide about 20 charges for  certain devices with lower wattages. This video will give you a good idea of how it works.

Here is a summary of what you get with this jacket:

• Power pack provides 8.6 hours of continuous heat on low setting, and 3 hours on medium, and 1.8 hours on high
• Provides 10-20 charges for electronics such as iPods/iPhones, cell phones, GPS devices and more
• Recharges 80% in 1.5 Hours and 100% in 3 hours (* initial charge may take up to 7hrs)
• Simultaneously runs heat and power
• Provides differing levels of heat to multiple locations throughout the garment
• Includes LED Fuel Gauge to monitor power levels
• Total system weight is 295 grams or the equivalent of 2 iPhones
• MSRP: $145 (Power pack, charger and USB block only)

The jacket has received many good reviews however, at $230 for the jacket and another $145 for the battery pack; It is a rather expensive jacket that some of us may not even need. This is what I like to call extreme wear and I don’t see many people wearing it casually on their way to work. However, if you are a skier or an extreme mountain climber, this may be the jacket for you. One thing that bothers me is that I am not sure whether or not this jacket can take the rain. There may be some concern if you might expect the jacket to get wet, but other than that, it appears to be a great jacket and something I’ve always wanted when I find myself outside in cold weather for an extended period of time.

Can Electric Clothing Keeping You Warm and charge your gadgets? Artica Electric Jacket Review originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on February 1, 2010.

You may not realize just how useful and convenient solar technology is or how far it has advanced. A solar power charger is able to charge a battery in order to store electricity as a solar energy supply for use when you need power. When solar powered devices first saw the light (no pun intended), the technology could only be used during the day. Fast-forward to today and there is technology that allows a solar product to actually store the energy it collects. That is brilliant. Remember those pesky solar calculators? I would sit at my desk in school with my nifty solar calculator only to ask to borrow a battery powered one due to insufficient light. Those were good times, but today are better times because we can now harness that energy for later.

Some manufacturers have explored the possibilities to run and charge iPods off the sun. Solio is the leader in solar USB chargers.  They have developed four Solio chargers including the Solio Rocsta, Solio Mono, Solio Classic and the Solio Mag. These mobile solar chargers collect power and transfer it to your mobile devices including Ipods, Iphone and just about any other mobile device. The price for these solar chargers ranges from $50.00 – $150 dollars.

Brunton is another leader in solar chargers. They produce a wide verity of portable power devices. At the time this article was written they have five solar charges in there Solaris line. One of my favorite solar chargers is called SolarRoll. SolarRoll is as the name suggest – a solar panel that you can roll out flat to collect that energy. The SolarRoll comes in three sizes depending on the output you need. If you are looking to charge something like a laptop, you will need one with the output of 14 watts. It can provide a full charge in about 5 to 10 hours depending on the quality of sunlight. What is great about the SolarRoll is that you can link them for greater output. When you need to move on, just roll this sucker up and go on your way. Price range from $295 and $695 depending how large you get them.

The Voltaic Generator sounds like a beast and it is. This solar charger is actually built into a backpack. This solar backpack has a battery pack to store the energy it collects. It can charge an array of gadgets and hold a laptop up to 17 inches. It generates a wonderful 15 watts of power, which takes about a day to charge however. What I love about the Voltaic Generator is the fact that it is completely environmentally friendly. Not only does it use the sun’s energy for you gadgets, it is made of recycled PET, making it water resistant and extremely light. Unfortunately, the bag still ways a hefty 5lbs. At $599, you may want to ask your shoulders twice if they want to carry that weight. If you go to school, I have the perfect option by the same company. Voltaic solar bags look like backpacks and charge your devices, generating a generous 15 watts of power.

I’ve only mentioned a handful of solar panel chargers. There are many more products that are specific to your needs. If you need a solar charger that charges smaller devices, I would recommend Solio’s list of great solar chargers. It is without a doubt that solar technology will advance quickly and become part of our lives even more. Like all new technology, the price has deterred many of us from going with solar energy methods, however, according to Earth2Tech, the cost has dropped by half already! As time goes by and the technology advances, you will find that products will be created with solar technology built right in like a few products. The solar technology focuses on cost-effective methods of energy that reduces the country’s dependence on imported fuels, improve air quality, and offset greenhouse gas emission and that spells success for the future of solar technology.

Solar Battery Chargers By Solio, Lenmar, Brunton Wave of The Future? originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on January 26, 2010.

I was in both fear and awe. A micro black hole in the Earth’s atmosphere is a fair trade in my book for the Higgs boson and dark matter.

The Large Hadron Collider: 27 kilometers in circumference, conducting the ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, ALICE, TOTEM, and LHCf experiments all during its stay as the Large Hadron Collider. It’ll take 10 GJ of energy stored in the magnets to accelerate the particles from 450 GeV to 7 TeV so that results can be taken and our God Particle can be discovered.

But wait – what the hell does any of this mean anyway? I mean, it sounds really impressive, but do who really knows what this stuff means? Well, let’s break this down, shall we?

A joule is a unit of energy named after the British physicist James Prescott Joule. It is typically applied to work. Say we have a medium-sized apple (about 1 kg in mass) and we want to move it a meter – which for all intents in purposes is roughly a yard – and we want to move this apple this meter in one second. The energy expended in this action is 1 J of work. So, 10 GJ is therefore the amount of work necessary to move a mass of 10 x 10^9 kg one meter in one second. So, about 10,000,000,000 apples, if they’re contained in a weightless basket.

However, we’re again faced with a ridiculously hard thing to imagine. So that’s about the mass of Halley’s Comet, which is 3.14×10^14. Forget the extra four orders of magnitude, it’ll work. So, to move Halley’s Comet 1 meter in 1 second it takes the amount of cruising magnetic force in the LHC.

I keep saying LHC, but I haven’t really explained what a hadron is. A hadron is a class of subatomic particles, divided into two main classes: baryons and mesons. Basically, hadrons are protons and neutrons. Which is what the LHC fires: streams of protons with Halley’s Comet-moving levels of force.

Well this is all just fine and dandy – but about 90% of the people I’ve told about this ridiculous machine have asked me:

“Why?”

I have an answer, and they all have to do with the experiments. There are 3 major experiments that CERN is conducting using the LHC – one to isolate the Higgs boson particle, one to analyze dark matter, and one to investigate the possibilities of alternate dimensions of time and space.

Well that sounds cool…I think. I mean, people know what quarks are for the most part – the subatomic particles that make up subatomic particles. But bosons? What the hell are those?

Well, bosons are another class of subatomic particles. (It seems that subatomic particles are like those Russian stacking dolls – for a while we think that that’s all folks, and then we look with more accurate equipment and oops, we found a few more!) As opposed to fermions, they regulate forces between bodies. There are 5 observed bosons:

y – the Photon

g – the Gluon

W

and

Z

(The latter two regulate the Electroweak interaction)

There is a fifth boson…a perfect boson…guarded by the Mondoshawans and their earthbound priests…

Okay, maybe not. But it is termed the God Particle for a reason.

The Higgs Boson is what makes the difference between a massless particle and one with mass. Ergo, if the Higgs Boson exists, it is the particle that gives matter its mass.

Whoa.

And when I say whoa, I mean whooooooa.

CERN’s dealing with some heavy stuff. And there’s more. Through the ATLAS experiment (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), the CERN scientists will be investigating not only the Higgs Mechanism, but the existence of alternate dimensions of space.

The other general detector in the LHC is the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, which will also study the Higgs Boson but will also try to investigate the nature of dark matter, which is another concept the majority of people don’t understand so well. I mean, I’ve heard people confuse dark matter with antimatter, and I’ve shaken my head sadly at that.

The difference is that we know antimatter exists. We just think that dark matter exists.

Personally, I’m pretty sure it exists. I mean, what else would be up there, taking up our space and being invisible? Seriously – the universe is thought to consist of only 4% visible matter and energy.

4%! Not one, not two, not three, but four!

So what’s the other 96%? Twenty-two of it is dark matter. The other seventy-four is thought to be dark energy, which permeates all space and is thought to account for the expansion of the universe. Dark energy is thought to come in two flavors, the cosmological constant, which permeates all space and maintains the same uniform density, and the quintessence, whose density changes in relation to time and space and would therefore expand the universe.  I think this is another whoa moment.

Whoa.

I mean, this would be the culmination of cosmological thought, explaining the reasons behind Red Shift and, more importantly, the reasons the Big Bang occurred. My head is spinning as I write this.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of risk involved in trying to study dark matter and the origins of the universe experimentally. Such as micro black holes, which were first theorized by Stephen Hawking. If you saw Star Trek…yeah. That’s about it. A micro black hole could, with a 1 in 10,000,000 chance, get trapped in the Earth’s core or atmosphere, and…well, let’s just say that you, me, and everybody else in the world are going to be occupying the same point in space for a while, and then our matter’ll be ejected to form our wittle bwack hole’s accretion disk.

Eep.

Another safety precaution is the strangelet scenario. Strangelets are made of strange matter, which is made up of strange quarks. And it had strange properties. The strangelet scenario dictates that is strange matter were created, it would create an out of control fusion process that would convert all the planet’s matter into strange matter. Now, I may be strange, but I’m nowhere near that strange.

However, the strangelet production scenario is less likely than the micro black hole scenario. The production of strangelet’s starts to drop off at higher energies, and as we know, the LHC uses a phenomenal amount. The fusion of strangelets only occurs at comparatively low temperatures to those that will be experienced during runs of the LHC, so we’re safe there too.

So take off your tin foil hats, folks, and revel in the plain fact: we may (or may not) be on the verge of the most exciting scientific discoveries in history.

Omg.

Hadron Colliders for Not-so-particle-physicists originally appeared on The Coffee Desk on July 2, 2009.