Biomechanical Energy Harvester
By BRUCE GRIERSON
You never know what’s going to knock out the power grid, leaving you juiceless and vulnerable. The solution: become your own electrical plant. A knee-brace-like gadget developed by a Canadian scientist harnesses the power of the human gait, generating enough wattage from your daily walking to power a cellphone or two-way radio and then some.
Max Donelan, a professor of kinesiology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and director of the S.F.U. Locomotion Lab, described “biomechanical energy harvesting” in a story published in February in the journal Science. He sees plenty of uses for the compact device, which stores the energy it harvests in a small lithium-ion battery. Aid workers in disaster zones or soldiers trying to reduce the
weight of their battery packs will benefit. (The first large-scale client is the Canadian military.) “There are people whose lives depend on portable power,” Donelan says.
Five years ago, Larry Rome, a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, invented a backpack that made its own electricity from the subtle bouncing motion as its wearer walked — like a scaled-up version of the self-winding watch. It was a cool demonstration of the principle but not really practical for civilians; to generate significant power, Rome’s backpack weighed up to 80 pounds. By contrast, the in-development version of Donelan’s device — with its aluminum frame, transmission system and generator — will weigh less than 2.5 pounds and easily fit underneath a pair of pants.
The modest genius of Donelan’s knee brace is that it taps the power of the “negative” work of
human muscles — the work that’s done by a muscle resisting a force. Donelan’s brace exploits and actually assists the hamstring’s natural braking action at the end of each stride, so walking feels no more difficult.
Brandon Jennings Experiment,
By DEAN ROBINSON
Brandon Jennings had to make a big decision over the summer: spend an unpaid year at a high-profile college-basketball program or go to Europe. For choosing the year abroad, he now gets $1.2 million to play for Lottomatica Virtus Roma. Widely considered the best prospect in the high-school class of 2008, Jennings will hereafter be known as the first star to go over-seas rather than serve an apprenticeship in college.
A little more than three years ago, the N.B.A. decided that its players must be at least 19 years old and a year out of high school. Over the two seasons since then, an unintended
consequence has become clear: dominant freshmen who would have jumped directly to the pros in earlier years have transformed college basketball’s upper echelon. In 2007, Greg Oden and another freshman, Mike Conley Jr., led Ohio State to the N.C.A.A. championship game; the next season, which concluded earlier this year, Derrick Rose did the same for Memphis. Two freshmen also received first-team all-America honors in 2007 — that never happened before, and it did again in 2008. And after each season, the first 2 (and 5 of the first 10) picks in the N.B.A. draft ended up being “one and done” freshmen.
Now imagine that talent stream circulating through European basketball leagues instead of American college conferences, and you can see why Jennings’s experience may remake the college and professional basketball landscape. If Jennings is one of the 14 “lottery” picks in
the N.B.A. draft next spring, he will show future high-school stars that skipping school need not reduce their value.
More important, if it turns out that playing professionally in Italian and Euroleague competitions is better preparation for life in the N.B.A. than a year in college — and the increasing number of international players nurtured there and thriving now in the N.B.A. suggests it might be — more young players than just the would-be lottery picks are likely to take notice. Those with any pro aspirations will consider that the basketball version of the Grand Tour can build real capital as well as the cultural, intellectual kind.
Bubble Wrap That Never Ends
By VANESSA GREGORY
Is there any cheaper, more satisfying catharsis than that of a good Bubble-Wrap-popping session? That pleasing little sound. The release of pressure as each plastic cell yields to the crushing thumb. There are online games and an iPhone application devoted to recreating the experience. But they obviously lack the tactile joys of the real thing.
Enter Japan’s Mugen Puchi Puchi, a battery-powered key chain with a panel of eight push buttons designed to simulate bubble-packaging destruction. Since the key chain’s buttons rebound, users can vent their frustration endlessly. Mugen Puchi Puchi roughly translates as “Infinite Pop Pop” and the toy has been an almost infinite success for the manufacturer, the Bandai Company, which sold a million of the little gizmos in the first two
months after it was released in Japan. The product reached the shelves of Target, Wal-Mart and other American stores in late October.
At the Sealed Air Corporation, the New Jersey-based company that manufactures actual Bubble Wrap, the anxiety-relieving benefits of the packing material have long been acknowledged. “None of this stuff ever surprises us,” a spokesman, Ken Aurichio, says. “Somehow, this product became sort of the icon of the stress reliever.” This latest invention can’t compare to Bubble Wrap, he says. Besides, at Sealed Air, there’s no need for the Mugen Puchi Puchi: employees get desktop “stress boxes” that dispense little sheets of Bubble Wrap to soothe them at difficult moments. Sorry, they’re not for sale.
Bus-Wait Formula,
By CLIVE THOMPSON
You arrive at the bus stop to catch the ride to work, but the bus isn’t there. Your destination isn’t very far, so you think, Hmm, maybe I should just walk. But then you might find yourself halfway between stops when the bus whips past, which would be deeply annoying. What to do? Should you walk or should you wait?
This question has plagued commuters for years, but this year three undergraduate students at Harvard and Cal Tech decided to resolve it. “We were sick of sitting at a bus stop, not seeing the bus and torturing ourselves over whether we should start walking,” says Scott Kominers, a Harvard student studying math, economics and ethnomusicology. So Kominers and his co-authors, Justin Chen and Robert Sinnott, drew up the problem as a classic
game‑theory dilemma, began crunching the numbers and, three pages later, had their answer: You should probably wait — and whatever you do, don’t second-guess yourself.
Buses, after all, are usually punctual and move much faster than you. If you start walking and catch the bus halfway through your journey, you might consider yourself fortunate — but even then you won’t have gotten to your destination any faster. What’s more, Kominers — like a good economist — points out that
waiting allows you to “optimize” your time, because you could get some work done while hanging out at the bus stop. There’s also a practical problem with walking, because people who decide to walk usually pause at each stop to see if a bus is coming, which drags their journey out. “You think you’re not slowing down if you stop, but you’re adding a bunch of time each time,” Kominers adds.
Mind you, their equation breaks down in extreme cases. If your journey is relatively short — less than a mile — and you suspect the next bus is half an hour away, they calculate that you should walk. (Though you should walk decisively, without dallying at each stop along the way.) But since most trips involve more-punctual buses and longer journeys, waiting is, far more frequently, the winning strategy. Or as Kominers concludes with some delight, “Laziness almost always works.”