Robotics engineer Stephen Roberts was taking his lunch at Somerville College at the University of Oxford, in England, when the conversation turned to chicken. It wasn’t the food, though. His dining companion was animal welfare specialist Marian Dawkins, and she thought that the pattern-recognition technology Roberts was explaining might help identify misbehaving hens. Continue reading When Chickens Attack
Tag Archives: Technology
A Memorable Device
It was over drinks at a local pub in the spring of 2006 that cognitive psychologist Martin Conway of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom first told his colleague Chris Moulin about using a wearable camera for memory research. But it took more than a few pints of beer to convince Moulin that SenseCam, a camera that periodically takes still photos while worn on the user’s chest, might be a game-changer in the study of what psychologists call autobiographical memory. Although skeptical of the small device’s usefulness, Moulin did finally agree to take one for a test drive.
Country Cooking
A wood-burning stove that uses sound to generate electricity and refrigeration could one day make waves in developing countries. That’s the hope of an international team headed by engineer Paul Riley of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. This month, the U.K. government and the U.S.’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico awarded the team almost $4 million to develop a Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration, and Electricity (SCORE). The appliance would rely on external combustion, such as a wood fire, to heat one end of a tube of compressed gas, inducing sound waves that can be harnessed to generate enough electricity to power a light bulb and a small refrigeration unit.
The principle isn’t new, but the technology has been too expensive for general use, says thermoacoustician Steven Garrett of Pennsylvania State University in State College. The SCORE team hopes to make it cost-effective with cheaper materials: Compressed air could replace high-pressure helium, for example. “If anybody can pull this off, it’s got to be these guys,” says Garrett. The device may not cut down on wood consumption, but tests suggest that it will make use of up to 30% of a wood fire’s energy, much more than a typical stove’s 7% efficiency.
Originally appeared in Science Magazine as a Random Sample: [html] [pdf]