In a world already packed with devices that need to be recharged or plugin in, this wire-and-battery-free switch saves some trouble and turns the energy of the user’s own motion into its own unlimited power source.

Developed by Panosonic, the switch generates power through users and can trigger anything around you from lights and fans to computers and music players. Imagine walking into a room or sitting down at your desk and having your devices and lamps turn on around you all automatically.

Additional functions can be activated by physically tapping the switch but moving it is not essential – even ambient surrounding activity can charge the device, like opening doors or jostling surfaces. Easy setup and installation are possible thanks to the lack of wiring and while the device is a prototype it can presumably be programmed to various functions in time and on demand.

The post Wireless Switch Needs No Batteries to Turn Stuff On & Off first appeared on Gajitz.

The latest in active-system sportswear, Nike’s Hyperadapt 1.0 flash as the laces tighten and to indicate low batteries, but for those with disabilities (like Parkinson’s or arthritis), they could be a real boon beyond their sheer cool value.

Sensors in the shoes automatically tighten using tiny electric motors, but control buttons on the side let you manually adjust the fit as well.

The batteries are recharged wirelessly by induction, and a few-hour charge lasts weeks (the light slowly cycles from blue to yellow to red as the batteries run low).

“Wouldn’t it be great if a shoe, in the future, could sense when you needed to have it tighter or looser?” asks Nike. “Could it take you even tighter than you’d normally go if it senses you really need extra snugness in a quick maneuver? That’s where we’re headed. In the future, product will come alive.”

You could also loosen them between bursts of athletic activity, like the downtime during a basketball game, without entirely untying and retying laces. Between this and hoverboards, Back to the Future is finally becoming a reality.

The post The Future is Back: Automatic Self-Lacing Shoes by Nike first appeared on Gajitz.

Making a primitive battery from salt water and a bit of metal is a pretty common science experiment, but how about using the concept on a larger scale for the good of the planet? Engineer and environmental activist Aisa Mijeno created a lamp that uses this eco-friendly, renewable energy to provide light to homes with no electricity.

The SALt (Sustainable Alternative Lighting) lamp uses just one cup of water and two teaspoons of salt to provide light for eight hours. The lamp is meant as an alternative to kerosene lamps, which are the standard in most electricity-free homes in the Philippines. Kerosene lamps are dangerous due to fumes and to the fire hazard, but many households have no other option after the sun goes down.

SALt uses a galvanic cell battery; it involves two electrodes placed into the saltwater solution. One electrode discharges electrons and the other picks them up, thus creating a current that can be harnessed to light the bulb in the top part of the lamp. The lamp also has a USB port on the side that the inventor says receives enough power to charge a smartphone.

Like all other batteries, this one will eventually wear out. But according to Mijeno, the battery should last for a good six months even if you run the light eight hours a day, every day. Then it’s just a matter of replacing the anode, not the entire lamp, to make it run like new again.

If you live on the coast, you don’t even have to worry about mixing up a saltwater solution – just grab some ocean water and pour it in the chamber in the bottom of the lamp. You’ll get the same performance as you would with a homemade salt + water solution. Mijeno and the rest of the team behind SALt hope to launch their product by providing 600 of the lamps to Philippine towns. After that, they plan to bring it to market so anyone with access to water and salt can have a simple, safe, portable source of light.

The post Now Sea Here: This Lamp Runs on Nothing But Salt and Water first appeared on Gajitz.

Can anything make your heart sink faster than hearing a pathetic clicking when you try to start your car? Your battery’s dead again and, thanks to good old neighborhood unfriendliness, there’s no one around to give you a jump start. You don’t belong to an auto club, and none of your lazy friends will come give you a ride.

Self-described crazy engineer Medhi Sadaghar of ElectroBoom shows us a rather unusual way to start a car with a dead battery using things that the average engineer (and a lot of other people) will have just lying around the house. The video above gives an overview of using a series of AA batteries to give your car battery just enough juice for a single start.

After soldering together a few AAs with wire, Sadaghar connects the batteries to the car battery – but be sure to connect positive to positive and negative to negative or your batteries will start smoking just like his. The setup basically pours the batteries’ juice into the car battery. It gives it just enough energy to turn over the engine one time. Tada! You’ve now got a running car and you didn’t even have to talk to any scary strangers in the process.

The post Fire it Up! How to Jump Start a Car Using AA Batteries first appeared on Gajitz.

Whether or not you’ve jumped on the electric cars bandwagon already, the chances are that we will all have to switch to non-fossil fuel cars in the future. Unless they’re being charged with solar power, electric cars are still consuming fossil fuels from the grid, anyway. An entirely new way of thinking about fuel inspired a company called Nanoflowcell to develop a car powered by what appears to be a salt water-powered fuel cell.

The Quant e-Sportlimousine is being touted as the world’s first salt water powered car. The technology is surprisingly simple: two liquids are combined, with metallic salts acting as electrolytes. This creates an electrochemical reaction. The solution is pumped through two separate cells to induce “cold burning,” a process that produces electrical power. The setup is known as a flow cell battery.

Although their feasibility has been questioned by some, flow cell batteries are far superior to the lead-acid or lithium-ion batteries currently used in electric vehicles. They can take a vehicle 20 times farther than a lead-acid battery or five times farther than a lithium ion battery. Unlike conventional batteries which require a long time to recharge, all that is needed to recharge flow cell batteries is an exchange of the spent electrolyte-rich fluid for new, charged fluid.

The e-Sportlimousine is still under development, but it recently got approval for road testing in Germany. It has been in development for 14 years and, besides its impressive technology, is just plain handsome with its gull wing doors and modern streamlined interior. Its makers claim that it can travel up to 600 kilometers (about 373 miles) on a single tank of salty fuel and can reach speeds of over 200 MPH. With the first prototype having been declared safe to roam the German roads, the race is now on for the company to produce and test more prototypes while refining their technology.

The post Revolutionary Salt Water Battery Powers Robust E-Car first appeared on Gajitz.