Stick your phone charger into the flames of a charcoal stove? You might feel like it in your moments of frustration, but never before has it been a productive action. Now, however, a company called Point Source Power has invented a low-cost device called VOTO that gains power directly from fire.

A fire-activated fuel cell lives within the VOTO and builds up power while the coal stove or other source of fire does its thing, cooking your meal or whatever. The rest of the device sticks out and the phone charging cord dangles away from the fire. Oxygen converts the burning carbon and hydrogen into electricity. As an added bonus, the device also incorporates a small flashlight.

There are some other similar devices on the market, but the VOTO is the only one we’ve seen that can be used with your existing camp stove or grill. The gadget would be of amazing benefit for people living in third-world countries who have fire and cell phones, but not reliable electricity with which to charge those phones.

The post Turn a Charcoal Stove Into an Efficient Cell Phone Charger first appeared on Gajitz.

The elegant design found in nature is often imitated in the lab – but not always well. Scientists have been searching for quite some time for a way to create artificial leaves which are functional energy producers and inexpensive to manufacture. So far, they have had success in one requirement or the other, but never both. That changed when Daniel G. Nocera tackled the idea. He replaced the platinum usually used in releasing the hydrogen from water with an inexpensive compound that works just as well.

As a result, Nocera’s artificial leaf is the first to be both functional and inexpensive. When dropped into water and provided with sunlight, it converts the water into hydrogen and oxygen, providing the perfect source of hydrogen to be used in fuel cells. Thanks to its low cost, ease of use and efficiency, Nocera’s artificial leaf is an ideal source of cheap solar power for developing nations.

The post Energy Grows on Trees: World’s First Practical Artificial Leaf first appeared on Gajitz.

So you say your bedside alarm clock positively eats batteries? Well, this one really is a killer: it attracts houseflies and eats them to power itself. The white strip is coated in honey which attracts and then traps flies. They can then be dragged slowly down to a blade that scrapes them into a microbial fuel cell where they’re turned into power for the digital clock. It’s rather like a Venus Flytrap in its function, though the fuel cell can only provide enough power for the clock and not the motor.

The terribly creepy invention isn’t even the most disturbing of the gadgets thought up by James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau and Professor Chris Melhuish. They also created a table that attracts mice with little pieces of cheese and slaughters them with an internal guillotine. Animal-rights advocates will be understandably outraged, but the designers are attempting to make a contribution to the future of robots by developing machines that can power themselves. Robots that can eat insects rather than rare and expensive fossil fuels may very well be the future of the world. And we, for one, welcome our new fly-eating robot overlords.

The post Little Clock of Horrors: Digital Timepiece Uses Terrifying Fuel first appeared on Gajitz.