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Teen Invents Flashlight That Could Change The World By Andrew Lampard Ann Makosinski was just another teenager with another science project when she joined her local science fair in Victoria, Canada, last year. Her invention, a flashlight that is powered solely from hand heat, took second place at the competition. Ann, 16, and her parents, both of whom are HAM radio operators and like to fiddle with electronics, were satisfied with that result. “It’s a very simple project,” said Arthur Makosinski, Ann’s father. “It has four electrical components. Let’s move on and do something different.” But had Ann left her project in Victoria, situated just 25 miles north of Washington State, the world may have missed out on a light source that doesn’t use batteries, solar power or wind energy. Think about that for a moment: a flashlight that shines for as long as you hold onto it. No more scrambling for and chucking away AA batteries. It could have an immediate impact on more than 1.2 billion people -- one-fifth of the world’s population -- who, according to the World Bank, lack regular access to electricity. Stunningly, no one on record has thought to use thermoelectric technology to power a flashlight. But for Ann, peltier tiles, which produce an electrical current when opposite sides are heated and cooled at the same time, were a convenient solution to a friend’s study problem. Two years ago, Ann, who is half-Filipino, was corresponding with a friend of hers in the Philippines who didn’t have electricity. According to Ann, her friend couldn’t complete her homework and was failing in school. “That was the inspiration for my project.” said Ann, “I just wanted to help my friend in the Philippines and my flashlight was a possible solution.” Ann got to work. She remembered hearing human beings described as walking 100-volt light bulbs: “I thought, why not body heat? We have so much heat radiating out of us and it’s being wasted.” After a few prototypes, she unveiled her “hollow flashlight,” so named because it has a hollow aluminum tube at its core that cools the sides of the peltier tiles attached to the flashlight’s cylinder. The other side is warmed by heat from a hand gripping the flashlight. Ann spent several months designing the flashlight and figuring out its voltage conversion. Much has been written online about powering a flashlight with peltier tiles, but those devices used heat from candles and blow torches. Ann’s patent-pending prototype relies on hand warmth only and required that she make her own transformer, among other difference-making factors. Art Makosinski remembers his surprise when Ann figured out how to light the flashlight’s bulbs at 20 millivolts: “I didn’t believe it, I had to inspect the circuit. I said what did you do here, do you have a hidden battery on the other side?” At the behest of Kate Paine, her ninth grade marine biology teacher at St. Michaels University School, Ann submitted her flashlight into the 2013 Google Science Fair last spring. She promptly forget all about it. Thousands of kids apply from around the world. She said she didn’t think she had a chance. A few months later, in September 2013, Ann was named a finalist in her age group. She travelled to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., to present alongside equally impressive projects, like a cure for the common cold and a robotic exoskeleton. “I didn’t expect to win anything,” she said. At the science fair’s gala night, Ann and Art mingled among top Google engineers, eminent scientists and some of the most innovative kids on the planet. Hers was the last name they expected to be called out the winner for her age group. When it was, Art almost dropped his camera. Ann floated to the stage as if welded to a conveyer belt; her face was frozen in shock. Her prize was a trophy made out of Legos, a visit to the Lego Group headquarters in Denmark, and a $25,000 scholarship. “I still have some of the same confetti that rained down,” said Ann. “Just an amazing experience and probably something I won’t experience ever again.” When Ann returned to Victoria, she received a standing ovation at her high school’s Monday morning assembly. In the months since, she has given three TEDx talks and appeared on the “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” "I think it’s a lesson that children can innovate," said Art Makosinski. "With the right incentive and environment, they can be quite innovative." Many people have asked where she wants to attend university, expecting to her to name the likes of Stanford or MIT. Ann said she’s not thinking that far ahead; she needs to get through the eleventh grade first. And then there’s the business of securing her flashlight’s patent and tweaking the prototype for market. At roughly 24 lumens, Ann’s flashlight’s brightness falls shy of commercial flashlights, which output dozens if not hundreds of lumens. Of her efforts to increase her flashlight’s voltage efficiency, she said, “I want to make sure my flashlight is available to those who really need it.” Read original article with video here: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/this-could-be-big-abc-news/teen-invents-flashlight-could-change-world-182121097.html?vp=1

Some people just Win the Gene Pool Lottery

LOL, like I'm ever going to think of buying a hand-crank while the lights are still on. Hell, I'm doing good to remember the ketchup.

Been there, done that, didn't look at all like fun to me. I'll stick with the menus, thank you very much. Being able to set pictures side by side or to center them would be nice, but the thought of learning something new at my age makes me slightly nauseous. Besides even if I took the trouble to figure it out, I'd just forget again unless I used it every day. On the other hand, I did figure out how to use the bracketed quote/unquote code to create a quote box when I wanted to quickly pull a small passage out of a long post. (Also good for quoting from separate posts; I never did figure out how to use the 'multiple quote' option ). I'm guessing that's a limited use of HTML code, right? Yea for me! Random efforts conquer all!

Forecasting!

'Consumer Reports' says to avoid these new cars Read the article here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/25/consumer-reports-worst-new-cars/5797579/

When you're soaking up 5% to 6% of the economy over and above the next most expensive health care system in the world, the cost of "an incredible amount of legislative and administrative bandwidth" is a rounding error. The hell of it is that the health care folks as a whole are completely conscious that the system is unsustainable but each separate segment is willing to die in the trenches rather than have their particular part of the pie squeezed. It just occurred to me: folks are always bitching about US jobs being shipped overseas when converting to a single payer system would reduce the labor costs of US based manufacturing by 25% or so immediately.

I'm pretty sure the link function was hinky during that time, so you may have been doing everything correctly without bringing home the bacon. I know I was doing links the same way I always did, but couldn't get a hot link to anything but a BoyToy site page. Seems to be working OK now, though. My guess is that, when you copied the text from my post, the HTML color tags got stripped off. So, rather than the light grey color I used for a please-feel-free-to-skip-this-as-it's-deadly-dull-final-thought, the regular black text showed up instead. In the user-friendly edit menu and box that OZ kindly provides, these HTML tags don't show up. You have to go behind the light switch to see them. So it's really hard to know whether you've copied them or not. I know it might seem odd for two grown men to be talking about HTML codes in a public forum, but the whole concept is really interesting, at least to me. With nothing but 0's and 1's flying through cyberspace, it's kind of amazing that someone thought to make up codes that would tell a browser to show the next snippet of text in bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, color, different font, different size, or almost any combination thereof. (Might be fun to flip the light switch and look at the underlying HTML code that was necessary to render the previous sentence with all its frippery.) Easy-to-use menus like the one we have here can take all the tedium out of formatting and linking and embedding and such but the browser still relies on the underlying HTML codes to display what's intended. It's fine when it all works perfectly, but miss even one little character and all hell can break 0110110001101111011011110111001101100101.

Chin up. It'll be June before you know it!

Lots of folks in the South have always known that some Yankees speak with forked tongue. Best regards, RA1