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Volume 9, Issue 6
Cool & Weird
Fun Facts That
You Should Know
1.) The FDA permits up to 5 whole
insects per 100
grams of apple
butter.
2.) There are no
naturally occurring
blue foods. Even
blueberries are
purple.
3.) The skeleton of
Jeremy Bentham is
present in all the
important meetings
of the University of
London.
4.) The elephant is
the only mammal
that can’t jump.
5.) Just like fingerprints, everyone’s
tongue is different.
October 6, 2014
Blown Away
Winds of
Change
Two University researchers created a windmill that can charge
your cellphone battery—and it’s smaller than a grain of rice.
Excerpt from utainquiry.com by Kimberly Garza
In Texas, where everything’s bigger, two engineers have opted to go small really small - with their latest design. UT Arlington research faculty associate Smitha Rao and electrical engineering Professor J.C. Chiao have created a micro-windmill that can harvest wind energy to power things like cellphone batteries. And it’s a fourth the size of a grain of rice.
Conventional wind turbines, like those sleek white structures seen spinning
alongside many Texas highways, can rise several stories high. In contrast,
Drs. Rao and Chiao’s invention measures less than two millimeters in diameter.
The idea for the ingenious device came to Rao when she was a Ph.D. student at UT Arlington. For a project in one of Chiao’s classes, she had to
come up with a new micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) device.
“We were required to think outside of the box. The fabrication rules of the
project made it very difficult to design things that could actually move or
have practical applications. But those rules were always in the back of my
mind,” Rao says. “I was originally thinking of a micro-helicopter or something that could power remote, wireless sensors in harsh environments, like
on an oil rig.”
Eventually, though, she settled on the idea for tiny, energy-producing windmills.
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For the rest of the story on this amazing invention, visit
http://www.uta.edu/inquiry/fall14/features/winds-of-change.php