Teen’s invention could charge cellphone in 20 seconds

[Samseau]

If you examine most genius's lives, you'll see that their parents had some but very little influence over them. For example, Einstein's father was an Engineer but understood nothing about magnetic fields. Mozart's father was a composer but Mozart was creating songs at the age of 7.

Meanwhile this girl does exactly what her parents were already involved in. Hmmm. Time will tell if this chick is actually an inventor or just taking credit for her parents talents so she can go to an Ivy League school like Bortimus suggested.

 

[mymeowcat]

Of all the NASA scientists, electrical engineers and MIT graduates out there --- no one ever thought of the capacitor thing before?

I wonder how this invention works?

As far as i know a capacitor is simply a circuit board component that stores up a charge then releases it. To charge a battery in 20 seconds I bet the thing might damage your battery too?:huh:

This reminds me of one time I went to a trade show and somebody was saying how in wires that much of the energy (or efficiency) is wasted because when you pass electricity through a wire it also wastes energy by creating a magnetic field. He showed using some voltometer that if he were to use an opposing magnetic force to push magnetic force back into the wire that more electricity actually comes out the other end into that voltometer. It sounded great and I could save a lot on my electric bill --- until I asked him what are you using to create that magnetic field to push the other magnetic field back into the wire. Answered turned out to be electricity itself! You are wasting money and electricity trying to save electricity.

I'm not an electrical engineer and I'm not sure if I'm describing it right but my point is that there has to be some kind of catch to this.

 

[Balboa]

This could be a case of a girl genius. They've gotta be out there, even if there are far fewer of them than male geniuses due to the well-known greater clustering around the mean of female IQ.

However, I'd put my money on it being a case of a nice bit of teen research, no more earth-shaking than many others, but the award given to her as part of the pro-girl agenda.

And what self-respecting male would say "I'm going to set the world on fire"?

 

[username]

Silly news piece designed to boost female ego.

Every engineer that has ever designed anything that has used a battery has thought about and decided against using capacitors instead of batteries.

http://engineerexplains.com/answr/CapacitorvsBattery1.html

Is there any advantage to using a capacitor as a battery or in place of a battery?

Capacitors can indeed be used to store small amounts of energy. However, compared to a battery they have very low energy densities. As for being interchangeable with batteries, no not really. i.e. if you have a device that uses AA batteries, you will not be able to obtain a AA sized capacitor that you could simply place in that device. Even if you could, the AA batteries will last many hours of use, whereas a capacitor that size may only be seconds (at best minutes).

To store the same amount of energy as a battery, you need much more space for capacitors. So by using capacitors instead of batteries, devices will be able to charge rapidly but they will be double or triple the size, maybe even larger, thanks to capacitors instead of batteries.

Also, pretty amazing coincidence that her "amazing breakthrough" is in the very field her father works in. Non-story guys. I just feel bad for the boys that might have had an amazing project get rejected just because they have a penis instead of a vagina.

 

[speakeasy]

Of all the NASA scientists, electrical engineers and MIT graduates out there --- no one ever thought of the capacitor thing before?

I wonder how this invention works?

That's exactly what I was thinking. How is this teenage girl going to have some insight that somehow slipped past all those engineers making batteries for Mars rovers. Something doesn't quite add up here. I'm not hating on the girl, but I have the feeling there is some....

:bullshit:

 

[soup]

Politics..

 

[aphelion]

This could be a case of a girl genius. They've gotta be out there, even if there are far fewer of them than male geniuses due to the well-known greater clustering around the mean of female IQ.

However, I'd put my money on it being a case of a nice bit of teen research, no more earth-shaking than many others, but the award given to her as part of the pro-girl agenda.

And what self-respecting male would say "I'm going to set the world on fire"?

Every self-respecting male ought to say that.

 

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

To store the same amount of energy as a battery, you need much more space for capacitors. So by using capacitors instead of batteries, devices will be able to charge rapidly but they will be double or triple the size, maybe even larger, thanks to capacitors instead of batteries.

But I thought that the point of this invention was that she invented some kind of a denser, smaller capacitor (a so-called super-capacitor)? Wouldn't that be helpful? I am not an engineer, of course, just speculating.

That said, the article mentions that her capacitor has powered a LED light, the tiniest of energy users in the mechanical world, but it doesn't mention how big her capacitor was. Whether it could be shrunk or not is the big question.

 

[Hobnob]

"The supercapacitor, she explains on CBS San Francisco, is “basically an energy source device that can hold a lot of energy in a small amount of volume.”

A capacitor is not an energy source. It is a device to store/transport energy generated by another device.

methinks this 'inventor' was daddy's little girl.

 

[BortimusPrime]

"The supercapacitor, she explains on CBS San Francisco, is “basically an energy source device that can hold a lot of energy in a small amount of volume.”

A capacitor is not an energy source. It is a device to store/transport energy generated by another device.

methinks this 'inventor' was daddy's little girl.

Yup, hell I remember my science fair project was on magnets. Yet at that point I still didn't understand how a magnet could exert force without an apparent power source. It wasn't until college that I understood that it's a potential energy field, and the energy came from pulling the attracted object away from the magnet. (Same as picking up a rock and dropping it. The gravity pulling the rock to the ground required you to use energy to pull it away from the ground picking it up in the first place.)

These wunderkind stories are suspicious precisely because while teenagers can be exceptionally bright, they're still lacking enough experience and knowledge to apply that intelligence in creating something new. That's why scientists and inventors seem to make all their big contributions in their 20's and 30's. Young enough to innovate, but old enough to have a base of knowledge.

 

[GenJx]

wrong thread