Can Women's Sports Bra power an iPod

Victoria's Circuit

Adrienne So

As a woman who loves sports, I've always found the concept of breasts bothersome. If all goes according to plan, they will fulfill their intended function for about three of the 70 years that I have them. The rest of the time, they alternate between getting in my way and embarrassing me. They are a favorite target of Frisbees and soccer balls. Finding sports bras is a chore. Shirts don't fit.

And these are just the physical discomforts. I am still tortured by the memory of three cousins standing in a circle around me, at the impressionable age of 10, mocking my early development and telling me that I was going to be the Asian Dolly Parton. Fortunately, that never happened, but the possibility haunted my late childhood.

Then one day recently I had an idea. As I rode public transportation to the office, my messenger bag slung uncomfortably across my chest, I thought, "Why not put the girls to work?" Human-powered devices are showing up everywhere, from Rotterdam's sustainable dance floor to human-powered gyms in Hong Kong. The time seemed perfect—perhaps even overdue!—for a bra that could harness the untapped power of breast motion.

The idea of an energy-generating bra isn't as crazy as it might sound. A company called Triumph International Japan recently unveiled a solar-powered bra that supposedly will generate enough energy to power an iPod. But I live in foggy San Francisco and prefer not to walk around in my underwear in public. Could someone design an iPod-powering bra for me?

I decided to run the question past some scientists. It turns out that the physics of breast motion have been studied closely for the last two decades by a gamut of researchers, most of them women. LaJean Lawson, a former professor of exercise science at Oregon State University, has studied breast motion since 1985 and now works as a consultant for companies like Nike to develop better sports bra designs. Lawson was enthusiastic about my idea but warned it would be tricky to pull off. You would need the right breast size and the right material, she explained, and the bra itself would have to be cleverly designed. "It's just a matter of finding the sweet spot, between reducing motion to the point where it's comfortable but still allowing enough motion to power your iPod," she said.

Lawson explained that breasts move on three different axes: from side to side, front to back, and up and down. The most motion is generated on the vertical axis. Naturally, the bigger the breast, the more momentum it generates. "Let's face it—if you're a double-A marathoner, you're probably not going to get that iPod up and running," Lawson said. Measurements compiled by Lawson and her colleagues show that a D-cup in a low-support bra can travel as much as 35 inches up and down (35 inches!) during exercise, while a B-cup in a high-support bra barely moves an inch.

Fabric and design are also important factors in distance traveled. Elastic fabric allows the breast to move more. Choosing between an encapsulation design, in which the cups are separated, or a compression design, where they are hugged close to the body, can also affect breast motion. An encapsulation design further reduces motion because two smaller masses are easier to control than one large one. "Also, if you have a really high neckline, the breasts won't fly up," Lawson said. So I was in the market for an elastic, compression-style bra with a low neckline. Sexy!

Of course, even a bra that perfectly maximized motion (without sacrificing support and comfort) would be useful to me only if there were a way to turn that motion into energy. For a primer on how to do that, I turned to Professor Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Tech, who is currently working to develop fabric made from nanowires that will capture energy from motion. Wang's wires are about 1/1,000^th the width of a human hair. When woven together in a fabric, these nanowires rub up against one another and convert the mechanical energy from the friction into an electric charge. According to Wang, the fabric is cheap to produce and surprisingly efficient; his team hopes to use it to create energy-generating T-shirts and other articles of clothing. A square meter of fiber produces about 80 milliwatts of power, which is enough to run a small device like a cell phone. Wang expects to have a shirt available for purchase within five years.

Many bra patterns call for about a meter of fabric, which would probably mean that a regular bra would have enough energy to power an iPod. But the fabric could also be layered, doubling or even tripling the amount of energy produced. I asked Wang whether his fabric could be used to make a bra. "Bras would be ideal," he said. "There is a lot of friction and movement in that general area. And the fabric would be thick."

"So you can generate enough energy to power an iPod?" I asked.

I asked Wang if this bra would be machine-washable.

"You don't need to wash a bra!" he said.

I disagreed. Wang said his team has been working on the washing problem for a while. Nanowire technology can generate electricity only if the space between the wires is maintained, and that space might be affected if the fabric were agitated by washing. One solution would be to layer the fabric so that the parts that directly touch the skin could be washed, leaving the nanowires in between untouched.

There was one more approach I wanted to investigate, one that might supplement Wang's technology. Was there a way to capture the energy of the bra strap, which bears the pressure of holding up the breast mass? To answer this question, I called Larry Rome, a biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the creator of Lightning Packs. The Lightning Pack, intended for long-haul hikers and for the military, generates kinetic energy from the vertical displacement of a heavy backpack. Would it be possible to use the kinetic energy generated from a breast's vertical displacement?

"The backpacks we've built are intended to carry between 40 to 80 pounds," Rome said.

I cited the D-cup numbers given to me by Lawson. "Well, that's not normal, is it?" Rome asked.

I said that it probably wasn't. Yet after a moment's thought, Rome came up with an idea. The Lightning Pack uses a rotary generator, which converts motion into energy by winding a rotor as the backpack moves up and down. Rotary generators produce up to 7 watts of energy, enough to power a compact fluorescent light bulb. Rome said it might be possible to insert a linear generator into the bra. A linear generator is a lot smaller and creates energy by moving a piston up and down. Rome conceded that with the right body type, this just might work, though he warned it "probably wouldn't be very comfortable."

Still, if someone were to engineer a kinetically powered bra, even one that isn't quite as comfortable as the old-fashioned kind, I'd be intrigued—and I might just start looking at my breasts in a different light. Maybe it's not very sexy to see breasts as a pair of batteries, but oil prices are so high, people are jogging to work. It may be time for breasts to start pulling their own weight.

The Minds and Talents behind the technology we know today - part 1

The Minds and Talents behind the technology we know today - part 1 of 5


Without the imagination and hard work of these 50 innovators, technologies you use every day might never have been invented.

It's easy to look at a laptop, an iPod or a laser printer as nothing more than a tool to get work done with or to while away your free time on, but these and many other high-tech devices didn't fall off a tree. They emerged following years of hard work -- and in some cases, an entire career devoted to a single technology -- by inspired researchers, designers, and developers.

Our list of technology visionaries includes the guy who invented a way to store data in a portable form -- and who almost got demoted as a result. It recognizes the woman who popularized the term "bug" after a moth flew into a computer relay. And it acknowledges a genius who might have saved modern gaming by inventing Jump Man.

So it's time to pay homage where homage is due. Here's our take on the 50 most important people in the recent history of technology -- the most critical players (including a few forgotten heroes) who've been instrumental in crafting the last 50 years of technical innovation.

Our opinion doesn't have to be the last word on the subject, however. If you have additional nominees who deserve recognition, or if you want to chime in to agree with or reminisce about or rail against our choices, please add a comment to let us know.

1. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce

Unlike most of the other multiperson entries on our list, Robert Noyce (left) and Jack Kilby didn't work together. But their common invention is still utterly crucial. In 1959, both men came up with the first integrated circuits -- Kilby while he was at Texas Instruments, and Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor. The IC solved the problem of size that got worse and worse as the need to jam additional transistors into a device grew more and more critical. Packing them all into a single chip effectively ended the era of the room-size computer. Ultimately, Noyce's design based on silicon, rather than Kilby's based on germanium, became the standard -- one that we still use today -- but both designs were instrumental in pushing the technology forward. Kilby and Noyce are often overlooked, but the importance of their contribution to technology cannot be overstated. Nothing else on this list could exist without the underpinning of the integrated circuit.

2. Sergey Brin and Larry Page

What is the defining contribution to technology made by Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin, the fathers of Google? The company is the single most important business in Silicon Valley today, but of course search engines had existed long before Google came along. What impressed so many early fans was Google's relentless pursuit of refinement and accuracy in its search algorithm: Whereas other search engines' results tended to be laden with spam, Google's were generally on target. The company had lots of other tricks up its sleeve as well: The rapidly expanding Google universe now offers dozens of productivity and entertainment tools -- from word processing to video -- most of them free, underwritten by the company's ubiquitous ad-serving system.

3. Bill Gates

The world's richest man (well, depending on that day's stock price) is also one of its most noteworthy technologists -- a guy who dropped out of Harvard to launch Microsoft, a company that all techies are intimately familiar with, like it or not. No hands-off executive, Bill Gates has been involved with Microsoft product development at an incredibly detailed level over the company's entire 30-year history. Though he'll continue to serve as the company's chairman, Gates will effectively leave Microsoft this July to focus full-time on his nonprofit endeavor, the Gates Foundation, which he has endowed with an eye-popping $29 billion to support global health and learning. Critics love to caricature Gates as a ruthless corporate tyrant who rules the tech industry with an iron fist, but evidently he has a conscience and a social vision, too.

4. Steve Jobs

The once and future King of Apple, Steve Jobs is familiar to even the most casual technophile. Jobs lays claim to two critical moments in tech history. First, with the original Apples, he pioneered the idea that computers belong in the home; and then, 20 years later, he convinced the world that people ought to carry their (digital) music with them everywhere they go. Apple may not have invented the PC, and it certainly didn't invent the MP3 player, but Jobs' famous "reality distortion field" has proved that who got there first is sometimes less important than what they brought with them. Today, after more than one brush with corporate death, Apple is bigger than ever, boasting market share that the company hadn't seen since the 1980s.

5. Tim Berners-Lee

No bones about it: You wouldn't be reading this if not for Tim Berners-Lee and his 1989 invention, the World Wide Web. Everything from URL structure to hyperlinks were part of Berners-Lee's original specifications; and though they've been extensively revised (in large part under his guidance as director of the World Wide Web Consortium), they remain in use today. Berners-Lee continues to be a key figure in the development of Web standards, and these days he spends his time developing what many think is the next step for the Internet: the Semantic Web.

6. Ray Tomlinson

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the message that would ultimately be heard 'round the world: an e-mail from one ARPANet host to another. When you open your e-mail program and see that your inbox has 112 unread messages, you may not feel like thanking Tomlinson, but imagine where digital communications would be without e-mail. Tomlinson also came up with the idea of using the @ symbol to separate the username from the host name in an e-mail address.

7. Douglas Engelbart

Quick, click on this link. You now understand the importance of Doug Engelbart's creation, the computer mouse. Engelbart patented the idea of his "X-Y position indicator for a display system" in 1967, and also nicknamed the device the mouse (owing to its tail). Though it's hard to imagine working without one now, the mouse didn't catch on for more than a decade, until Apple computers started using them. Engelbart didn't stop at one invention, either: He and his research lab also developed an early online storage system -- and even demonstrated videoconferencing back in 1968.

8. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard

No company has touched so many facets of technology as the brainchild of Dave Packard (left) and Bill Hewlett, two titans of Silicon Valley who built a monster computing company out of nothing but spit and gumption. Originally responsible for building audio oscillators for Walt Disney in the 1940s, HP went on to create all manner of test equipment for electronics before jumping into computer servers, desktops, calculators, cameras and, of course, printers. After a few rocky years, HP is back on top as the largest technology company in the world. And what other people have had their garage turned into a national historic landmark?

9. Shigeru Miyamoto

The video game industry collapsed in the early 1980s, and for a while it looked as though the phenomenon would go down in history as just a quirky fad, like the pet rock. But Shigeru Miyamoto almost singlehandedly kept the industry alive with his creation of an animated character named Jump Man, who soon became known as Mario. Miyamoto's influence in the gaming business -- he's now a senior director of Nintendo -- has been crucial ever since. His latest creation, Wii Fit, arrives on U.S. shores this month.

10. Shawn Fanning

With Napster, Shawn Fanning introduced the technology that, some doomsayers warn, could spell the end of the Internet. Today traffic from peer-to-peer programs consumes an estimated 70 percent of all broadband bandwidth, and AT&T says that peer-to-peer is a major reason why it will have to radically upgrade its infrastructure if it is to avert the collapse of the Internet as we know it by 2010. All of this because a guy was looking for an easier way to share a few tunes with strangers? Sheesh.

How to have a ROCK STAR status in YouTube - a guide

Being famous in YouTube is as easy as 1-2-3 here in my How to achieve Rock Star Status in YouTube Guide

Achieving Popularity on YouTube

While there is no guaranteed method for achieving popularity on YouTube, there are many things
you can do to increase your chances of success. The following list represents the most common
approaches that can be used for virtually any video created for YouTube.

■ Improve your production quality While most successful YouTube videos are not
exactly ready for prime time, they are a bit more polished than the glut of “amateur”
content on YouTube. As always, there are exceptions, particularly with viral videos that
become popular as the result of an outrageous stunt or a newsworthy event caught on a
camera phone. Perhaps your results could be improved by using more creative camera
work and editing (such as additional angles and a faster pace). Careful framing and
attention to lighting can go a long way as well, even for video blogs or videos with only
a couple of setups. Audio quality is also important, which can be improved through the
placement of a microphone and the removal of background noise. In any case, thinking
about how you put something on video can be just as important as what you choose to
record.

Viewers are more likely to stick with something that is not painful to their eyes
and ears. Don’t worry about making your pieces look too polished, since without the
budgets of a Hollywood studio, there’s little chance that someone will mistake your video
with the latest Bruckheimer epic. In general, showing your viewers that you have a handle
on your craft inspires confidence in your abilities as a storyteller, demonstrates respect for
your audience, and gives them the feeling that they are not wasting their time.
Add more visual appeal The other side to production quality is the talent, props,
and sets that you choose to include in your videos.

When selecting a location to record
your video, choose appealing environments, even if it means rearranging a bedroom
or office to create a pleasing “set” design. Visual appeal can also come in the form of
extra graphic elements (carefully designed titles or animations) and special effects,
which temporarily elevate a typical YouTube video to more a design-conscious level.

Any additional elements that you can think of to hook potential viewers with their eyes
(particularly in the still image that is associated with each video) increase your chance
of success. Visual appeal may even be added to webcam videos by varying facial
expressions and moving your head around a bit instead of staring directly into the camera
without blinking for prolonged periods. Similarly, aural appeal can be added by reading
your script or delivering your blog entry with enough inflection and emotion, while
avoiding a monotone delivery.

■ Fill a niche There are countless areas of special interest that are represented on
YouTube. Knowing which one of these groups (or range of interests) that you want to
target is critical to getting your message across, even if that message is simply to visit
your channel and watch more of your videos. An understanding of your target market
and its makeup will guide many of the choices that you make, starting with production
considerations, and ending with where you will place your videos to achieve optimal
exposure.



If you’re looking to break into YouTube, finding an area that hasn’t been
sufficiently covered might be one approach. Many successful companies (YouTube
included) got where they are by filling a need that was, as yet, unsuccessfully fulfilled.
Finding a niche and filling it with videos that are produced well and that meet the
requirements of its potential viewers is one starting point for success.


■ Make it timely Reading the pulse of other YouTube users or the community at large
can be difficult. It requires research or a natural intuition about trends and, in the end,
is often a matter of luck. Still, it may be the key to finding a formula (if there is such as
thing) for YouTube success. Alternately, documenting important events means putting
yourself in the right place at the right time, which can be an equally elusive proposition.
You can begin to stay acquainted with what’s happening in a particular community by
reading a lot of blogs, fishing around for information in discussion groups or through
e-mail lists, polling your friends or colleagues about their interests, and simply doing
your “homework” when it comes to an area that seems interesting.


■ Make your videos easy to find Without providing relevant data about your videos, it
will be difficult for users to locate them. Even users who are interested in the subjects
covered by your videos will have a hard time if they have not been properly described
and tagged. Begin by adding a description that includes as many specific details as
possible. Adding relevant tags may also be useful, so consider what keywords users are
likely to use in a search.


■ Build a network It’s easy to promote your video if you already have a network of
interested viewers in place. Once someone subscribes to your channel, you’ve got
an instant audience every time you upload a new video. Of course, it’s not so easy to
gain subscribers. Once you’ve had some success with one or more videos (perhaps
even a viral video hit), then you can more easily build a solid subscriber base—on rare
occasions, this may happen overnight.


■ Seed your videos online Post links to your videos or embed the video into blogs,
discussion groups, and other Web pages like MySpace as much as you can. Try to get
your videos reviewed by sites online, such as popular blogs. Post comments to other
videos on YouTube or similar social networking sites, along with a link to your video. If
your video fits well into a particular niche, then make sure to get visibility on any sites or
community groups that are related to that area of interest.