• DIY

    The Instant Hot Tub

    By Posted on 4.18.2008 22 Comments

    Self-heating soup sounds like something from the future: Push a button on the can, and three minutes later the contents are piping hot. But its widely available today, along with self-heating coffee and hot chocolate. In Japan, I even found self-heating sake. Pretty high-tech! Or not. In fact, these products use a chemical reaction known since at least 4000 B.C.—the mixing of quicklime and water. When you roast limestone at about 1,650�F, it converts to quicklime, a powder used to disinfect corpses in war zones. Mix quicklime with water, and it grabs and binds the water molecules, releasing lots of energy in the form of heat. (The material left over, known as hydrated or slaked lime, is the basis of lime mortar, popular in the Roman empire and still used today.) Soup is OK, but I decided to use the technology to make a self-heating hot tub.

    5.11.2008 at 09:14pm - Comment by matt360

    3dtopo for your information being a vegetarian hurts the environment due to the fact of cows depleting the ozone from methane also this guy is just having fun by doing this. of course anybody could see that this would work but if nobody tried to do things for the fun of it then we would have no tv, no radio, and no video games

  • Cars

    The Race to 100 MPG

    By Posted on 2.11.2008 12 Comments

    Over the past several decades, the promise of the "car of tomorrow" has remained unfulfilled, while the problems it was supposed to solve have only intensified. The average price of a gallon of gas is higher than at any time since the early 1980s. The Middle East seems more volatile than ever. And even climate skeptics are starting to admit that the carbon we´re pumping into the atmosphere might have disastrous consequences. To these circumstances, automakers have responded with a fleet of cars that averages 21 miles per gallon, about four miles per gallon worse than the Model T.

    5.11.2008 at 07:50pm - Comment by matt360

    What most people don't seem to understand is a few things. The first is that by the 1980's comment includes there being inflation no just the cost of it. Second is that yes the government would take away any object that would do 100 miles per gallon and be able to sell because they get so much money off of the oil industry, and finally the main reason of the price being so high is not just the supply of oil it is also the stress on refineries and that no new ones are being built



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