It may not look like much, but physicists from the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have invented the “perfect” coffee cup. Why “perfect?” It’s all about the temperature: this coffee cup is capable of maintaining your coffee (or any other beverage) at an ideal temperature for a full 20 – 30 minutes. The ideal temperature for coffee, incidentally, is 58 degrees Celsius, but personally I prefer to drink tea (not coffee, tea, thank you) at something closer to 59… Yeah, I like living dangerously.

The cup is constructed of a swirly looking aluminum frame covered with a ceramic material. The spaces around the frame are filled with a PCM, or phase changing material. PCM is super neat stuff that is only happy at a very specific temperature. When you add heat to a PCM, it absorbs it and turns into a liquid, kinda like wax. If things start to cool down, the PCM turns back into a solid, releasing the heat as it does so, doing its best to keep itself (and its surroundings) as close to that happy temperature as possible. So when it comes to coffee, the PCM will first cool the liquid down to the ideal temperature by absorbing heat, and then keep it at that temperature as it releases that heat. Best part is, it’s totally free, in that it’s “powered” by absorbing heat from something that’s too hot. And hey, did I mention that it also works in reverse? A different type of PCM can be used to stabilize cold liquids, too.

The only catch to this technology is that PCMs are temperature specific. So, you’d need a hot PCM cup for hot beverages and a cold PCM cup for cold beverages. And they’re not likely to be cheap:

In the meantime, it won’t be long before the IBP’s new table products arrive in stores. Their steep price tags should easily give them away. “We don’t know how expensive they’ll be yet,” Sedlbauer says. “We are already talking with different companies. If we can find a partner to work together with, the first mugs could already be on sale by the end of the year.”

I’d imagine that a steep price tag wouldn’t dissuade that many people from a coffee cup that keeps your coffee at the perfect temperature… I mean, you only really need one, right? And if you drink coffee (or tea, which is way better) every day, it’ll easily pay for itself in convenience. As long as they dress it up a little bit first, of course.

[ Spiegel ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

It’s nice to see when innovations in science and technology trickle down to the grade school level where they can directly benefit students. No longer will hoodlums have to settle for Kleenex-based spit balls since they can now take advantage of advanced polymers to rain down terror on their fellow classmates. Available from Edmund Scientific for $4.95 a pack, these Spit Balls will grow to 200x their original size and according to the packaging will “Slip, Slide, Bounce & Explode” which are essential qualities when it comes to spit ball engineering.

[ Edmund Scientific - Spit Balls ] VIA [ Nerd Approved ]

Thanks to the likes of Brando and other companies, USB microscopes are plentiful and easy to find these days. But being tethered to your PC with a USB cable limits where they can go. Not this wireless model though, the only limit of where you can use it is your imagination… and possibly good taste.

It uses a 2.4GHz wireless signal with a switch on the cradle/wireless receiver for choosing one of 4 channels, and the optics are able to magnify whatever it is you’re looking at from 10-200x. It’s also got a ring of 8 white LEDs around the ‘lens’ for added illumination, a built-in Li-ion battery that charges when placed in the cradle, and is available from ThinkGeek for $139.99.

[ Wireless USB Digital Microscope ]

Created by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic, this beautifully illustrated map includes the almost 200 missions to space from the past 50 years, showing which of our celestial neighbors we like to visit the most. The National Geographic website has an interactive version you can pan and zoom around on, but if you’d like to make yourself a nice little wallpaper you can find a full-sized version of it on Flickr.

[ National Geographic - Fifty Years of Exploration ] VIA [ io9 ]

The scale and complexity of massive particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider allows them to make amazing scientific discoveries, but not every researcher has $2.2 billion lying around to build and fund one of their own. And that’s exactly what scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are hoping to overcome with their BELLA or Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator. In 2006 they showed that lasers could be used to accelerate electrons to very high energies in distances measured in centimeters instead of hundreds of meters using a technique described below:

Project leader Wim Leemans has spent much of his nearly 18 years at Berkeley Lab building lasers and working with laser accelerators. Collaborating with Simon Hooker of the University of Oxford, he and members of his group achieved a major breakthrough in 2006 when they broke the world record for laser-wakefield acceleration, a technique in which particles are accelerated by waves in plasma generated by intense pulses of laser light. In the wake of the laser pulse, electrons surf the waves of the ionized gas. Leemans and coworkers used this concept to accelerate electron beams to energies of more than 1 GeV in a distance of just 3.3 centimeters. Compare that to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC, which takes 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) to boost electrons to 50 GeV.

And while BELLA may never be as powerful as accelerators like the LHC or the SLAC, the scientists at Berkeley Lab are confident that the same techniques can be used to accelerate an electron to energies exceeding 10 GeV in a distance of just one meter. So in theory, one day you might actually be able to buy a rather capable particle accelerator that’s just a bit larger than your office’s photocopier. But since they produce massive amounts of radiation when running, you probably don’t want it sitting next to your desk. Maybe the new guy’s desk though… or the interns.

[ PR - BELLA: Accelerating Science by Accelerating Electrons ] VIA [ Popular Science ]

By Evan Ackerman

Electromagnets can be used by people with too much time and electrical knowledge to crush cans, but the truly ambitious can (briefly) harness a magnetic field to shrink a quarter to about half its original size. The principle is kinda simple, really… A big capacitor sends a surge of electricity into a coil around a quarter. This creates a magnetic field in the coil, and also in the quarter, but the field in the quarter has the opposite polarity. The quarter tries to get away from the coil, but having nowhere to go, shrinks inward as the magnetic field strength exceeds the strength of the metal. The coil, on the other hand, explodes outward at mach 2. The process takes between 30 and 40 microseconds, meaning that the edges of the quarter shrink inward at about 400 mph.

This particular experiment was done by Hackerbot Labs, and Intellectual Ventures has more pics and video at the link below.

[ Intellectual Ventures ] VIA [ Bre Pettis ]

By Evan Ackerman

I totally appreciate how awesome this video is, but it seems to me that an aircraft might not be the smartest place to be in the middle of a lightning storm. But hey, what do I know, I’m just one of those weird people who likes not dying.

Actually, aircraft are quite safe from lightning. It is estimated that each commercial aircraft gets struck about once a year, but the lightning gets safely conducted over the skin of the plane and never makes it inside. Much better than standing under a tree.

VIA [ Fark ]

By Evan Ackerman

Incredibly, this is not just another piece of weird internet humor. You actually can make a photovoltaic cell with little more than high proof alcohol, powdered donuts, and purple Passion tea from Starbucks. It’s the future, people! The cell only puts out about 0.13 amps per square meter, so you’re not gonna be able to power your house with a few boxes of donuts and some Everclear. But, just in case, you should probably pick that stuff up anyway. You know, for scientific experimentation.

[ Nanotation ] VIA [ Fark ]

By Luke Anderson

Is it just me, or do drinks taste better when they are carbonated? Take grape soda for example, that’s much better than your run-of-the-mill grape juice. Now granted, one of those two is probably healthier for you than the other (depending on if it’s real juice), so why not add a little carbonation to it? I’m no science whiz, but apparently all it takes is some baking soda, vinegar and one of these funny little u-fizz contraptions.

Apparently you can carbonate just about any liquid you’d like with one of these little suckers. I’m pretty sure that the first thing I’d try would be Jell-o. That would be some pretty cool stuff right there. If your kid needs a science fair project, or you’re bored with your current non-carbonated drinks, then this $7 kit will get you started.

[ ScientificOnline ] VIA [ Technabob ]

By Evan Ackerman

I like lemonade. I like it a lot, in fact. But if there’s one thing that lemonade absolutely sucks at, it’s telling you what time it is. So next time you find yourself with some spare lemons, chop them up and stick them onto the Citrus Clock. The clock is made with two spikes of copper and zinc to impale the lemons on, and will run for a week using the juice contained in one lemon thanks to black magic electrolysis. It doesn’t have to be a lemon, either… Anything acidic will do. Like limes. Or potatoes. Or a battery.

The Citrus Clock doesn’t seem to be commercially available, but hey, you can make one at home! Or better yet, just go to any middle school science fair and steal one.

Citrus Clock ] VIA [ Core77 ]