Energy from your feet: When sidewalks and dance floors become energy sources

Business Sustainable Dance Floor doesn’t just light up—it generates electricity as you dance. Photo: Anneke Hymmen, courtesy of Energy Floors

The average person takes about 150 million steps in a lifetime. What if we could turn all that movement into energy? Two innovators are working on it — including a TED@London speaker. While one has built a system to capture the energy of foot traffic, the other is harnessing the power of smooth dance moves.

Mashable directs our attention to Energy Floors, a groovy company based in Rotterdam that has used dancefloor power to create more than 8 billion joules of electricity so far. In 2008, the team created Club WATT — an ecological dance club with flooring tile that harnesses the ecstatic movements of dancers, converting kinetic energy to actual electricity. Their first big idea: Launch a network of sustainable dance clubs with glowing, interactive floors, while simultaneously launching a line of floor tiles called Sustainable Dance Floor. But as CEO Michel Smit tells the TED Blog, that business model proved unsustainable, so the company shifted its focus toward using dance floors to raise awareness of energy usage.

Enter the Mini Sustainable Dance Club, tiny portable dance clubs that fit six to eight people. These can-shaped rooms are step-activated, so when curious visitors walk up the three stairs, the club ignites into an interactive and intimate experience that gives dancers visual feedback — the more enthusiastic the dancers are about getting into the groove, the more the illuminated illustrations on the walls intensify. When a threshold is reached, a mirrored disco ball spins. These “clubs in a can” can be set up by two people, and are naturally becoming a hit at outdoor festivals.

PaveGen floor tiles catch the energy of everyday walking. Here, they appear in London’s West Ham Underground station. Photo: Courtesy of PaveGen

This idea of regenerative energy flooring is similar to one we’ve seen presented on the TED stage. Laurence Kemball-Cook, a London-based industrial design engineer, was working at one of Europe’s largest energy companies when he set his sights on making the power in cities more sustainable. In a country prone to overcast and mild weather, solar and wind energy are anything but practical. But he had another idea.

During TED’s worldwide talent search stop in London, Kemball-Cook gave a talk about PaveGen, his technology company that develops sustainable flooring tile. The flooring tile, made out of things like recycled truck tires, works to convert the kinetic energy created from a footstep into electrical energy that can light pathways (and even tweet).

After Cook installed PaveGen tiles at music festivals and the 2012 London Olympics, as well as in school hallways, he realized that people were gravitating toward his system because of the instant feedback it gives. Which is exactly what makes the Mini Sustainable Dance Club such a fun idea too.

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Vitamins Cheat Sheet: What They Do and Good Food Sources [Infographic]

When it comes down to healthy eating and balanced diets, we need to make sure we get our fair share of vitamins. But what do they actually do? What are the benefits and what food sources are they available in? Here’s a handy infographic we prepared for you to share, print out, re-use as a handy reference sheet. The next time you are preparing a meal, or shopping, you’ll have a good idea which food contains which vitamins, and remember, when you’re cooking the food, it’s a myth that the vitamins will be ‘cooked out’.

If you need the full sized image you can click here to get it.

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The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

Guest Reviewer: Walter Isaacson on The Social Animal

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

David Brooks has written an absolutely fascinating book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, he explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. In The Social Animal, he makes the recent revolution in neuroscience understandable, and he applies it to those things we have the most trouble knowing how to teach: What is the best way to build true relationships? How do we instill imaginative thinking? How do we develop our moral intuitions and wisdom and character? Brooks has always been a keen observer of the way we live. Now he takes us one layer down, to why we live that way.

--Walter Isaacson

An Amazon Interview with David Brooks

We talked with David Brooks about, among other things, Jonathan Franzen, Freud, and Brooks's own unfamiliar emotions, just before the publication of The Social Animal. You can read the full interview on Omnivoracious, the Amazon books blog, including this exchange:

Amazon.com: Speaking of Tolstoy, I bet a lot of people are going to quoting the first line of Anna Karenina to you: "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Is there a consistency between what makes a family happy, the way that this family turns out to be?

Brooks: You know, I never bought Tolstoy's line.

Amazon.com: I didn't either.

Brooks: I didn't know many happy families that were alike. One of the things you learn is that we're all so much more complex. We all contain multitudes, so someone who might be a bully in one circumstance is incredibly compassionate in other circumstances. We have multiple selves, and the idea that we can have a very simple view of who we are, what our character is, that's actually not right.

One of the things all this research shows you is how humble you have to be in the face of the complexity of human nature. We've got a 100 billion neurons in the brain, and it's just phenomenally complicated. You take a little child who says, "I'm a tiger," and pretends to be a tiger. Well that act of imagination--conflating this thing "I" with this thing "tiger"--is phenomenally complicated. No computer could ever do that, but it's happening below the level of awareness. It seems so easy to us. And so one of the things these people learn is they contain these hidden strengths, but at the same time they have to be consciously aware of how modest they can be in understanding themselves and proceed on that basis.

A Letter from Author David Brooks

© Josh Haner, The New York Times

Several years ago I did some reporting on why so many kids drop out of high school, despite all rational incentives. That took me quickly to studies of early childhood and research on brain formation. Once I started poking around that realm, I found that people who study the mind are giving us an entirely new perspective on who we are and what it takes to flourish.

We’re used to a certain story of success, one that emphasizes getting good grades, getting the right job skills and making the right decisions. But these scientists were peering into the innermost mind and shedding light on the process one level down, in the realm of emotions, intuitions, perceptions, genetic dispositions and unconscious longings.

I’ve spent several years with their work now, and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story.

This is not a science book. I don’t answer how the brain does things. I try to answer what it all means. I try to explain how these findings about the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics. This story is based on scientific research, but it is really about emotion, character, virtue and love. We’re not rational animals, or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with each other and connect to larger ideas.

Price: $27.00

Click here to buy from Amazon

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

Guest Reviewer: Walter Isaacson on The Social Animal

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

David Brooks has written an absolutely fascinating book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, he explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. In The Social Animal, he makes the recent revolution in neuroscience understandable, and he applies it to those things we have the most trouble knowing how to teach: What is the best way to build true relationships? How do we instill imaginative thinking? How do we develop our moral intuitions and wisdom and character? Brooks has always been a keen observer of the way we live. Now he takes us one layer down, to why we live that way.

--Walter Isaacson

A Letter from Author David Brooks

© Josh Haner, The New York Times

Several years ago I did some reporting on why so many kids drop out of high school, despite all rational incentives. That took me quickly to studies of early childhood and research on brain formation. Once I started poking around that realm, I found that people who study the mind are giving us an entirely new perspective on who we are and what it takes to flourish.

We’re used to a certain story of success, one that emphasizes getting good grades, getting the right job skills and making the right decisions. But these scientists were peering into the innermost mind and shedding light on the process one level down, in the realm of emotions, intuitions, perceptions, genetic dispositions and unconscious longings.

I’ve spent several years with their work now, and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story.

This is not a science book. I don’t answer how the brain does things. I try to answer what it all means. I try to explain how these findings about the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics. This story is based on scientific research, but it is really about emotion, character, virtue and love. We’re not rational animals, or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with each other and connect to larger ideas.

Price: $27.00

Click here to buy from Amazon