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Non-Tech : Alternative energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerry in Omaha who wrote (385)	12/17/2001 7:07:12 PM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 16955

OK, I'll see that and raise you a mess 'o garden slugs... Comic writer Dave Barry on the slugbot... Following the slime trail to scientific breakthroughs miami.com To produce a robot of that caliber, we need a scientific breakthrough. That's where Dr. Kelly comes in. He has built a robot that, when perfected, will power itself by -- we are not making this up -- catching slugs, and using them as fuel. Dr. Kelly calls his invention ``SlugBot.'' Of course this basic concept is not new. The French have been converting snails into energy for centuries. But the French are, for the most part, human, whereas SlugBot is a purely mechanical device. It looks kind of like a power mower with a long robot arm (you can see it on Dr. Kelly's website, ias.uwe.ac.uk ). When SlugBot detects a slug, the arm swoops down, snorks it up, and drops it into a drawer; when the drawer is full, SlugBot screams and passes out. No, sorry, that's what WE would do, if our drawers were full of slugs. (``Drawers Full of Slugs'' would be a good name for a rock band.) What SlugBot will do, once it is fully operational, is convert the slugs into electrical power via some chemical process that we frankly are not scientific enough to understand. Apparently, slugs contain electricity, which comes as a shock (Har!) to those of us who thought they were basically little bags of slime that have figured out how to crawl. Anyway, Dr. Kelly's goal is for SlugBot to be able -- without any human assistance -- to catch slugs, turn them into energy, then use this energy to proceed with its mission, which is, well, catching more slugs. If that sounds pointless to you, ask yourself this question: In what significant way is SlugBot's lifestyle different from yours?