We’ve all been there. It’s been a frenetic afternoon in the lab. You have half a dozen experiments on the go and, what with various interruptions – the rotating graduate student can’t find an enzyme; you’re the only one who knows how to fix the microscope and it’s on the blink again; the post-doc next door feels a pressing need to whinge about her supervisor – and you’re absolutely gasping for a cup of tea.
Hot stuff Newton’s Law of Cooling takes a beating
You boil the kettle, lovingly clean out the mold from your mug and make yourself a beautiful brew. You sit down at your desk, open up your computer for a bit of a relaxing email browse, put the steaming mug to your lips, and –
The phone rings: your dry-ice package is downstairs and needs a signature. On the way back upstairs you are nobbled by someone who wants you to read their latest grant; you extricate yourself quickly, but when you pass through the lab, the building manager wants to talk to you about your leaky incubator and the new post-doc needs you to work out whether that weird stuff in the bottom of his transfections is harmless DNA precipitates or in fact gram-negative bacteria. By the time you return to your desk, your mug is cold.
Repeat this entire process – several times – and you have a typical day in my lab.
But those days, dear reader, are over. I have been gifted with the most amazing gadget ever: a USB mug-warmer. Yes, friends, this little beauty has got to be every scientist’s best friend. I can’t speak for the whole genre, but after having road-tested this cheap and cheerful little model from Tesco’s, I can confidently confirm that it has withstood an entire afternoon of chaos and still managed to deliver me a hot cuppa at the end of it.
All this without actually causing second-degree burns or setting fire to my lab notebook. Bottoms up!
USB mug warmer? huh? I want to see photo evidence of this magical device.
(it sounds like a magical thing to have, indeed… 🙂 )
yeah, when the photo is large I guess one can see it…. duhh… * feeling slightly silly now *
cool thing!!
heh heh…I’ve got a bigger photo, if you have a bribe.
That’s awesome.
Of course, I tend to leave the bag in the cup, so while the tea would be hot, it might be too strong – even for me.
Also, not so great for desktops compared to laptops. But still. Very cool!
But it looks like it only warms the bottom of the cup. Does it really stay hot throughout? (Hot tea rises?)
Tangentially techno-beverage-related joke: two builders down tools for lunch. Sitting on a wall with their lunch packs, one builder pulls out a thermos flask.
“What’s that?” his friend asks.
“It’s a thermos flask, innit.”
“What’s it do?”
“Well, its a kind of magic bottle. If you put hot things in, it keeps them hot. If you put cold things in, it keeps them cold.”
“Amazing. What have you got in there right now?”
“Two cups of tea and a choc ice.”
What’s a ‘rotating graduate student’ and where do I get one? Be useful for when the centrifuge breaks down (again).
That’s a cute little device there, Jenny. I’m amazed USB draws enough current to do the job.
It’s USB, so it works with a PC as well. It’s not so great with mugs that have a fine rim around the perimeter, but if it’s a flat-bottomed one, the heat transfer is pretty decent. I’ve noticed it can’t heat up a luke-warm mug, but it’s good at maintaining a pre-existing temperature.
And note the sexy red and green lights.
Red and green lights are everything.
Lets play at engineering. The USB standard is a 5V output limited to a maximum current of 500 mA. That gives a power output of 2.5 W. I think your hot tea is a wonderful new example of the placebo effect.
@Henry – LOL! Excellent!
Jenny – what’s the carbon footprint of you gadget? I was given a USB-powered fan last year. Would you like to borrow it to see if you can drive the tea crazy?
Hah, Brian, I was just working that out.
I figured that it would take about 16 minutes to raise the temperature of a cup of tea by 1 deg. C. What’s the rate of cooling of tea?
How long’s the cord?
I actually have a USB-powered vacuum cleaner. For cleaning the keyboard.
Not sure how good it is…
You will be glad to hear that there is an Open university exercise on the cooling of a cup of tea This gives the heat loss to be in the range 2 – 20 W/m2/K. So for a warm cuppa (say 360K, the heat loss will be around 5W. So USB will not maintain the temperature.
I want to patent the USB laptop charger.
5W? So the USB warming thingie should reduce that quite substantially. Rate of cooling is halved, which can make all the difference between ‘Yuk’ and ‘Mmm, tea’.
Ah but that is the lower bound estimate. The upper bound is 50W. Anyway the OU says the cup of tea is cold in 13 minutes (without the USB).
It is a poor scientist who decides that an experiment hasn’t worked because it’s ‘impossible’, in the face of clear evidence that it actually does.
The plate, equations aside, is damned hot, hot enough to burn skin. Why is it mysterious that a ceramic mug of tea stays warmer on a hot plate than on a desktop surface?
Cath, the cord is about as long as your standard mouse cable.
Anyway the OU says the cup of tea is cold in 13 minutes (without the USB).
Argument from authority? For shame.
And a ten-fold range is pretty pants for an experiment, isn’t it? Even biologists try to get within an order of magnitude.
Jenny, I’m not saying it’s impossible—it obviously isn’t. I was wondering just how much heating capacity there is there and how long it would keep your tea warm. It’s a bloody brilliant idea, and I’m now more than a little worried about swapping USB cables with gay abandon.
This is the cutest thing ever. That is what I put in my USB port 😉
…and if I wasn’t scared of tipping the mug and pouring tea all over my laptop I’d consider the heater. Promise.
Oh my Neolithic solar deity … did you see the “Build Your Own Stonehenge” kit on that ThinkGeek website?? Must … buy … one … NOW!
hahahah I wondered who would comment on that… you geek.
The combination of an anthropology degree, the Anglophilia, my treehugging nature worship tendencies, and the utter geekiness, leaves me defenseless in the face of a tiny Stonehenge model.
I remain uninterested in the apparent charms of the USB mug-warmer, however; I use a Thermos for tea or coffee. It reminds me of grad school birdwatching trips, or sailing with my aunt and uncle.
This gadget will never catch on in my place. A device that keeps one from lingering in the common room for hours at a time?
Anathema.
I agree. A thermos trumps a USB
belly buttontea-warmer every time. Reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story about NASA spending millions developing a ballpoint that would work in zero gravity … when Russian astronauts used pencils.However, a walk to the local coffee outlet helps me clear my head and think beyond the introspective contemplation of the piles of paper on my desk. I am off to Cafe Nero now!
Is the tea being kept warm because it’s next to the laptop’s heat outlet?
The Beast discovered very early on that that’s a good way of keeping his rear end warm. Of course, it means he has to sit on the mouse mat, but he never complains.
Well, for the last 18 months my tea has sat in precisely the same spot, so I think we can rule out extra-thermic activity.
Apparently though, laptops are a key factor in male fertility problems, so it’s something to keep in mind.
Because it does nothing for your sex life if when closing the lid you’re not careful about where you put your—
ok ok I’m outta here.
Now where did I leave my salon squirt-gun?
Apparently though, laptops are a key factor in male fertility problems
… as is any activity that diverts male attention from their womenfolk, particularly during ovulation. (_See_ football, cars, sheds, fishing, release of calcium from intracellular stores, writing books, playing one’s massive organ at blues jams etc etc etc)
How about a USB-powered electric shaver? That way, we could pull the required all-nighters before the deadlines for abstract submission AND still keep a vague resemblance to a civilized human being when it’s time to head for the bench again, the following morning.
Granted, the desk may get REALLY messy (it’s not exactly in a pristine state right now, anyway) and the laptop keyboard may need some kind of covering for protection, but still…
How about a USB-powered electric shaver?
Try this . I was so impressed, I bought the company.
See football, cars, sheds, fishing, release of calcium from intracellular stores, writing books, playing one’s massive organ at blues jams etc etc etc
Neolithicsolardeity damnit! After a trip through my nasopharynx, coffee** just came out my nose.
unaltered by USB devices
And here I was thinking it was all down to scrotal temperature.
(Note to self: first ever use of the phrase ‘scrotal temperature’ in my salon.)
We have a big espresso machine at my place – the kind that delivers espresso, capuccino, latte macchiato, plain coffee or just hot water at the push of a button.. the noise of the machine grinding beans is absolutely constant all day. Plus, when your drink is done, it says ‘Bitteschoen’ on a little display. We love it.
You could also use a USB video camera to turn your computer screen into a mirror and have a wet shave. The resulting mess and short circuitry could be enough to improve male fertility.
Johnny 5 is alive
Our machine is the scourge of our existence. Despite the fact that fresh beans are ground as part of the automatic process, the coffee still tastes vile. I think it’s down to the temperature of the water (ah temperature, nice recurring theme) being not quite high enough during the brew. The resulting coffee is never steaming hot. and is suitable only for medicinal purposes.
One of the biggest mysteries is the option called ‘cafe creme’ which is, oddly, black.
uugh, the black ‘cafe creme’ just brought back bad memories of a machine we had at school: it would deliver coffee with or without ‘whitener’, hot chocolate, tomato soup, and chicken broth – all from the same dispenser…
I think cafe creme may be a reference to the crema or froth on top of good espresso
Ha! Doubly erroneous in that case! But thanks, at least, for clearing up the mystery. Perhaps our resident Italian post-docs could have cleared it up, but of course they wouldn’t be caught in a ten-meter radius of that machine.
Jenny, it’s not the scrotum that we have to worry about. (This was one of my favourite Lancet articles).
I have one of those stove-top espresso gadgets. Seriously considering getting a hotplate in my office.
Best. Coffee. Ever.
Re laptop injury – see the following clip and you will never use it on your lap again. Mind you the smoke does remove the surprise value.
Yeah. I got my yummy cup o joe today planning to painstakingly go through months of work……..and my timer went off………4 hours later i looked longingly to that cold cup o joe. I sucked it down unenthusiastically.
sigh…i think ill invest in your lovely gadget. Thanks!
Frank – that must have been one hell of a report the guy was writing. One can just hope it was worth it.
In my many years in the lab, the only fire I ever started was on my bench! Back in ye olde days of sequencing by hand, interesting things would happen to the gel if the buffer leaked out and things got dry during the run.
I love the smell of burning polyacrylamide in the morning.
At school I managed to set the fume cupboard on fire in chemistry. I hadn’t appreciated that yous should not dry alcohol soaked chromatography papers with a bunsen burner.
Hell, Jenny. That never happened to me—but my DPhil supervisor once burned down the TC lab.
On Christmas Day.
hm, I only managed to melt all the eppendorf tubes in the waterbath (the water boiled away and the pot just kept channeling the heat) when I was preparing my proteins for SDS-PAGE gel…. needless to say, it smelled aweful and was really hard to clean melted plastic to a metal rack 😉
You’ve just given me a great idea for a better USB mug warmer. Would water hold its temperature well enough if the mug were partially immersed in a tiny USB-powered bath?
I reckon a padded USB-powered jacket might be a better bet.
Needs a snappy computerish name…
tCosy!
iHot.
A better idea… disappear for 20 minutes to somewhere nobody will find you, then enjoy your brew!
Ah Darren, it’s a novel idea. But where can you hide, in a university prowling with curious, needy academics who need urgent help last Tuesday?
When I need to really hide, I tend to head to Gordon Square Park and daydream on a bench. The old microscope room is good for private phone calls, and the undergraduate student union, though noisy, is a great place to write.