Similarly, attaching thermoelectric devices to the flues of power plants could generate more useful power.
Consider that for every BTU of coal or natural gas burned in a combustion turbine only 35 percent of that is converted into useful power.
Such technology could be useful in power-sucking data centers and handheld devices with limited batter life, such as smartphone sand tablets, obviously.
Dr Wilkinson, whose work is funded by the Tampa Electric Company, said that vegetation was likely to prove a useful source of power for many robots.
Eventually, says Mr Burt, the ability of dye-based cells to produce useful quantities of power even in dim and diffuse light could see them used outside, perhaps on rooftops in cloudier parts of the world a market at present dominated by traditional, silicon-based cells, even though they are not well-suited to the purpose.
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Intel recently came out with a dual-core chip, useful for low-power laptops.
Mr Peters, steeped in that ethic but open to things new, found power tools useful in his own workshops in Surrey and in Devon.
The elections can also provide a useful alternative path to power for the Sadrists, if they really have given up violence and decide to take part.
Thus it might prove more expedient to invest in this at least tried technology, which could extend the useful lifetime of nuclear power by hundreds of years.
That plus the fact that carriers are a useful means of projecting power in parts of the world where air bases are not assured makes it likely that carriers will be kept.
Orphan or under-utilized servers do little useful work and suck up power.
The cash dividend payout ratio is particularly useful for evaluating the staying power of dividends from companies undergoing massive business model overhauls.
The focus may be narrow, but the effect is not trivial: telling people how to influence their local school or hospital is useful and gives them real political power.
That would be an especially useful service as the devolution of power in Russia gives local bosses more and more freedom to rule as well, or as badly, or as barmily, as they wish.
In operation they can respond quickly to changes in power prices, which is useful in Britain's cut-throat market.
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Nevertheless a firm called Powercast, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has developed wireless-charging products that can do useful things while still operating at safe power levels.
Liberalising power generation, too, looks useful as both an economic and an environmental policy.
But without power these gizmos are about as useful as a doorstop.
"You have the power to be where you are most useful, " Mr. Wanstrath says.
Big batteries like these could simply store power, but they could also be useful in smoothing out the bigger spikes and troughs in electricity production that these intermittent sources create.
But because a lot of things that people do with computers, such as e-mail, writing and web browsing, do not require fancy graphics or lots of processing power, netbooks can still be extremely useful.
Clinicians (like me) have learned that the developmental process by which inevitable potentially healthy and useful envy gets turned malicious is by those with power, like parents and teachers, doing exactly what Romney is doing.
His toilet uses solar panels to power an electrochemical system that turns waste into useful things.
But they are actually useful, and serve as a reminder of the unexploited power of home computers.
It may be surprising to see management as a social grace, but fulfilling the burning need to exercise power in a relatively harmless manner provides a useful social service.
Dr Kanatzidis argues that wherever heat is generated as part of power generation, thermoelectric devices could help extract more useful energy.
Not that you'll really need to be micromanaging either of those things with 1GB of RAM and oodles of processing power, but still, it's a useful feature to have.
In addition, 30 members would be appointed, so the prime minister would retain his patronage power and the other party leaders would keep a useful retirement home for their MPs.
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Big Data has been a problem for businesses in the past because it's been expensive to store and because huge amounts of computing power are needed to analyse it to get anything useful from it.
This week Fertik offers up points for employers looking to wrangle the power of the twentysomething and to shape that employee into something useful.
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