This Kickstarter project is an opportunity to help a company create a magic cooking pot. Apparently it’s not really magic, but the result is awesome!

 

Based on two thermoelectric effects, the Seebeck effect and the Peltier effect, you can use the heat from your campfire or other heat source to generate electricity. That means you can light your lantern or mp3 player as you cook your noodles, or a resident of a remote village can charge a cellphone without the need for batteries.

The 10-watt model currently being offered is enough to charge a tablet device, and the page indicates there is even a 15-watt PowerPot in the works!

Perhaps what’s most Good about this is that the $99 level contribution to the Kickstarter campaign automatically donates a PowerPot to someone in a developing nation.

If you’re still as skeptical as I was when I first saw this, have a good read of their How It Works page, and all supporting links.

For over a billion people worldwide, today is Good Friday. Theological explications of this are the domain of Wikipedia, not the MakerBot Blog. However, Good Things in general are certainly within our purview.

Today we will feature things that are Good, like this:

What you’re looking at isn’t just incredible art on an iPad. It’s incredible open source art on an iPad! There’s a really nice piece at the Creators Project Blog that explains what it is about open source art that’s so cool.

Traditionally, iconic artists are upheld as innovators of the visual language of their time and we celebrate their genius because the myth goes that they came up with it alone, locked up in their garret studios (think Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso). Modernist painter Mark Rothko was so protective of his arcane process that he never showed one single studio assistant the entire method. This “solitary genius” myth largely holds to present day, but it’s a fundamentally dangerous assumption that causes artists to be analyzed outside of their social context and one that is getting harder and harder to maintain in the age of the internet. Open source dismantles this notion, demonstrating more than ever that artists never work in a vacuum.

Bre talks to BoingBoing about the community-created clock he demoed at TED 2012. 

Earlier this week, Bre and 24 of his fellow-TED-Fellows inspired and delighted attendees of the TED Conference 2012, where the world’s boldest and brightest gathered in Long Beach, California. “This year–there’s a spirit of solutions in the air,” wrote Forbes’ Steven Rosenbaum, who listed Bre’s talk on the power of collaborative innovation as one of four ‘earthshaking’ moments from this year’s event.

“We may really be printing out everything we need in the future,” gushed Mariella Moon of Tecca. Moon’s list of 11 Radical Ideas Worth Spreading From Ted 2012 also includes autonomous flying robots, electronic toy kits, a brain recording kit, and a ‘clip from TED2023′  imagined by Ridley Scott in the much-anticipated Prometheus.

Finally, GOOD: education asks, If Schools Kill Creativity, Can Toys Bring it Back to Life? Heck yeah! Here at MakerBot, we’re firm believers in the learning power of play-time. Give a kid a Replicator, and she can make the stuff of her imagination come to life. She can learn science, mechanics, and problem-solving while creating awesome toys of her own invention. Most importantly, she can discover  that nothing is impossible – all she needs is her mind, her MakerBot, and a little help from her friends.