New Light Tape for Bikes?
 

and no batteries! Hopefully soon,eh?

http://http://physorg.com/news116776284.html

cleaned up linky

thank you and maybe a mod could move this to the proper forum? Lights,Elec,Etc please?

My bad.

Not legal in the US, in all probability.
Myself and some of my friends have tritium-based glowies on our keychains. We were not able to get them in the US and the UK supplier said they were not allowed to export to the US. We had them "imported" by a friend visiting from europe.

We tested them and there's no detectable level of radioactivity from them (using pretty good detectors in a radiation safety lab). But you know the US, anything that an idiot would be scared of, we don't allow.

FWIW, these would be pretty useless on a bike anyway. The glow is very dim. I have one hanging on the butt of my bedside flashlight so I can easily find it in a blackout, and they're good for finding keys in a tent at night, but they're not nearly as bright as even a firefly.

yeah, the US tends towards being a nation of SafetySallys. I thought it would be nice to put some on a bike for night time parking. Maybe they upped the output somehow? Maybe embed it in some 3M reflective?

who knows...

I also am still fascinated by glow in the dark stickers, so there you go...:p

We're not that much of a nanny state yet (although we're getting there, what with the schools banning games of Tag at recess and all).

Anyways.

I think it'd be nice to have some of this stuff to light up the tubes (i.e. fork, top-tube, down-tube, seat-tube, seat-stays, chain-stays) on my bike so that, even if I'm not blinding drivers with it, on my rides home in the evenings and at night I'll look like a bicycle, and not merely a headlight followed by a blinking tail light.

You could get some el-wire.. I had some on my old bike and on my helmet even and it made it pretty obious what I was from the side.
I don't know about wrapping it like they did but here is what it is. Just uses AAs and lasted me a week between battery swaps.
http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.c...8_1973_2681240

I absolutely disagree. We're far too lax on dangerous chemicals and substances that we allow in from other places. Do you know that millions of Americans use imported Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) every year without knowing the risks? According to the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division, these include:

# Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
# Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
# Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
# DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
# Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
# Contributes to soil erosion.
# Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.

Our elected officials should ban this dangerous substance immediately! http://www.dhmo.org/

Unless exposing it to a few minutes of incandescent light is a problem, you might want to try the 12 hour high-intensity photoluminescent tape available at Identi-Tape. 1" x 33' is on sale for $15.00 right now.

there's a brand of diving watches that uses Tritium for the hands and numbers. Forget the name.

Moved thread.

Unless you know of a way to decrease the half-life of tritium, afraid not. You get X decays per second, and those decays are converted into photons by the phosphors, yielding X photons per second. I'm assuming it's pretty efficient since tritium is a beta source, and you can stop beta particles practically with tissue paper, so probably most particles are turning into photons.

Here's what appears to be the patent for this:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4889660.html

Sure, you could use it in conjunction with a reflector, but that just makes it be a reflector, it's not increasing the output. This is going to be not really even as bright as conventional glow-in-the-dark plastics just after you turn the lights out. Not sure what you mean about parking; this would certainly make it easy to find your bike in the dark, if that's what you mean, but it's not going to draw a driver's attention.