No More Junk on TV

I couldn’t resist that headline, but it’s close enough. The UK has decided to ban ads that sell junk food to young teens and children.

A total ban on adverts for unhealthy food and drink products around TV programmes for under-16s has come into force.

It extends similar restrictions already in place for shows aimed at children under 10 years old.

The new curbs affect commercials for food and drink products high in fat, salt and sugar.

Adverts around youth-oriented and adult programmes which attract a significantly higher than average proportion of viewers under-16 will also be affected, Ofcom said.

Cyclists’ Cellphones Monitor Pollutants

bike

Bike couriers in Cambridge, UK have been given tricked-out cellphones that monitor the air pollution around them and ten report that information to a research team. What a clever way to gather this information.

The technique is made possible by small wireless pollution sensors and custom software that allows the phones to report levels of air pollutants wherever they happen to be around town.

“Mobiles are everywhere, and now have a lot of computing power,” says Eiman Kanjo, the computer scientist at Cambridge University, UK, leading technical development of the project. “They can provide an alternative to expensive custom hardware and report from places that otherwise aren’t monitored.”

Kanjo and colleagues gave local cycle couriers air-pollution sensors and GPS units that connect to their cellphones via Bluetooth. Custom software lets the phone constantly report the current air quality and location to servers back in the lab.

“They cycle around the city as usual and we receive the data over the cellphone network,” says Kanjo. “We can find out what pollutants people are exposed to and where.”

Nanosolar Producing Cheap Solar Energy

A company in California, Nanosolar, as produced solar chips that generate electricity at $0.90 per watt. If sales go well this is a massive breakthrough for solar energy as this a milestone in solar electricity.

After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

… Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.

Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.

Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

Japan Stops Whaling

This is without a doubt, really reat news. Japan has halted whailing for the year, after pressure from the Australian government. A hat tip to Kevin Rudd and his fellow Aussies for convincing Japan to change their ways.

The country’s chief government spokesman, Nobutaka Machimura, revealed the backdown at a news conference today.

Japan had planned to harpoon 50 humpbacks
He said: “Japan will not hunt humpback whales.”

The country had planned to harpoon around 50 humpbacks on its current expedition, the first time since the 1960s that Tokyo would have hunted the species, which are popular with Australian whale-watchers.

Mr Machimura added: “It’s true that Australia expressed quite a strong opinion to Japan on this.

“As a result, I hope that this will lead to better relations with Australia.”