Technology

Bamboo Ecobook

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Bambooing
Asus is making a line of notebooks that are modular and easily upgradable for the end user. One of these easy modifications that can be done is making the notebook an ecobook by having bamboo casing and all the plastic made of recycled materials!

There won’t be many who find issue with the choice of material used in the EcoBook. Bamboo wood is easily replenished (it grows infamously fast) and yet when polished up it creates a luxurious wood veneer that is also biodegradable.

But the goodness of ASUS new ECOBOOK doesn’t stop there. the plastics chosen to manufacture the EcoBook come from recyclable raw materials and are numbered to facilitate recycling when the product reaches the end of its life cycle.

Sun is the Greenest

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Computers burn a lot of energy on our planet, in fact it’s 4-5% of total world power consumption. Well, Sun Microsystems knows this and is doing something about it. I wonder how they stack up to sustainable linux, black google, but, they are better than windows and Apple.

For him, this is just good business. “Energy responsibility is about to become a society-wide business imperative,” he says. “All my projects have measurable business benefit. You might say the ‘eco’ in my title is for economics as well as ecology.”

“We’re not only part of the solution but also part of the problem,” he confesses. What he means is that computers are egregious energy hogs. Data centers alone, Sun calculates, account for 2-3 percent of total world energy use, with all IT making up more like 4-5 percent. At big companies, 20 percent of total energy costs can typically be accounted for by information technology.

Solar Goodness

- Adam Clare

picture-1.png Solar power is always seeing new advancements. It can be something fun like building your own solar powered iPod charger or finding that solar dyes can be used for creating electricity. This month Georgia Tech has developed a solar panel that uses nano-towers to create a more efficient solar cell.

The difference is in the design. Traditional solar panels are often flat and bulky. The new design features an array of nano-towers – like microscopic blades of grass – that add surface area and trap more sunlight.

Google Earth Exposes Darfur

- Adam Clare

Google Earth is now showing people unpleasant information about Darfur. The things that are happening in Darfur are in no way good – in fact, they are the opposite of good (bad). What is good about Google doing this is that it is bringing a lot of attention to people who need our help in the troubled region.

Find out more at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

From the first link:

The Internet search company Google is venturing into political territory. Together with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the popular online mapping service Google Earth inaugurated Tuesday a project to call attention to atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Power Your Own Electronics

- Adam Clare

The power of walking proves itself to be a great way to get energy yet again!

This most recent addition to the foot powered future uses nanogenerators to convert kinetic energy into cell phone energy.

Researchers have demonstrated a prototype nanometer-scale generator that produces continuous direct-current electricity by harvesting mechanical energy from such environmental sources as ultrasonic waves, mechanical vibration or blood flow.

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