Worm Geek

An artificial tree can absorb carbon dioxide a thousand times faster than a real one.The latest invention of Columbia University scientists is an artificial tree that can absorb carbon dioxide a thousand times faster that a real tree. Claus Lackner, professor of Geophysics at Columbia University, has worked on this project for above 10 years and hopes that artificial trees will turn out to be a very important instrument to fight climate changes.

Scientists will be able to use the latest invention for capturing greenhouse gases emitted by vehicles and airplanes. Synthetic trees would not need direct sunlight and water to function, CNN reports. According to Lackner, the trees could have different sizes and could be placed almost anywhere.

Here it is how the system works: a synthetic tree collects greenhouse gasses on a sorbent, cleans and removes carbon dioxide, and then releases them. The technology of absorbing gases resembles a sponge soaking up water. In one day only, the artificial tree can capture a ton of CO2, which is equal to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by 20 vehicles.

The technology is currently being improved by Research Technologies. Such inventions may well serve for the environmental protection, but for now are quite expensive – a single synthetic tree is worth 30 thousand dollars.

Dyson company decided to change the home fan, making something original from this boring domestic commodity. And the first modification is obvious – they just removed… the vanes!

Actually the vanes are there but they are hidden and on their normal place there are just hollow circles that directs the air flow. The new models – AM02 Tower and AM03 Tower has output up to 33 liters of air and are capable to accelerate the air up to 18 times thanks to the Air Multiplier technology.

The fans have remote control and can direct the air under different angles. Of course like any designer product, the price is not very low – about 300£.

Word groups “alternative energy” and “fuel elements” has become very popular in the last years.  But yet these terms are related mostly to solar energy gadgets and there are very few devices that use fuel elements. And even fewer are with price of less than 100$.

Probably this is why the Horizon company decided to introduce to the market the MiniPak charger working on hydrogen. The charger works with  hydrogen cartridges (there are two in the bundle) and one cartridge last about the time that will endure 1000 standard AA batteries.

And if you empty both cartridges… well, you can just refill them using the HydroFill device by the same company.

What about MiniPak’s compatibility? MiniPac can be used practically with all devices because it has miniUSB interface so you can charge everything. The price of the charger is only 99$.

InnoVision Labs enhanced their HoloAD 3D technology and developed the HoloAD Diamond Series. The new 3D hologram display support FLV files and allow loading from USB.

Remarkable feature of the display is that hologram image could be observed from all sides. Nevertheless the principle of display operation is very simple – there are three screens in the upper part, which images are reflected under determined angle by the glass surface below.

The HoloAD Diamond Series consist of two product modifications: DS3_Queen with resolution 640×489, dimensions 43x35x40 cm and weigh of 16 kg and DS3_King with resolution 1280×1024, dimensions 115x87x90 cm and weigh 95 kg. Price and date of market introduction are not announced yet, but you should not expect low price for 95 kg holovisor.

After several mounts of information “leaks” Apple finally introduced iPhone 4. This happened on 7th of June at the opening of Apple WWDC developers conference, where Steve Jobs compared new iPhone with Leika camera and said that it will revolutionize the world of smartphones. (more…)

Nokia company announced from … Kenya the development of a new charger for bikes. The new device is designed for countries with general use of bicycles as transportation and with electric supply problems.

The charger is suitable for all Nokia phones with  2 mm power connector as well as for devices with the same connector. In order of charger to work it is enough to ride with speed of more than 6 km/h (just above normal pedestrian speed) and as Nokia announced 10 minutes of ride with 10 km/h will charge the phone enough for 25 minutes of conversation.

The charger kit includes dynamo and dynamo mounting, charger, phone holder, cables and plastic phone protecting bag, with total weight of about 350 g. If you already have dynamo with 6 or 12V output you can connect it to the charger.

The price will vary according to the country, for example in Kenya, where the charger was introduced the price is 15 Euro.

There were a lot of rumors about the Intel’s project called Larrabee concerning development of a multi-core processor. By the end of 2009 it seemed that the project was abandoned, but now Intel announced commercialization of a similar product, utilizing some of the Larrabee developments.

The new processor name is Knights Corner and it will be available with 8 to 48 cores with tendency to past over 50 cores. Intel created the new processor using Many Integrated Core architecture that have a lot of common parts with the Xeon architecture. The performance is expected to exceed 500 gigaflops and is further boosted with 8MB cache of each core.  

Knights Corner purpose is parallel processing of huge data massives and respectively it’s target group are institutions performing big quantity of calculations. So far Intel is sending so called Developers Kit to computer manufacturers, but there is no fixed date for market release yet.

Do you remember the time when in order to listen to radio you had to rotate the knob instead of pressing the ”find next” button or typing the address? Probably those memories of analog times led to development of the new radio by the Teague company, only that with radioball you have to roll all device.

The Radioball is an old school radio with visible printed circuit boards, wires and speaker mounted inside a ball and is equipped with the most intriguing tuner that sense it spatial position. Thus you have to roll the radio in order to listen to definite radio station. You can also literally mark the position of the station with a sticker.

Guess how much fun will be just to find  a radio station!

Recently we have turned your attention to hybrid HDD, now the hardware developers made the next step: hybrid between optic drive and SSD. The novelty is introduced by Hitachi-LG Data Storage and is based on HyDrive optic disk with incorporated flash memory.

The idea of HyDrive is to have a small device with big potential in data storage and system performance. It could be considered as alternative to standard SSD devices and even of HDD in notebooks and nettops.

The first generation of HyDrive will have 32 or 64 GB memory and will be available in August. The plans for the next year includes models with 256 GB memory.