earth

This year's Cleantech Open 2010 Business Competition winner, announced last week, is Puralytics, a company developing photochemical water purification products.

Since 2006, the Cleantech Open has offered a venue for competition among green tech start-up companies looking for funding. Winning alumni of the contest include Cool Earth Solar, Green Volts, and Micromidas.

This year's winner, Puralytics, is an Oregon-based start-up that uses natural sunlight or LED lighting as the catalysts to remove pathogens, petrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals from waste water. Its processes under development have applications for both industrial manufacturing facilities and small rural communities. Puralytics will receive $250,… Read more

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Facebook gets ready to make an announcement about mail and messaging

AOL unveils its new Webmail client, Project Pheonix

The Sony Dash touch-screen device snags Hulu Plus

Netflix can now stream on Android but only on a select few handsets

Google Earth adds user-contributed panoramic photos

Audi is raising the bar for electric vehicle infotainment systems by offering the same telematics package in the European A1 E-tron that it delivers in its top-of-the-line A8 sedan.

The Audi A1 E-tron is a prototype plug-in that uses a 45-kilowatt electric motor powered by a 12-kilowatt battery to deliver a 31-mile range. For longer distances, a small gasoline engine generates electricity to recharge the battery and extends the urban EV's range another 125 miles. Gear heads often complain that EVs take the fun out of driving, but the A1 E-tron's infotainment system could change their minds.

It … Read more

A Chinese embargo on rare earth elements is causing a dramatic spike in the price of materials, which is expected to lead to a jump in high-tech product prices before settling back down in a few years, according to report released today.

Prices will increase rapidly until "non-Chinese rare earth mines are up and running, increasing product availability and thereby decreasing prices," wrote Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network, in a research note today. (See: Pay dirt: Why rare earth metals matter to tech (FAQ).)

But for the time being, Castellano points to some alarming statistics. In … Read more

We've used plenty of weather-watching programs, but none quite like Earth Alerts from South Wind Technologies. This disaster-watching program monitors online information related to severe, extreme, and violent weather and natural disasters in near real time, notifies you about alerts and updates, displays satellite data and imagery, and even lets you view the event in images and video.

Earth Alerts has an attractive, colorful display that is quite easy to get started with. We first added our own location by clicking New Location and entering our ZIP code in the Search tool. Earth Alerts populated the relevant information fields … Read more

A topic most people once considered as boring as dirt--rare earth minerals--has fast become a matter of international significance with a direct impact on green technologies and consumer electronics.

Rare earth metals are a group of elements that are used in a wide range of products we use every day, including hard drives and hybrid cars. Their properties, notably as light-weight magnets, make them key to the ongoing miniaturization of electronics and the growth of green technologies.

Rare earth minerals have become a hot-topic issue for industrialists and politicians for one simple reason: supply.

China recognized the importance of these … Read more

The World Trade Organization, the European Union, and the United States said on Tuesday they were pressing for solutions to concerns China may be exploiting its stranglehold on rare earth metals, crucial in the making of everything from portable phones to wind turbines.

Officials and industry executives in Berlin and Washington warned of severe repercussions from a scarcity of the minerals with magnetic, luminescent, and other properties that go into products such as hybrid cars, solar panels, and windmills. The dominance of China, which produces 97 percent of the world's supply of rare earths, has been well-known for years, … Read more

editor's notebook Is Google's Street View about to become a global forum for street theater?

It might be headed in that direction, if Italian officials get their way. According to a report, Italy has demanded that Google start giving people in that country three-days warning, via radio and newspapers, as to when its Street View cars will be roaming the stradas collecting images to plaster all over the Web.

The demand, picked up by PC Magazine from a report in La Stampa, is hardly surprising. As my colleague Chris Matyszczyk has pointed out, the Street View cars have … Read more

Most of the Earth's surface is covered with water, which we land-lubbers have a difficult time exploring on our own. A new update to Google Earth for Android adds an ocean layer to its application for surveying our planet.

The Ocean layer will be switched on by default. To explore the ocean floor, zoom in to just below the ocean surface and tap the "look around" button to take a closer look at undersea dimensions.

We dove underwater to check out the Monterey Bay Canyon that's situated just off the California coastline. Other fissures and mounds … Read more