Environment

Earth Day 2010: The power of green (roundup)

On the annual occasion of honoring our big blue marble, we look to see how technology is having an impact, and what lies ahead.

Chasing home efficiency, nudged by the sun Call it hypermiling at home: CNET's Martin LaMonica sizes up the numbers after two years with solar panels and finds that on-site power has made him more thrifty with energy. (Posted in Green Tech by Martin LaMonica) April 22, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

Blu-ray player 'Quick Start' mode an energy hog? CNET examines the extra power consumption required by Blu-ray players' quick start mode and how much … Read more

Ubisoft ridding its Xbox, PS3 titles of manuals

This may very well be the beginning of the end for the paper game manuals found in console games. Game publisher and developer Ubisoft on Monday announced that it would no longer be shipping them in its future console titles on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

In their place will be an in-game manual that provides the same types of information about controls, game credits, and other legal information. This is the same kind of offering Ubisoft's been doing with its PC games since last month. According to the company, the first console title to feature such a … Read more

Tweeting uses less juice than googling, says Twitter

Amid the talk of APIs and mapping the social graph, Twitter engineers are also thinking about energy.

During the Chirp Twitter developer conference last week, there was a brief presentation on how much energy is consumed by tweeting (hat tip to Earth2Tech for uncovering).

In the presentation (video starts around 3:05), Raffi Krikorian from Twitter's API team says that running Twitter translates into about 50 million grams of carbon dioxide per day, or one metric ton.

For comparison, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculates that a typical passenger car emits about 5.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in a year. … Read more

Rare earth element miner seeks to expand in U.S.

Many green technologies associated with energy production rely on an often overlooked resource: minerals.

Molycorp Minerals, a company with rights to mine the rare earth elements that are vital to many green technologies, said on Friday that it hopes to raise $350 million by going public on the stock market. In its S-1 document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said its operation in Mountain Pass, Calif., in the Mojave Desert is the most fully developed rare earth project outside of China.

There has been growing attention being paid to rare earth elements because most of these … Read more

Tech helps fuel green businesses

It can be tempting to dismiss talk of sustainability in business as greenwash. But after spending a few days moving among the green-business elite, I feel like people are proving that concern for the planet is a source of innovation every day.

I spent the earlier part of the week at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif., where representatives from leading-edge companies shared stories of how they profit from green technologies or products. This group is hardly representative of the business world as a whole and people well-versed in corporate sustainability probably didn't walk away with … Read more

Biodegradable 3D glasses coming to theaters?

Though some moviegoers' powerful identification with "Avatar" may have inspired them to ponder the planet and rethink their carbon footprint, they likely missed the irony: millions of nonbiodegradable, plastic 3D glasses were reportedly distributed for the movie.

Luckily, cinemas may be on their way to adopting a more sustainable technology. Cereplast, an L.A.-based maker of bioplastics, has partnered with Oculus3D to create what appear to be the first biodegradable 3D glasses. Unlike current 3D glasses that are made using petroleum-based plastic, these will be manufactured with plastic derived from plant materials.

Cereplast and Oculus3D say they'… Read more

Sheriff wants inmates to pedal for TV rights

If you're looking for a weight loss boot camp, the Tent City Jail in Phoenix may be your solution. Controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who dubs himself "America's toughest sheriff," is providing the inmates there with a new amenity: cable television. But to watch their favorite shows, they're going to have to pedal.

Arpaio installed an energy-generating stationary bike (PDF) attached to a TV when he found that 50 percent of the inmates were overweight, many morbidly so. As long as an inmate is pedaling, the bike will produce 12 volts of energy--just enough to power a 19-inch tube TV. But if an inmate stops pedaling at a moderate speed, the TV shuts off.

Because inmates can't be forced to exercise, access to cable TV could provide incentive for them to do so. Female prisoners will test the program first, because they were more receptive to it, Arpaio says.

This isn't Arpaio's first attempt to trim inmates' waistlines. Some years back, he cut inmates' food intake from 3,000 calories to 2,500 calories. "You're too fat," CNN reported Arpaio as saying to the inmates. "I'm taking away your food because I'm trying to help you. I'm on a diet myself. You eat too much fat."

"America's toughest sheriff" hasn't always had an easy time implementing his standards, which have included assembling a female chain gang and making inmates pay $10 every time they need to see a nurse. Human-rights groups consider Tent City jail to be among the harshest in the nation, according to CNN, and numerous civil-rights lawsuits have been filed against the sheriff.

The program that Arpaio is calling "Pedal Vision" might be received with less criticism, though. Watching TV while serving time is a privilege, not a right, so inmates are choosing to take advantage of it. But what if every prisoner pedaled to produce energy? … Read more

A forest epidemic turns into energy opportunity

Fuel start-up Cobalt Technologies has figured out a way to use trees poisoned and killed by pine beetles to make biobutanol, the company announced Wednesday.

Cobalt develops biofuels that can be mixed with gas, diesel, or jet fuel, as well as used to make plastics. Up until now, the company has used forestry byproducts that originated from healthy trees to make its n-butanol. The result is a gasoline blend made up of 12 percent biobutanol, which the company has claimed can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 85 percent when compared to conventional gasoline. It's been touting the … Read more

Robotic undersea vehicle draws power from ocean

Researchers say they've taken underwater robotics to the next level, successfully running an autonomous robotic vehicle off the Hawaiian Islands for more than three months, powered only by energy harnessed from changes in sea temperatures.

The Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging vehicle (or Solo-Trec, for short) is the product of a years-long joint research project by NASA, the U.S. Navy, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the University of California at San Diego. The group said Monday that Solo-Trec is the first such vehicle to be powered entirely by the ocean's thermal energy.

Solo-Trec works by … Read more