cooling

Southern California Gas company is testing how well the sun can cool buildings.

The Los Angeles-based utility said on Tuesday that it has chosen two solar concentrators to measure how effective they are at cooling. The units will be installed on the roof of its Energy Resource Center (ERC) in Downey, Calif.

Both products--one from Hawaiian start-up Sopogy and another from HelioDynamics in the U.K.--reflect and concentrate incoming sunlight onto a pipe to heat water. That heated water is used in place of gas or electricity to power an industrial absorption chiller, which creates cold air using a … Read more

Cooliris has just released a new version of its add-on that lets users run multiple instances of its media browsing wall in different tabs of the same browser. Previously, the only way to get it to run like this was to open it in different browsers. This way you can have one tab open to search YouTube videos, another that's browsing online photos, and a third that's playing a TV show off of Cooliris' Hulu.com interface.

Users are only limited in the number of Cooliris tabs they can have by what their computer is capable of. I … Read more

IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich plan to build a water-cooled supercomputer whose surplus heat will be re-used to heat the university's buildings.

The Aquasar supercomputer will be located at the ETH Zurich facility, and it will start operations next year, the partners said in an announcement on Tuesday.

The supercomputer will combine two rack-mounted IBM BladeCenter servers, each containing multiple blades with a mixed population of IBM PowerXCell 8i and Intel Nehalem processors. It is expected to deliver a peak performance of about 10 teraflops.

The installation will re-use heat directly for in-building heating. … Read more

I use Twitter. A lot. Twitterfon is likely the most-used app on my iPhone. I have a Twitter widget in my MacBook's dashboard. And Twitter itself is one of my browser's home tabs. I make sure I've got a Twitter client of some sort on all of my devices.

Now, thankfully, I can tweet from my Commodore 64 using the adorable app called Breadbox 64 (yes, guys can say "adorable"). Of course, your Commodore needs an Internet connection, but as developer Johan Van den Brande points out, it's all very doable. In a post on his site, … Read more

In the U.S., the Amazon Kindle remains the most popular and best known e-reader on the market. But not everyone's ready to pay $360 for the device, and the Kindle doesn't appeal to international readers, because its wireless capabilities don't work overseas. And that's where upstart digital readers like Interead's Cool-er come in.

The product's name was inspired by the concept of a "cool e-reader" and it's the first consumer electronics product from Interead, which has offices in the U.K. and New York and also has a companion online … Read more

When I talked to Interead's CEO and founder Neil Jones a few months ago, he told me his upstart U.K. company was getting ready to launch a new lightweight e-book reader that he was hoping would get some attention in the marketplace for sharply undercutting the price of the Kindle 2. He was going to call the thing the Cool-er, and it would cost $250 and tie into Interead's fledgling e-book store.

Jones was planning a very controlled launch for the product, with a target date set for just before Memorial Day here in the the U.… Read more

Scientists at the University of Illinois have developed polymers that change color when the material becomes overstressed.

The materials science invention could be used in things like parachute cords, climbing ropes, or added to smart coatings for bridges.

The polymers contain mechanophores--molecules that create a chemical reaction that makes the synthetic material change color when a certain amount of force is exerted upon it.

One of the polymers offered by the scientists as an example of their work is an amber-colored elastomer that turns progressively more orange as it's pulled and then finally red right before it reaches its … Read more

As weird as this CoolCop contraption appears, those of us who live with the humidity of a tropical climate can probably identify. Essentially a flex hose similar to what's found on vacuum cleaners, the $49.95 CoolCop attachment makes it easy to redirect your car's air conditioning into your shirt to keep you cool and dry. The idea is that policemen wear many layers of clothing, including a bulletproof vest, so they still sweat in an air-conditioned car.

The dashboard attachment hooks into into the air conditioning vent and serves mainly American police car models. Those so inclined … Read more

CoolIris for iPhone has just received a hot update...and we do mean hot. New on the list of features is the capability to turn Google's SafeSearch on or off, which according to the company was one of the most requested features. The app remembers your preferences between sessions, giving you a wider gamut of results that can be, well, NSFW.

Why is this so important? If you're familiar with Apple's app store reviews process and guidelines you'll know the company has been rather stringent. So much so, it won't even let you view the … Read more