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If you've been curious to know what it costs to make the Kindle 2, iSuppli has dismantled Amazon's digital reader, taken stock of all its components, and come up with an estimated price tag of $185.49--or roughly half the Kindle 2's retail price of $360.

That figure doesn't include the fee Amazon pays Sprint for the Kindle 2's built-in "free" wireless service or any marketing costs, which can be substantial. So the true "actual" cost is probably significantly higher, though Amazon obviously preserves some of its margin by selling direct to consumers.

If I had to guess, I'd say Amazon was making more like $100 on each unit, give or take $10. That's still quite decent, and when you factor in the high margins on Amazon's $30 optional Kindle 2 cover, things look even better.

So, yes, there's probably a little room for a discount. But if you're looking for a Kindle 2 price cut anytime soon, I wouldn't count on it. If anything, the first Kindle 2 deal you'll probably see is Amazon bundling in a cover as a freebie.

Comments?

(Source: iSuppli via Engadget)

(Credit: Litracon)

The LitraCube lamp consists of four identical pieces of Litracon concrete.

(Credit: Litracon)

And today in news about concrete...

You may already have heard about Litracon, a see-through concrete developed by Hungarian architect Aron Losonczi. Filled with optical fibers that run from one end of a poured piece of concrete to the other, these prefabricated blocks and panels effectively transmit light from one side to the other.

The material can be used for artistic purposes, or in commercial or residential construction projects, where experts predict it could reduce heat loss in buildings. Needless to say, this stuff turns the traditional concept of cold, hard, gray concrete on its side.

Well, if you're interested in innovative building materials and you happen to be winding your way through New York City between now and April 25, you can view the see-through concrete as part of an exhibit at the American Institute of Architects' Center for Architecture. Previously, this eye-catching material has primarily been displayed in Europe.

The exhibit, called Make It Work: Engineering Possibilities, highlights inventive strategies for the built environment, and the ways in which multidisciplinary research and integrated practice take ideas from seed to blossom.

The Acqua Liana's marbled oversize garage overlooks the swimming pool above.

(Credit: Frank McKinney )

The artistic foyer features a water floor.

(Credit: Frank McKinney )

Many real estate sellers are facing tough times in today's economic climate. What to do? One alternative: hope for environmentally conscious green dollars. That's what luxury real estate developer Frank McKinney did. He is pursuing a green strategy with his latest creation, the elaborate Acqua Liana, set on about 1.6 acres on the Atlantic Ocean in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Acqua Liana (Tahitian and Fijian for "water flower") features a glass "water floor" with "hand-painted tiles in a Lotus garden motif, brilliantly illuminated below the shimmering surface," according to McKinney's Web site. The three-story mansion claims to be the first built and certified according to the rigorous standards defined and mandated by the U.S. Green Building Council, the Florida Green Building Council, and Energy Star for Homes.

While we can't help but wonder if the words "green" and "mansion" inherently represent a contradiction, the 15,071-square-foot mansion does incorporate plenty of eco features.

Solar panels meet most of the house's energy needs. Environmentally conscious lighting reduces electricity consumption by 70 percent. If the homeowner wants to know how much electricity is being consumed, the automated feedback system displays energy efficiency in real time.

A water system collects enough runoff water from the entire cedar roof to fill an average swimming pool every 14 days. The water is then used to fill the water garden and irrigate the landscape. Ultra-efficient air conditioning and purification systems ensure air quality that's supposedly twice as clean as a hospital's operating room.

Tiny bits of toner wafting from laser printers can't be blamed for polluting indoor air, according to research released this week.

In 2007, a study from Queensland University of Technology in Australia suggested that breathing toner particles from printers could hurt the lungs as much cigarette smoke.

Researchers examined laser printer emissions in an enclosed area.

(Credit: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft)

But researchers from that school and the Fraunhofer Wilhelm Klauditz Institute in Germany have found no evidence to support that claim, after examining the makeup of chemicals released from laser printers.

They determined that such airborne materials include paraffins and silicon oils that evaporate when a printer's fixing unit, which attaches dry toner ink to paper, reaches temperatures as high as 428 degrees Fahrenheit.

"One essential property of these ultra-fine particles is their volatility, which indicates that we are not looking at toner dust," said Tunga Salthammer, a professor who worked on the study, in a statement.

The study did not describe how breathing in the ultra-fine chemicals could affect human health. However, volatile organic compounds are a major source of pollution indoors, where they are found in the air at levels up to 10 times higher than outdoors, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The nonprofit GreenGuard Environmental Institute offers a directory of electronics that emit relatively few of such chemicals, but that does not include printers. Last year's Australian study identified printer models with the highest emissions.

Add-on filters would do little to prevent printer emissions, according to researchers participating in the latest study, who noted that volatile organic substances are also released into the air from other household activities, such as toasting bread and cooking.

Printer makers belonging to the German Association for Information Technology partly funded the research.

German lawmakers plan to talk about the potential for laser printers to cause health problems at a meeting in January , according to Heise Online.

The public-art organization Creative Time unveiled an interactive exhibit called "Playing the Building"--a 9,000-square-foot, site-specific installation by renowned artist David Byrne (lead/founder of retro-pop group Talking Heads).

What once served as a soaring waiting room for passengers to board ferries bound for South Brooklyn until 1938, the Battery Maritime Building in lower Manhattan was transformed into a massive sound sculpture for which all visitors are invited to sit and "play." The project consists of a retro-fitted antique organ in which the innards are replaced with relays, wires, and light-blue air hoses, and placed in the center of the building's cavernous second-floor gallery. The organ is fitted with several motors, which produce the bass sounds by vibrating a set of girders that once supported a stained-glass skylight in the 40-foot-high ceiling. The organ is attached to a pump that blows air through a tangle of hoses. These hoses snake into the huge room's old water and heating pipes and conduits, making primitive flute sounds. And then there are more than a dozen spring-loaded solenoids, attached to the columns and even to a huge radiator that emits a surprisingly sonorous tone when struck in just the right place with a metal rod. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, and striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate, and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

The organ is sectioned off showing what keys will trigger what: 11 keys will trigger hammers that clang against cast-iron columns and pipes; five will jump-start motors that make the ceiling beams vibrate and hum; and 12 will shoot blasts of air through pipes.

Scratching your head yet? Here's a video of the contraption in action:

The exhibit is open every weekend, from noon to 6 p.m., till August 10, and admission is free.

Solar company HelioVolt and Architectural Glass & Aluminum on Tuesday announced a partnership to produce glass windows capable of generating electricity.

HelioVolt is one of several new solar manufacturers using different materials to produce thin-film solar cells.

HelioVolt's solar cell which it will put into solar panels and embe into building materials.

(Credit: HelioVolt)

The company intends to make solar cells for rooftop panels and later get into building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), where cells are embedded onto roof shingles, blinds, awnings, or other building components.

The deal with Architectural Glass & Aluminum calls for the companies to design solar-enabled curtain walls, the glass facades on the outside of buildings, or architectural glass in the interior of buildings.

Citing a Department of Energy study, HelioVolt said that solar cells integrated into buildings can produce about half of a building's energy usage.

Last week, another thin-film solar producer, Global Solar Energy, announced a partnership with Dow to make solar shingles.

Another company doing solar-enabled roofing is DRI Energy, a division of a construction company that has developed roof shingles and solar cells that glue onto flat roofs of commercial buildings.

In its coverage, Greentech Media pointed out that BIPV has a number of technical challenges, making the days of power-generating windows a few years away.

Specifically, solar cells typically have a shorter warranty--at 20 or 25 years--than many building materials. Thin-film cells made from CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide), as HelioVolt is making, corrode more in water than traditional silicon cells.

Lego Digital Designer for Windows and Mac gives users the chance to play with Legos without paying for Legos. Loaded with features, the drawbacks are minor and this program is a lot of fun to use. The program links to the Lego online store, but there's more going on here than corporate shilling.

The graphics-intensive program seamlessly zooms in and out, rotates your point-of-view 360 degrees, connects bricks to each other, rotates them, and moves any hinges they might have so you can explore how your pieces fit together. Parts include basic bricks, model jet engines, and infrared sensors. The Brick Palette puts all your bricks in one basket, so to speak, so that managing them is no more difficult than keeping track of more than two dozen subpalettes that catalog the variations.

Beginners get a helping hand with the 17 prebuilt models, and there are tools-a-plenty for memorializing your creation, including sharing your design with other builders at Lego.com and blowing it up. Resurrection of your masterpiece takes only a mere mouseclick.

Bamboo buyer beware, says Kelly LaPlante.

"This is one of the biggest areas for greenwashing," she told me during a tour of a suite she redesigned on behalf of Lexus at San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel. (As part of a marketing campaign, Lexus is sprucing up hotel suites in San Francisco and Washington, D.C, The Fairmont one costs $869 a night, but you get to use a Lexus hybrid V8 while you're there.)

A coffee table from Lexus

(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)

A lot of companies offer bamboo flooring and panel so they can sell a green product, but many of them also use toxic adhesives and other chemicals that take away the advantages of using bamboo. Bamboo grows fast and needs little fertilizer, making it a relatively green building product.

Some also grow it in distant places and truck it in, eliminating further environmental advantages. You've got to dig into the suppliers to figure out if you're buying green. Later this year, she will set up a site that rates various building suppliers on how green they really are. It should be good reading.

Other remodeling tips from LaPlante:

• Recycle as much as possible. She recently remodeled three cottages in Venice, Calif. They reused drywall and so much material that they didn't even need a dumpster out front. The less stuff that ends up in the land fill, the better.

"When you demolish something, are you demolishing or carefully removing," she said.

That footstool/table you see in the picture is an example of recycling. It's made out of leather found in old Lexuses.

• Green is not necessarily a statement. You can consciously pick green materials, but it doesn't have to be a theme. In fact, self-conscious green will likely look dated in the future.

"We try to make things that don't look like green design," she said.

Do-it-yourself magazines like MAKE and basement-brewed steampunk anachronisms might be at the forefront of home engineering projects, but 50-year-old Lego is still the name builders know best. Now you can play with them on your computer in the official freeware program Lego Digital Designer, available for both Windows and Mac.

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