Here First - Science and Technology Blog

Joule Biotechnologies Inc.’s secret ingredient - a designed organism - looks like green Jell-O before it’s refrigerated. The unknown organism consumes sunlight and carbon dioxide, then sweats ethanol. The 2-year-old compan said that one day soonin the near future its SolarFuel could be used to power cars all around the world. It seems that the the mysterious fuel-making organism has a green color, but it is not algae. Chief executive Bill Sims and cofounder David Berry did provide a peek at the Joule process, while dodging persistent inquiries about the mysterious fuel-making organism. “We are converting sunlight to liquid energy,’ Sims explained. The goal is to make an environmentally-friendly fuel that can compete with $50-a-barrel fossil fuels Jeremy Martin, a senior scientist in the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is shure the organism is almost certainly a plant. Read more here

This solar-powered phone from Samsung is the holy green grail of gadgets for eco-fans. It seems that Samsung has finally delivered on this promise with their brand new Blue Earth phone. The phone stands to it's name. Blue Earth is a gorgeous green touch phone that has a full solar panel on its back which can generate enough power to charge the phone. The phone is small enough to fit in your pocket! But this was not enough for Samsung. They are going above and beyond to achieve what they hope is the greenest phone on the market. The body of the phone is made out of recycled water bottles and has no brominated flame retardants, beryllium and phthalates - all incredibly toxic substances. The charger also meets high standby mode energy efficiency ratings.   The device is set to be energy efficient, with a new user interface making it easy to activate the phone’s energy saving mode. Blue Earth also include CO2 emissions calculator, a pedometer and Samsung is aiming for minimal packagi...

I am glad they have released a mac commercial outside of their "mac vs pc" ads! I salute their effort to produce environmentally friendly products. Along with this, Apple has unveiled a new webpage dedicated to showing off their new notebook’s green innovation. Additionally, a new commercial showcasing the “Greenest family of notebooks” aired recently: When we redesigned the new Macbook, our designers and engineers set a goal of making not only the greenest notebook Apple ever produced, but the greenest family of notebooks. So every new Macbook has been built using materials that are highly recyclable and free of many harmful substances present in other computers. Apple engineers also designed the software and hardware to work together, in order to maximize energy efficiency and minimize the carbon footprint of the MacBook. Even the packaging was reconsidered and reduced, so there would be smaller boxes to ship and less material to recycle. The result is exactly what we hope...

PC energy saving specialists Verdiem have today released free software designed to help users reduce their energy use up to 80%. Allison Cornia, is the vice president of product management at Verdiem:  “If we could get just 10% of the world’s one billion PCs using [the product] properly we could save 32 billion kilograms of CO2 a year. That’s equivalent to taking half a million cars off the road.” This new software from Edison employs a desktop user-interface enable userse to set times at which the machine will automatically transfer to sleep mode. It will allow users to reduce the amount of time a computer lies idle before it switches monitor, PC and hard drive power off.