Hasta La Gadget!

A number of organizations have pledged their support for WindMade: a new label that will be attached to products that were made using wind power.

The World Wildlife Federation and Danish wind turbine maker Vestas are among the supporters of the label. The actual technical details–i.e. specifically what it will take for a product to get the WindMade stamp of approval–haven’t been announced yet, but the goal is to increase the demand for wind energy, which is typically quite expensive.

“We hope that this will create a strong element of consumer pull, which will accelerate the pace of wind energy development globally,” Vestas’ Ditlev Engel told Reuters. A timeline for when we’ll start seeing WindMade labels has also yet to be announced.

Rumors are swirling that famed luxury car maker Rolls Royce will be entering the world of electric vehicles. According to the Daily Mail, Rolls Royce is planning a rechargeable, electric limousine. The car has been rumored to be in production for the last two years.

However, since there’s no official word on the luxury EV, there aren’t really any details. In fact, Rolls Royce itself has yet to confirm anything. “We are not going to make any rash decisions,” CEO Torsten Mueller-Oetvoes told the Daily Mail. “It would be wrong for the brand and wrong for our customers if we were to take a decision without fully exploring all options.” He did, however, go on to say that such a car would be a good idea.

The company’s flagship car is the Rolls Royce Phantom, a $300,000 vehicle with a V12 engine that produces 377 grams of CO2 emissions per kilometer.

The sleuths over at CNet have spotted a patent filed by Apple, which shows that the company is looking at a solar-powered charging solution for its range of portable electronics.

The patent was filed way back in 2009, and Apple finally received it earlier this week. The patent describes a solar powered charging option, which would likely work in addition to traditional AC charging options, for products including ” a notebook/laptop computer, a media player (e.g., MP3 or video player), a cellular phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), an image processing device (e.g., a digital camera or video recorder), and/or any other handheld computing devices, or a combination of any of these device.”

While this obviously doesn’t mean that the next iPhone or iPad will have a built in solar panel, at the very least it means that Apple is looking into the possibility.

Scientists have long used a simple technique to follow the lives of specific penguins: placing a band around their flipper, thus making them easy to spot. But it turns out those simple bands actual harm the birds, reducing their lifespan and even diminishing the number of offspring they produce.

A study took place over ten years, and looked at a group of 100 King penguins — half of which had a flipper band, half of which had been outfitted with an implanted transponder. After a decade, 18 of the transponder penguins were still alive, while just 10 of the banded penguins survived. The penguins with the bands also arrived to breeding grounds much later and took longer to find food, thus leading to a reduced number of chicks.

The reason for the issues is most likely that the bands cause drag, reducing the penguins swimming abilities. They also make the birds more visible to predators.

“I would say no [it is not ethical],” French researcher Claire Saraux told the BBC. “The exception would be using them only on land, and that probably won’t be a problem so long as you take them off the birds before they go to sea – and that could still be useful, because I can tell you that when you go into a colony of 50,000 penguins to find yours, it’s not easy.”

If you just so happen to have an old motorcycle lying around, it turns out there’s a lot you can do with it with just a bit of elbow grease and a lot of creativity. A number of designers have created a wide range of useful objects using nothing more than old bike parts.

The designs include a turntable made from a cylinder head and brake parts, bowls made from wheel spokes, a brake lever corkscrew, and an iPod dock made from tail lights. The recycled creations were made as part of an exhibition put on by Triumph Motorcycles and the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. Hit the jump for more images.

Via Design Boom