Hasta La Gadget!

One of the fastest and most efficient ways to make a care more environmentally friendly is simply to make it lighter. Less weight means less fuel is needed to power the car. And Ford has developed a way to potentially lighten its fleet by around 10 percent.

The secret is bubbles. Tiny bubbles. A technology developed by MuCell actually injects plastic materials with carbon or nitrogen bubbles, which significantly reduces vehicle weight without compromising the strength of the materials. Though it’s still in the trial phase, Ford is hoping that the bubble tech will allow the company to reduce the weight of its cars by anywhere from 250 to 750 lbs by 2020.

Via GigaOM

For researchers at the University of Liverpool, wind turbines weren’t enough. They need to be solar powered wind turbines.

The design aims to fix one of the main issues with wind turbines: that they’re essentially useless when there’s no wind at all. By having photovoltaic solar cells included on the spinning blades as well, the turbines will also be able to generate power via the sun, thus making them more useful.

One unintended problem, though, based on computer simulations is that the moving solar cells produce bright beams of light. These could potentially be temporarily blinding for people nearby, which could be especially dangerous for pilots.

Currently the team is looking for a place to start testing the turbines, preferably outside of England where wind and sunlight aren’t available in large amounts. “We are confident we can transform the world’s renewable energy needs,” Dr. Joe King told Inhabitat. “Just think what our turbines could do in countries like Australia.”

Anyone who has be on the New York City subway in the past several years knows that the underground transit system is perpetually littered with discarded Metrocards. Sometimes the things can be refilled, but many of the longterm cards are rendered useless the moment their time is up, and those disposal boxes that only exist as a place to get rid of the cards are seemingly perpetually overflowing.

40 farmers from the tiny Canadian province of Prince Edward Island are utilizing new software to help manage their fertilizer use. And they’re doing it from an iPhone.

The new app, called PEI AgriLogic, as developed by a software company in Quebec in conjunction with PEI’s department of agriculture. It keeps track of how much fertilizer a farmer uses, which in turn helps determine how much nitrogen is being put into the ground. The farmer simply records voice messages throughout the day, and the app transcribes them for easy record keeping.

“The very last thing we want to do is work a long day and come home and have to enter a pile of notes into something,” one farmer told the CBC.

The province hopes to double the size of the pilot program next year, before hopefully making it available province wide.

Chances are you stopped using Internet Explorer a long time a game, with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari being much more appealing alternatives. But if you’re looking to reduce your energy consumption while on the computer, you may just want to give IE another look.

According to Microsoft, the latest iteration of the browser, IE9, consumes less energy than the competition. This was discovered via several real-world tests, which included measuring power consumption while reading a news site and while using HTML5 applications. IE9 performed lowest in each of the tests, with Firefox coming in a close second.

Of course, since the results are coming directly from Microsoft they should be taken with a grain of salt. All of the tests were run in Windows 7, so Mac users don’t really get a clear picture of their browser energy use. But either way, it’s an important factor to consider when choosing a browser. Not only does less power consumption mean you’ll be losing less energy, but for laptops and other portable devices it will help save battery life.

Via CNet