Hasta La Gadget!

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

Fresh water is the most precious resource on Earth, and it’s becoming increasingly scarce — but a new invention could make desalination an affordable, cost-effective technology. A team of scientists from Germany and the US has developed a “water chip” that uses an electrical field to separate salt from seawater. That isn’t the only new innovation that has the potential to change the world. This week Inhabitat took a look at the Horizon mass transit system, a futuristic hybrid train-plane propelled by a maglev-style mechanism. The UK celebrated the launch of the world’s largest offshore wind farm, and Apple announced plans to build a 18-20 MW solar plant to power its data center in Reno, Nev. A 15-year-old from Canada created a flashlight that is powered entirely by body heat from a human hand. And in one of the week’s most uplifting stories, an amputee built herself a prosthetic leg out of Legos (it might not be very practical, but it sure is cool).

Filed under: Misc, Science

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The announcement is wrapped in an aura of déjà vu: Universal Music Group is marketing an uncompressed, high-end digital audio format for Blu-ray called High Fidelity Pure Audio (HFPA). Where standard CD audio is 44.1KHz at 16 bits, HFPA’s A2D sampling rate clocks in at a sky-high 96KHz at 24 bits.

Analog elitists will maintain that even extremely refined sampling is inherently inferior to capturing unchopped waveforms, and while that argument is fun to test, it is academic in the context of wide consumer adoption. Can a new audiophile format gain traction in a technomusical world governed by convenience and mobility?

Filed under: Misc, Software

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Google introduced the Nexus Q close to a year ago. It was an intriguing device with a standout design, but its high asking price and limited functionality meant it wasn’t long before the Q was pulled from virtual shelves. A peculiar product and, perhaps, a cautionary tale, but the sphere was also interesting for another reason: it was manufactured in the USA. That credential is a rarity, and in the consumer technology business, almost an anomaly. It’s fast becoming a lot more common, however, with some big players setting up a stateside manufacturing presence. Awareness of the potential advantages of doing so can only increase, and serve to debunk the myth that future technology can’t be built on American soil.

After flirting with the idea, then committing to build a computer in the US, Apple chose its redesigned Mac Pro for assembly in the states. Lenovo has a PC production facility up and running in North Carolina, and Google-owned Motorola will be putting together its next flagship, the Moto X, in Texas. Time will tell whether other companies will follow suit, and to what extent, but if the arguments in favor of US manufacturing hold up, we could see the trend sustained in the long term, leading to many more gadgets bearing a US birthmark.

Filed under: Misc, Apple, Samsung, Google, Lenovo

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You might think a harmless white collar crime would escape the wheels of justice. After all, what’s a little $1.7 billion accounting scandal in the grand scheme of things? As it turns out, you wouldn’t be far wrong: none of the three senior figures sentenced in Japan today for falsifying Olympus Corp.’s financial accounts have been sent to jail. Former Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa received a three-year suspended sentence, in light of the fact that he didn’t make the original decision to hide the firm’s financial losses, while a former executive VP and a former auditing officer also got suspended sentences after making similar defenses. The company itself was fined $7 million.

Meanwhile, the two men accused of starting the fraud, former presidents Masatoshi Kishimoto and Toshiro Shimoyama, have escaped all charges because, as reported by Kyodo News a couple of months ago, too much time has elapsed since the original crime. Oh well. If there’s any upside to this sorry saga, we guess it’s the fact that the whistleblower who lost his job after exposing the scandal, former CEO Michael Woodford, eventually saw some restitution.

Filed under: Cameras, Misc

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Source: Bloomberg

Samsung may already have its 8-core Exynos 5 Octa offering, but the cunning “big.LITTLE” implementation means only up to four cores work together at any time — either the Cortex-A15 quartet or its lesser Cortex-A7 counterpart. In other words, we’d rather rename the chipset range to something like “Exynos 5 Quad Dual.” But according to recent intel coming from Taipei and Shenzhen, it looks like Taiwan’s MediaTek is well on its way to ship a true 8-core mobile chipset in Q4 this year.

Filed under: Misc, Mobile

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Source: Sina Weibo (login required), UDN (1), (2)