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.

Lego just made an announcement that will have geeks around the world salivating: Beginning in September, the company will release a 1-foot-tall Star Wars Ewok Village, complete with tree houses, rope ladders and of course, our favorite furry friends. That’s not all — this week the toy maker also unveiled plans for a new Lego museum in Denmark that looks like a big pile of toy bricks. In other blocky building news, the world’s first carbon-negative building brick was just unveiled in the UK, and Studio Liu Lubin created an awesome set of stackable Tetris-style micro houses in China. And in green transportation news, Tesla announced that it will add a fourth car — a compact SUV — to its electric vehicle lineup, and Japan just unveiled a new prototype of its ridiculously fast 310MPH maglev train.

Filed under: Misc, Transportation, Science

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Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.

In this installment of our regular session of inquiry, special effects and robot expert Mark Setrakian (of Syfy’s Robot Combat League) talks tools of the robot trade and cyberspace-augmented memory. Join us on the other side of the break for the full collection of responses.

Filed under: Misc

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Source: Distro Issue 94

In mere days, the ESA will host the 18th annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, a multimillion-dollar event that serves as a soapbox for industry leaders, game developers and peripheral manufacturers as well as a focal point for video game enthusiasts. The show is a driving force for the industry, dictating Christmas lists in early June and establishing what products will live, die and fade from the public mind. Retailers eye consumer reactions to help them finalize their holiday orders and fans devour coverage of the event as if it was manna from heaven. Since the show’s 1995 launch, video games have grown from a niche category to a central facet of modern entertainment — finding their own place in the music industry, our national museums and even organizations like the Boy Scouts of America. No other event celebrates and glorifies the industry so thoroughly.

Yes, it’s a trade show at heart — as well as the industry’s best hype machine — but it’s also a very prominent part of gaming fandom. Following the news, scrutinizing announcements and arguing over who “won” the show is almost an annual tradition. Amid all of the event’s excitement, it’s easy to forget its strange origins. The industry’s biggest spectacle wasn’t born from a rational need to create a unifying trade show, but instead from a federally imposed stalemate in the console wars of the 1990s.

Filed under: Misc, Gaming, Sony, Nintendo

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Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.

I just spent a week in Japan, where I attended my first Japanese wedding in Tokyo. It was lovely, different and the same all at once. I’ve been coming here almost annually since 1998, and while most things have remained the same, I’ve watched Japan’s pace of consumer technology innovation take a seeming nosedive in recent years. I have no solid evidence to prove this — just some observations.

When I first visited Tokyo in 1998, Japanese mobile phones were years ahead of their American and European equivalents. Japanese mobiles were lightweight, had high-resolution — for the time — color screens, allowed internet access and some even had video cameras that supported real-time video chat.

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc, Peripherals, Software

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Google has just secured the services of an entire 72MW wind farm in Maevaara, Sweden for the next ten years to keep its Finnish data center humming, according to the official blog. It brokered the deal through German insurer Allianz, which purchased the farm and will begin selling all the electricity it produces to Mountain View by 2015. The move is part of Google’s quest to remain carbon neutral, and is along similar lines to a recent deal which saw the search giant purchase 48MW of energy from a wind farm in Oklahoma. The news follows Apple’s announcement that it gets 75 percent of its power from renewable sources — showing the arch-foes can at least agree on something.

Filed under: Misc, Internet, Google

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Source: Google