Earlier today, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed off stickers that would give car buyers standardized info on a particular model’s fuel economy and environmental impact. Gadgets should have standardized ratings, too. More »
Continue reading MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)
MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Continue reading NEC builds a better bioplastic from plant stems and cashew nut shells
NEC builds a better bioplastic from plant stems and cashew nut shells originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Quirky’s hive-mind has done it again. The design-by-community site will now sell you Petal Drops, a flower-shaped cap which screws onto any old plastic water-bottle, turning it instantly into a tiny water-barrel, ready to water the plants.
The floral funnel collects the rain and at the same time makes the old bottle good-looking enough to leave in the garden: you won’t end up looking like that terrible neighbor with the old car parts and construction materials in his now unsightly front yard.
By now, you know how Quirky works. The products go on pre-order, and are made when the minimum number of orders have been placed. Then, the profits are split, with a proportion going to the “influencers” who helped design the product. This time, the price is just $5.25, and the order threshold has already been crossed. Go get ‘em.
Petal Drops [Quirky]
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In Asia, everything from scaffold to lunch is made with bamboo. Anywhere else the tough, fast-growing grass is always marketed as being environmentally friendly (even when it houses a the toxic wasteland that is a modern computer). Today, we see the Bamboo Bottle, a water-bottle that makes the same world-saving claim.
The most environmentally water-bottle is probably the plastic one your Evian or Volvic came in. Long lasting and recyclable (into fleece-jackets, sadly), they are also cheap and come with a few free liters of water thrown in. This is my choice, and a quick rinse with boiling water once in a while keeps things hygienic.
The Bamboo Bottle is made from Bamboo, of course, but has a glass lining, which is removable for cleaning and is a lot easier to break than either plastic or aluminum. There are also plastic parts: a cap, a bottom cap and a top retaining ring. While it might not be as easy, light, cheap or durable as a regular plastic bottle, it is at least better-looking and all the parts can also be recycled. It will be available soon for $25, and will hold 17-ounces (half a liter) of liquid.
Bamboo Bottle [Bamboo Bottle Company via Uncrate]
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Man, these great cardboard stick-on wheels should be sold in every Ikea. The kit is called Move-It, and consists of a set of self-adhesive components that stick onto a big-box purchase and let you wheel it home yourself.
Move-It is up for the James Dyson Award over in the UK, and is completely made from cardboard, from the handle up top to the axles and wheels which are designed to let you trundle across the whole city as you take your new gear home. And because it is all card, you can just toss it into the recycling bin when you’re done.
Two wheels assemblies stick onto two bottom corners, and a longer handle-piece goes wherever it is most convenient to hold and drag. As you can see in the video, it works for boxes of any size and shape, and will move loads of up to 20-kilos, or 44-pounds, letting you roll them home like a wheeled-suitcase.
T
he trolley will even deal with cobbled streets and even wet ground, and as you see in the video above, event the prototype, made from old boxes, managed to carry a microwave for ten miles.
It’s truly ingenious, and would make trips back from places like Ikea something to be done on public transport. You probably saw this coming, but I’d bet that this could even be towed behind a bike as long as you kept things nice and slow.
Move-It [James Dyson Awards via Pimping the Granny Trolley
“>Oh Gizmo]
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Even though sterilizing water is not hard, SteriPEN‘s Sidewinder is a nifty alternative to boiling or using iodine pills to sterilize water.
Green geeks will like the idea of sterilizing water using UV light. Holding one-liter of water, Sidewinder has a hand crank on the side and a UV-light-bulb inside. Turning the crank powers on the bulb, blasting the water with germ-killing UV. An LED indicator on the front flashes green when the sterilization is complete and the water is safe to drink.
Whether out camping, traveling, or just anal about your home tap water, the Sidewinder is easy way to to just be sure.
Priced at $99.95, Sidewinder will be available online and in stores in September.
Quandary: You live in a place so beautifully sunny that you could probably power your home with solar-energy, but it is so beautifully sunny that you spend the whole day lazing in a hammock sipping iced-tea. The answer, my idle friend, is the Sunfish, solar-power that is literally plug-and-play. It’s so easy to install that even you could do it.
Sunfish works like this: You lay out a solar-panel and hook it up to the power-module. Plug this into any power-socket in your house. Then, plug in the accompanying circuit-monitor, a controller box which connects to the power-module via Wi-Fi and lets you keep an eye on things (via any web-connected device). That’s it. As long as the sun is shining, the setup pumps electricity into you mains circuit.
There are two models. The 200-watt version will power your lights (although why you would run lights with the sun shining outside is a mystery). The 1kW version will take care of washing machines and the like. If you need more power, you can just plug in more boxes.
It’s ingenious, and because its so easy to install it is pretty much portable: a boon for those in rented accommodation. The Sunfish will be available next year, at planned prices of $600 to $900 for the smaller model and $3,000 to $4,500 for the bigger one. Clarian, the company behind the device, says that a unit will pay for itself in a couple years.
I’m sold. I have been considering solar power ever since moving to Spain, but it has always seemed so complicated to set up. This plug-and-go option isn’t exactly cheap, but it sure is easy.
Sunfish: Revolutionizing Renewable Energy [Clarian. Thanks, Chad!]
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Clearly dissatisfied with what it sees in the mirror, Panasonic has today announced its decision to bulk up. A new share issue expected to raise ¥500 billion ($5.7 billion) will be enacted soon as part of raising the cash to complete the buyout of Sanyo Electric and Panasonic Electric Works. Don’t ask us why a company named Panasonic has to buy another company with Panasonic in its name, but them’s the facts. The total outlay is expected to come in at around $9.4 billion and is justified by Panasonic as fundamental to its future strategy of expanding into environmentally friendly tech and developing a three-pronged operating paradigm by 2012. The Osaka-based company is also reporting a ¥43.7b ($498 million) profit for the last quarter — a major upswing from a ¥53b loss in the same period last year — though that’s information the market seems to have ignored. Panasonic shares have plunged down 7.7% in the immediate aftermath of the acquisitions being announced, while Sanyo’s have shot up. Click past the break for the novella-sized press release explaining the details of the deal.
Panasonic to spend $9.4b on buying out Sanyo and PEW shares, posts robust quarterly profits originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Apple’s just slipped something into its iMac update press release that we didn’t want to go unnoticed: a battery charger. Apple’s AA battery-powered lineup now includes the wireless keyboard, the Magic Mouse (which seriously burns through the juice) and the Magic Trackpad, and for $29 you can score a dedicated charger for all that gear. The Apple Battery Charger comes with six long-lived NiMH rechargeable batteries which apparently have a lifetime of up to 10 years.
Update: We just had a chance to get a quick hands-on with the little guy, and well, it’s a battery charger. Apple tells us the charger has the lowest vampire power draw of any charger on the market — the idea is for users to keep two batteries in each of their peripherals and two in the charger, so they can quickly swap out as the cells run out. Interestingly, the batteries are some of the only Apple products in recent memory that don’t have an Apple logo on them — they’re just plain silver with “Rechargeable” printed on them. The charger itself has slightly nicer charging contacts than the usual spring-and-flap arrangement, and it features the same removable flippy-prong AC plug as Apple’s laptop and iPad power adapters, so you can theoretically swap it for a longer power cord if you like.
Gallery: Apple Battery Charger hands-on
Apple Battery Charger gets official: a battery charger, only you know, better (update: hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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