Hasta La Gadget!

Man, if only this had been discovered before Ariadne was tasked with building impossible dreams. A team of scientists caught high-fiving over at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have a new and riveting announcement to share, and it revolves around our old and trusted friend, graphene. This go ’round, the self-proclaimed “extraordinary form of carbon” is being stressed to its max, but not without good reason. Thanks to inquisitive minds and a “stroke of serendipity,” a research team was able to create magnetic fields in excess of 300 tesla by simply straining graphene in a certain way. For physicists, the discovery is a dream come true, particularly when you realize that magnetic fields in excess of 85 tesla were practically impossible to come across in a laboratory setting. The benefits here? It’s honestly too early to tell, but gurus in the field are already suggesting that the “opportunities for basic science with strain engineering [are] huge.” Something tells us Magneto would concur.

Strained graphene leads to pseudo-magnetic fields, bends physics even further originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

With summer in full swing, this week Inhabitat watched the mercury rise as the world’s largest thermostat burst forth with an array of 72,000 building-mounted LEDs. We also kept things cool with a remarkable plan to transform frozen construction sites into event-hosting urban icebergs. And if you haven’t made plans for a summer vacation yet, might we recommend this stunning Swedish “Treehotel” housed within a silvery mirror cube in the sky?

Heartening news rang forth from the renewable energy sector this week as a UN-backed study reported that the building of new renewable energy plants has officially overtaken fossil fuel plants in Europe and the US. We also took a look at two brand new types of power plants — the world’s first hydrogen-driven power plant in Italy and the first hybrid coal-solar power plant in Colorado.

The past week also saw several remarkable advances in clean tech, starting with MIT’s latest innovation, a new type of high-tech fiber that can transmit sound, light, and generate electricity. We also paid homage to one of our all-time favorite sources of (surprisingly green) home entertainment – the Roku Box.

Inhabitat’s Week in Green: of mirror cubes and urban icebergs originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As smartphones continue to extend their pocket-swelling domination of the mobile market, it should come as no surprise that people are less worried about talking and more concerned with doing other stuff on their handsets than ever before. But, still, if you want some hard numbers to make you feel better about making such conclusions, the Pew Research Center‘s 2010 Mobile Access survey has ’em. Compared to April of last year, 76% of people take pictures with their phones, up from 66%, and over a third play games, up from about a quarter. A third of people now play music on their phones, compared to 21% in 2009, but the biggest jump is in recording video: 34% vs. 19% before. Given the number of new movie-capturing phones released over the past year, it’s easy to see why. So, no shocking numbers here, but sadly there’s no indication of the one usage statistic we think might actually be falling: making calls.

Pew’s 2010 Mobile Access survey shows more people are doing more things on their phones originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At Engadget HQ, we take great care not to trumpet the claims of a web survey, as it’s always difficult to tell who’s actually doing the surveying — and even if we could, consumer surveys are all about a “what if” that may never actually come to pass. That said, it looks like maybe ABC is conducting a study asking folks whether they’d be interested in a subscription to an ABC.com streaming video service, and maybe that service might have a wide variety ABC shows, past and present, fully on-demand. Sound familiar? Interestingly, the subscription would seem to be offered alongside the existing free service, and both paid and free would have advertising, though reduced by 20 percent for those coughing up the fee. You can find a list of potentially potential shows included in the gallery below, forwarded to us by an anonymous tipster; we tried to take the survey ourselves, but were promptly rejected for our love of FlashForward.

ABC’s subscription video plans leaked in consumer survey? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 20:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon’s experiment of replacing textbooks with Kindle DXs in classrooms already took a pretty hefty blow from Princeton’s feedback — which described the jumbo e-reader as “a poor excuse” for an academic tool — but here comes some more punishment courtesy of the trialists at Darden. The Business School describes the DX as clunky and too slow to keep up with the pace of teaching, with up to 80 percent of users saying they wouldn’t recommend it for academic use. There is a silver lining to this cloud of hate however, as up to 95 percent of all project participants would be happy to recommend the Kindle DX as a personal reading device. That meshes rather well with the high satisfaction and sales figures e-readers are enjoying, but it does show that the hardware has a long way to go before it convinces us to ditch our paperbacks.

[Thanks, Miles B]

Kindle DX trial at Darden concludes it’s academically woeful, personally enjoyable originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 May 2010 08:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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