Nokia and Samsung tops new Greenpeace guide

Greenpeace released its latest Guide to Greener Electronics on Wednesday, revealing that promises aren't always kept.


The Greenpeace guide, which started in 2006, ranks the top 17 PC, cell phone, TV, and gaming console manufacturers based on their policies regarding e-waste, climate change, and use of toxic chemicals.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Lenovo all dropped in the rankings for failing to live up to public promises to eliminate polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from their computers by the end of 2009, according to Greenpeace.
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Solar panels take on roof tile shape for aesthetics

Will a better aesthetic tempt more people into going solar? SRS Energy is betting on it.

The company has partnered with US Tile, a leading manufacturer of Spanish, slate, and shake roof tiles, to design solar panels with the exact same shapes as their clay counterparts.

The result is solar tiles that can be seamlessly integrated with the terra-cotta tiles on your roof. Instead of the solar panels being on your roof, your solar panels are the roof. Instead of consumers going solar as aftermarket adaptation, the Philadelphia-based company hopes that solar will become part of the architecture and building of residences and commercial properties.
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Korean researchers claim world's first purely white LED breakthrough

Researchers from Korea claim to have produced the world's first purely white LED (light-emitting diode).

Soo-Young Park, a professor of organic materials for photonics at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in Korea, led the group, which includes researchers from the University of Valencia in Spain.

LEDs are much more energy-efficient than incandescent or compact fluorescent lightng (CFL), but the quality of light they can give a room is up for debate.

Because LEDs do not naturally produce white light, getting them to look like they do adds to their production cost, making them much more expensive than your average incandescent or CFL. Many companies have been trying to come up with different LED recipes and components to produce a nice white light, while keeping the consumer cost down.
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iTunes 8.1 falls short on promise of Genius

Apple's notes on iTunes 8.1, an update released Wednesday, as was a new iPod shuffle, promised a list of new and improved features.

Among them is an update to the Genius feature that makes recommendations based on favorite music that users select from their own library, and lets them play clips of those recommended songs from a sidebar.

It's a neat and convenient feature, which is why the Internet was abuzz when it was rumored, and then Apple's iTunes 8.1 release notes confirmed, that the iTunes 8.1 update "adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows."
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Fuel cell power for your gadgets

MTI Micro, a subsidiary of Mechanical Technology Incoporated, unveiled a portable charger recently that uses replaceable fuel cartridges.

MTI Micro is not the first, and hopefully won't be the last, company to go to the fuel cell for portable convenient power. (People refer to these new tries as "fuel cell gadget chargers," though to me, that seems like it refers to a charger for powering fuel cell gadgets.)

Just this past September, Medis came out with the 24-7 Power pack, a charger powered by a liquid fuel cell, for only US$40 with replacement packs for about US$20.

The MTI Micro Mobion prototype works with cartridges of the liquid fuel methanol. Each cartridge offers about 25 hours of power. When it's depleted, users just pop it out of the charger and replace it with another one.

Sounds promising, but we're still waiting to hear back from MTI Micro on the pricing of the charger and those cartridges. The company says the MTI Micro Fuel Cell Charger will be available as a product toward the end of 2009.


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