New way to save energy: Disappearing ink

Think of it as the future of today's paper.

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and parent company Xerox are experimenting with a type of paper and a complimentary printer that would produce documents that fade away after 16 to 24 hours. A restaurant, for instance, could print its daily specials on a piece of paper, attach the pieces of paper to menus, and then collect the sheets of then-blank paper in the morning to run through the printer again.

How does it work? The paper is coated with photosensitive chemicals that turn dark when hit with UV light.

Users don't have to wait for the paper to fade either. By running it through the special printer made for this paper, the printer will erase the old image before putting the new one on.

The paper and printer could hit the market in a few years.

The same sheets of paper can be run through the printer hundreds of time, according to tests conducted by Xerox, said Eric Shrader, area manager, energy systems, device hardware laboratory at Xerox. Typically, the paper isn't reusable only when it gets damaged or crumpled.

The idea is to cut the amount of energy consumed in making paper and printing. Like refurbished PC makers have noted, reusing an item consumes a lot less power than making a new one, or even recycling one.

It takes about 204,000 joules to make a sheet of paper, Shrader said. That's about the same amount of power required to run a 60-watt light bulb for an hour, he added. Recycling that same sheet of paper takes about 114,000 joules.

Printing a conventional 8x11.5 sheet of paper takes about 2,000 joules, he said.

Reusable paper takes a lot less effort. It only takes 1,000 joules to print an image on one of Xerox's reusable sheets of paper, and that's if you use the printer to erase the image. If you let the image fade naturally, it only takes about 100 joules to print. It takes energy to produce the special paper, but the energy consumed in recycling fades out.

"Being able to reuse paper is a big energy win," Shrader said.

Energy has become a major focus of research at PARC over the last three years. The lab, which Xerox opened in the '70s, helped create the PC, inkjet printing, and Ethernet networking. Xerox, however, didn't commercialize a lot of these inventions successfully; instead, companies like Apple borrowed liberally from the lab to great effect. PARC now functions relatively independently, coming up with inventions to license to others.

Not every document is right for reusable paper. Presentations and legal contracts probably need to be printed on something more permanent. But lunch menus, daily work summaries, and memos from meetings can all potentially take advantage of this. Xerox says that 44.5 percent of documents are printed for one-time use and 25 percent of all documents printed get recycled the same day. (Lyra Research estimates that 15.2 trillion pages get printed worldwide a year, a figure that will grow 30 percent over the next 10 years.)

"Think of the Google map you printed to get here," Shrader said. "Thirty years ago, we said the future was paperless."

The paper and the printer will be a little bit more expensive than their conventional counterparts. The photosensitive molecule embedded in the paper is proprietary.

While the paper shown in the photo is yellow with purple ink that appeared later, Xerox has produced white paper and can come up with a variety of ink colors. The company, however, has used yellow paper as an example so that focus groups know what sheets to reuse and which to recycle.

Via CNET Crave

Plastic made from pig urine

The company has essentially devised a way to better commercialize urea, a compound of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, found in urine.

Other animal waste products like manure can be inserted into the system, but pig urine is particularly interesting because it is an environmental hazard, says Peter Tøttrup, a partner at Seed Capital, a Danish venture firm that also helps the government incubate start-ups. We ran into Tøttrup at the coffee urn at the NordicGreen conference in Menlo Park, Calif., this week.

"There are 20 million pigs in Denmark, and what they do environmentally is a problem," he said.

Transforming farm waste into plastic precursors is potentially attractive over other bioplastic ideas because the feedstock effectively has no value. In fact, it has negative value because animal waste must be disposed, which costs money. Some other bioplastic companies make their resins out of corn starch.
Read more »

Some scary water stats from an expert

How much water does it take to make a pair of leather shoes? 8,000 liters.

That's from Hans Enggrob, head of innovation at the DHI Water Group, a research and consulting firm, speaking at the Nordic Green conference taking place this week at SRI International's offices.

It takes 2,000 liters to make a cotton T-shirt, 2,400 liters to make a hamburger, and 1,200 liters to produce a gallon of ethanol, he said.

But beer drinkers should rejoice. It only takes 75l for a glass of beer and 140l for a cup of coffee, he added. Much of the water in these products goes toward irrigating crops used to make these products.

Enggrob, like many others, points out that the world is facing a pending water crisis. Several startups concentrating on water purification and desalination have received funding in recent years and large giants such as General Motors have put more emphasis on water. Still, demand is growing faster than supply. China, Australia, and several African nations are already grappling with water shortages. In the US, some believe Lake Mead could run dry by 2021.
Read more »

Cool your house with chemical reactions

Solid, meet liquid.

Acvio, a company out of Finland showcasing its technology at the Nordic Green conference this week at SRI International in Menlo Park, says it has come up with an air conditioning system that consumes 60 percent to 70 percent less power than conventional systems.

The energy savings comes because Acvio's system doesn't require an air compressor to make cool air, the traditional engine inside air conditioners. The system relies upon the energy released when a solid becomes a liquid. It works like this: Warm air from the outside is collected and funneled toward a solid. The heat melts the solid and the melting process takes heat out of the air. That cooler air is then cycled inside to cool down the inside of a home or office. You can also use it in server rooms. Half the electricity in today's data centers gets used to power the air conditioners. (And you thought it was to run the machines in the snack room.)

"Instead of a compressor, we use hot and humid air," said CEO Kari Moilala, during a meeting. "The energy is taken out of hot air."

Acvio's system does require fans, but these can be run by solar panels, Moilala said.

The system can also be used to heat a building by running the process in reverse, but it works better as an air conditioner.

Moilala wouldn't say what the material is that goes from solid to liquid, but it isn't water. A few U.S. companies like Ice Energy are cooling buildings by converting ice to water.

Heat exchange systems--those that shuttle heat and cold back and forth like this-- have been around for a while but are improving in the face of increasing electricity prices. Another one to check out is Hallowell International, which has an air conditioner that also works as a heater in cooler climates.

Via CNET News blogs

After 38 years, a new type of memory to hit market

It's been a long haul for phase change memory, but the goal is in sight.

Numonyx, the memory joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel, is already shipping samples of phase change memory (PCM) chips to customers and will start shipping PCM chips commercially later this year, CEO Brian Harrison said at a press conference Monday.

"We expect to bring it to market this year and generate some revenue," Harrison said. "It is one to two years before it becomes widely commercially available."

Hearing a CEO talk about existing samples and near-term commercial shipments is a big deal for PCM. The technology has been stuck in the proverbial "a few years away" phase for a long time.

"It could be cheaper than flash within a couple of years," analyst Richard Doherty in said in 2001, predicting the technology might hit the market in 2003.

"We are making good progress," Stefan Lai, one of Intel's flash memory scientists, said in 2002.

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and the man for whom Moore's Law was named, had an article in the September 28, 1970 issue of Electronics predicting that Ovonics Unified Memory, another name for the same type of memory, could hit the market by the end of that decade. (The same issue of Electronics also included this article: "The Big Gamble in Home Video Recorders.")
Read more »

Crave is...

The name says it all. Crave is our blog about cool gadgets and other crushworthy stuff.

Drop us an email if you have tips or suggestions.

Crave for...

» Mobile Phones (2215)

» Digital Cameras (974)

» Notebooks (1227)

» PC & Peripherals (1304)

» Handhelds (584)

» Printers (82)

» Home AV (1138)

» Music & Play (887)

» Gadgets (1474)

» Future Tech (391)

» Green Tech (170)

» Lifestyle (154)

» Luxury (22)

» Home Appliances (57)

» Cars (99)

» Games and Gear (245)

» Software (93)

» Web (105)

Previously...

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

Hot Topics

Subscribe to
Crave

What's Hot

apple apple inc. apple iphone apple ipod asia battery camera game google inc. iphone microsoft corp. microsoft windows mobile phone photograph singapore smart phone software sony corp. video

Today on CNET |  Reviews |  Crave |  Blogs |  CNET TV |  Digital Living |  Downloads