Office machine churns out toilet rolls

Never thought to see the day when I would be wiping my rear with used copier paper straight from an office machine. Butt seriously, thanks to Japanese ingenuity, this could soon be smart waste management, employed in corporate buildings to recycle all that paper we're guilty of overusing into toilet paper.

There's just one wee catch. Nakabayashi's pricey US$95,000 office machine requires a whopping 72kg of discarded paper (or about 1,800 A4 sheets) to churn into... just two rolls of (hopefully pliable) loo paper. But at least you can now say you've cleaned your behind with your boss' memo.

Via CrunchGear

HP launches Power to Change campaign

BEIJING, China--Aside from a series of hardware announcements at the HP Touch the Future Now event, the Cupertino outfit has also embarked on a new Power to Change campaign. The concept, based on the collective effort of users, involves switching off computers at the end of each day. To put this into perspective, every 100,000 people who participate in this campaign equates to taking 107 cars off the road each day. Or saving 2,680 kilowatt hours of energy and reducing CO2 emission by 1.6tons.

Users can now download a widget to calculate their carbon footprint from the Power to Change Web site. This will record the amount of time the computer is left powered on but in idle mode and reminds the user to switch off the system daily. The online portal also has trivia and tips on how to be more environmentally friendly. It may be a simple act on the part of an individual, but collectively, we can make a difference.

Sharp's sun-powered, waterproof keitai

Sunbathers in Japan will have another beach- or pool-friendly keitai to carry with them this summer. Simply known as the Solar Phone SH002, a 10-minute exposure to direct sunlight will yield 1 minute of talktime or 2 hours of standby. Of course, the mileage you get is dependant on factors like the intensity of solar radiation, cloud cover, etc. But you should be able to juice up the battery to 80 percent of its capacity if left outdoors long enough. There's even a Flash animation app that tells you how fast your phone is charging with a growing number of animals onscreen as the radiation gets more intense.

The SH002 is waterproof as well. In other words, you won't have to worry if the handset takes an accidental dive. Also interesting are the sports-related applications. You can configure a health and fitness program tailored to your lifestyle, learn to play golf on 2,300 preset courses, as well as check the number of calories you've burned. Too bad this doesn't measure the UVs you're soaking up even as it's charging up. Available only from KDDI in Japan from May 29.

Via AkihabaraNews

Google dribbles out PowerMeter smart-grid service

Google has signed on smart-meter manufacturer Itron and eight utilities to offer Google's PowerMeter Web service for monitoring home energy use.

PowerMeter reads a home's electricity meter and gives the consumer a detailed readout of usage. The idea is that a better understanding of electricity usage--presented via daily trends and data on individual appliances--will help people figure out how to cut consumption.

Google's home energy-monitoring software relies on meters, or addon devices, that can communicate usage information back to utilties. In a blog post on Tuesday, Google engineer Ed Lu said that the company is seeking to find more smart-meter vendors and utilities to offer PowerMeter.
Read more »

Future air-fueled battery could store 10 times more power

A new type of air-fueled battery being studied could provide up to 10 times the energy storage of designs currently available, and someday be used to power electric cars, mobile phones, and laptops, say researchers.

"Our results so far are very encouraging and have far exceeded our expectations," said professor Peter Bruce, of the University of St Andrews' chemistry department, in a news release Monday.

The new idea the researchers are examining is to replace the lithium cobalt oxide electrode in today's rechargeable lithium batteries with a porous carbon electrode. This allows lithium-ions and electrons in the cell to react instead with oxygen in the ambient air, according to a press release from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which finances the research conducted at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. The project has received about 1.6 million British pounds (US$2.4 million) from the EPSRC.
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