I came across a YouTube video showing the Apple Knowledge Navigator, a 1987 concept video produced by Apple. I find most concept videos to be so fanciful that they really never come to fruition (Beyond 2000 anyone?). But there was something quite simple and honest about this video – and not to mention that many of the pieces, while not all together as one, exists in some form today.

I couldn’t help thinking of Google Reader and Skype whilst watching this. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) is still a while away, but the insight Apple has shown here is astounding.

Click here to view the embedded video.

LED Lighting Fixtures of Morrisville, North Carolina will announce today that it has made a technology breakthrough that will dramatically lower the cost of LEDs (light emitting diodes).CEO Neal Hunter told the Raleigh News and Observer that his company is developing a lamp that uses less energy than its current LED fixtures but emits the same amount of light. He said a just-released federal study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology confirms that the product is the most efficient in the world. It uses 5.8 watts of power, compared with 60 watts for an equally bright incandescent bulb.

According to the National Institute report, the new fixture uses less than 9 percent of the energy consumed by common bulbs and less than 30 percent of that consumed by fluorescent lights. LLF’s best existing product consumes 15 percent of the energy used by an incandescent bulb and 50 percent of that used by fluorescents.

Hunter said he hopes to debut the brighter and more efficient lamps by the end of 2008. The first buyers will likely be wholesale distributors, followed by consumers off store shelves by 2009.

Semiconductor-based LEDs use much less power than traditional bulbs, don’t contain mercury like fluorescents, and they last for years, sometimes even decades. Recent years have seen very exciting developments in this area, with Orlando, Ann Arbor, Detroit and Taiwan announcing switches of traffic lights to LEDs. This year’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in New York will even be lit with the technology — strung along 5 miles of wire!

Red the full article here

Renewable energy produced from the wind has garnered much attention and support in recent years but is often criticized for its low output and lack of reliability. But now a super power wind turbine has come along that may be just what the renewable energy industry needs. The MagLev wind turbine, which was first unveiled at the Wind Power Asia exhibition in Beijing, is expected take wind power technology to the next level with magnetic levitation.

Full Article

May Wong, AAP

15 October 2007 02:01 PM

Your storage worries could be all over — nanoscale hard drive technology developed by Japanese researchers could soon see a quadrupling of the current storage limits of devices such as laptops and iPods.

Japanese company Hitachi Ltd says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today’s storage limits to four terabytes for desktop computers and one terabyte on laptops in 2011.

Read the full article here

A couple of news headlines in the last few days have once again brought into focus two of the most pressing problems facing every nation on this earth today.They are the price of crude oil touching $84 a barrel and that the arctic ice is vanishing at an alarming rate.The former threatens to derail economic growth worldwide and the latter is a warning that we are on the brink of an environmental catastrophe with yet unforeseen consequences.This is exactly why hydrogen powered vehicles become so important.
Most people think that US automakers have surrendered technological leadership to their Japanese rivals for good.If one were to consider sales of conventional vehicles and the latest hybrids then nobody would have a choice but to agree.But fortunately things are not so bleak for the US auto industry as they may appear at first sight.

People tend to overlook the fact that one of the major reasons why US automakers have lagged behind in the development of hybrid technology is that they have concentrated on developing electric and hydrogen powered vehicles.

So how do hydrogen powered vehicles work?They work in two different ways.The first is that hydrogen is burnt in internal combustion engines in the same way as in conventional autos.The second is to use hydrogen to power fuel cells.Here hydrogen is reacted with oxygen to produce electricity which is used to power an electric motor through a battery.

Hydrogen can be produced from a multiplicity of sources such as natural gas ,converting coal into gas,biomass and other waste products apart from water.It is estimated that supplies of hydrogen are unlimited.

Presently there are about 200 hydrogen powered vehicles on the road in the US mainly in California.Companies have started offering hydrogen powered cars to customers but there are a couple of problems.For one the cost of the vehicle is very high and secondly the fuel is not easily available.However it is expected that mass production will lead to significant reduction in costs.

Although hybrid cars cut down emissions significantly, only hydrogen cars offer zero emission, the only emission being water vapor.Moreover these cars will drastically reduce the nation’s dependence on imported oil.The US government is actively supporting this initiative and President Bush has allocated almost $2 billion to this program.Since one fifth of the nation’s cars are sold in California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying hard to put in place an infrastructure which would ensure easy availability of hydrogen.Once costs come down and fuel is easily available there is no reason why hydrogen cars will not replace gasoline cars very quickly because performance wise hydrogen cars are a match for their gasoline counterparts.Moreover they are more efficient and give two to three times the mileage of gasoline vehicles per equivalent measure of hydrogen.

Hopefully it won’t be very long before hydrogen vehicles are a common sight on the highway.

Original Article can be found here

A Clip from the 1967 film 1999 A.D. in which we see the family of the future shopping, paying bills and using electronic mail from home.

All the predictions came true, but what they didn’t anticipate was miniaturization.

This is where I plan to upload personal work. Photos, design’s, sketches, thoughts. I’m sure to add more to this when I can actually be bothered, so for now – and until I find a theme (or can be bothered designing one myself) this is all you’ll get J 

Take care