2 felix
Technology Editor Samuel Gibbs
TECHNOLOGY
Green Tech is awesome!
Simon Worthington takes a look at a few pieces of eco-tech in
the making, which could help save our way of life and the planet
M
odern technology is
blamed for every-
thing nowadays. Obes-
ity, crime...you name it,
we’ve blamed it. The killer though, is
climate change. No-one can deny that
since consumer electronics have ap-
peared in homes our energy needs
have soared. So, is our only solution to
unplug our Xboxes and power down
our tumble dryers? Of course it isn’t.
Technology is here to save us once
again!
Alfred Whitehead, British math-
ematician and philosopher, once said
of technology, “Civilization advances
by extending the number of impor-
tant operations which we can perform
without thinking of them.” By that prin-
ciple anything which can fight climate
change without us thinking can only
be a good thing. The Pavegen system
does exactly that, by embedding gen-
erators in paving slabs that capture the
kinetic energy of people walking. The
slabs are made from recycled car tires
and aluminium, and move just 5mm
when you step on it. On a fairly busy
pavement this translates to 2.1 watts
per hour which is enough to power
street lamps and information displays.
The slabs have already been tried out
somewhere in East London, and may
roll out across the UK from next year.
Generating energy is one thing but
saving energy is just as important. Hi-
tachi is on the case with at a TV that
uses facial recognition to turn off the
screen’s backlight when you’re not
Weekly Wrap-up: A quick guide to the best of the rest you might have missed
Samuel Gibbs Technology Editor
Another week in Tech and this time
we’ve got an Adobe Flash update that
doesn’t suck. OK, sucks a little less.
Flash 10.1 beta was unleashed to the
willing public with GPU video acceler-
ation for certain Nvidia cards on Win-
dows, but more importantly reduced
CPU usage across all platforms. What
does this mean? YouTube that doesn’t
make your Mac or PC red-line that’s
what. A step in the right direction
Adobe, maybe Flash isn’t a lost cause
after all.
Talking of YouTube, Google intro-
technology.felix@imperial.ac.uk
looking at it. TVs that turn off when
you’re not around is actually nothing
new with several big manufacturers
also having prototypes that sense pres-
ence, but the Hitachi is the first to be
able to tell whether you are actually
looking at the TV or not. Skipping over
the ‘1984’-style privacy concerns, the
power consumption of the TV is great-
ly reduced when the backlight is off
saving a lot of energy. Hopefuly we’ll
see use detection technology allowing
you to save energy in other devices in
the near future.
The electric car is another techno-
logical innovation that is taking it’s
sweet time making it into the main-
stream. Modern models only manage
about 200 miles on a 4 hour ‘quick’
charge and that’s a real problem. The
Fraunhofer Institute in Germany
thinks it has the answer with the ‘re-
dox battery’. These special cells use two
electrolytic fluids exchanging protons
through a membrane generating elec-
tricity. The genius point here is that
at fuel stations this liquid could be
swapped out for fresh juice and the old
stuff recharged later inside the stations
themselves, replicating our current ‘fill
up and go system’.
Still with cars, biofuels have been
banded around for a while now, but
they have quite large downsides with
high water usage and carbon produc-
tion. Joule Biotechnologies is set to
change that, however, with engineered
microbes that can produce diesel or
ethanol directly from sunlight and
carbon dioxide alone. This means the
duced skippable pre-roll adverts this
week to YouTube in an effort to finally
make some meaningful money from
its enormous purchase. It’s not the first
time Google’s tried pre-roll adverts
however, with previous efforts seeing a
70% bail rate before the video actually
starts. Google’s hoping with skippa-
ble 15 second ads it will be able to see
which ads fit and are acceptable with
which content.
Swindon is set to become the UK’s
first free Wifi town rocking free WiFi
across the entire city. Dubbed the
‘Swindon Mesh’, the £1 million wire-
less network will allow all residents
completely free access to the internet.
microbes don’t need any prime agri-
cultural land and the product doesn’t
require any sort of processing to be
used as fuel. If it really is as perfect as
it seems then it could pave the way for
a greater adoption of biofuels all over
the world.
Washing the dishes is something us
students have to deal with daily, but
those environmentally concerned who
could afford one shun dishwashers
for their huge fresh water and elec-
tricity usage. Fear not eco-warriors,
French appliance manufacturer De
Dietrich have created a dishwasher
that uses ultrasound to get the grime
off your crockery. Ultrasonic clean-
ers aren’t anything new, being used a
lot in jewellery cleaning and sterilisa-
tion, but this is the first time they’ve
been used domestically. Not needing
to boil large amounts of water will cut
the large energy requirements needed
to run a conventional dishwasher and
also remove the need for toxic deter-
gents. With eco-friendly cleaning and
looking like something out of Star Trek
what could be better?
Although they often get blamed,
technological and scientific advances
are clearly the way forward. With all
these developments and more happen-
ing in the past few months alone, it’s
clear to see that there is huge potential
for environmentally friendly technol-
ogy to help us change our energy burn-
ing ways. Whatever happens, technol-
ogy is here to stay and using it for the
good of the planet is the only way we’ll
be able make it, and us, sustainable. Af-
ter all I, for one, quite like our planet.
Residents who want greater speed, ‘up
to 20Mbits’, will be able to pay Digital
City UK for higher bandwidth, but a
vast majority should be set with the
free service. Those passing through
will be able to hook up via a PAYG
scheme. Work starts December and
is expected to roll out in April 2010.
Great, but I don’t want to live in Swin-
don, do you?
FRIDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2009
T
his week is Green Week here
at felix if you hadn’t noticed,
although considering you’re
reading this on paper, you
could be forgiven we’re a little bit
hypocritical.
Consumer electronics in general
aren’t seen as particularly environ-
mentally friendly and for good reason.
Most of the materials used to make
them are hard to find and pretty toxic
meaning that manufacturing them cre-
ates a lot of carbon in the first place.
Then you’ve got the fact that they suck
up juice like no-bodies business, al-
though we are making a little progress
on that these days what with OLED
screens and less power-hungry chips
in computers.
Still, our always on connected life-
styles use up a lot of energy and Goog-
le’s not innocent either. Each search
you make on the big G generates about
7 grams of carbon. Two quick searches
and you’re up to the same amount of
carbon released when you boil a kettle,
11 -12 searches and you’re equalling
that packet of crisps you just gobbled.
As we go forward, yes technology
will become more efficient but I can’t
see our power requirements ever di-
minishing greatly. It’s to that end that
technology needs to do us a favour and
help us generate cleaner energy that
doesn’t impact the planet so much. For
most of that I’m afraid you’ll have to
head over to the Science section, but
Simon’s got a little bit of eco-tech over
on the left that you could see in your
hands in the near future.
In tech, this week has seen the shut-
tering of the Pirate Bay torrent tracker.
Now it’s not all bad news for those
amongst you who use BitTorrent as
they’ve set up a Magnet link reposi-
tory. For those uninitiated, BitTorrent
has evolved to support a decentralised
structure using the DHT and PEX pro-
tocols. Now what that means for you
and your, umm, linux downloading
friends is that you no longer need a
.torrent location file to find and down-
Talking of Wifi towns, the MPAA
shut one down. Yes that’s right, the
MPAA shut down a whole towns mu-
nicipal wifi after it detected a single
copyright infringement. That’s what
happens when you give companies the
power to crush the little guy without
due process or trial. So, if you’re ex-
pecting to connect for free in Coshoc-
ton, Ohio, sorry you’re out of luck for
the foreseeable future.
It’s Green Week this week, and what
could be greener than a reusable way
to get your movies in a physical format.
Yes that’s right, I’m talking about JJ
Abrams hitting the small screen cour-
tesy of some fancy flash drives. The
Not just green
paint
Samuel Gibbs Technology Editor
load files over the p2p network. In
fact if you’re running one of the more
up-to-date clients such as uTorrent or
Azureus, you’ve had the magnet-link
capability for a while and probably
didn’t even know about it. The Pirate
Bay is so certain that it’s search engine
and magnet-link repository is the way
forward for BitTorrent that it’s been
canvassing other torrent trackers in
an effort to get everyone to move over
to the decentralised system. Whether
this is a sinister plot by the Pirate Bay’s
new owners or an honest to goodness
evolution of piracy (and legal p2p) is
unclear at this stage. But what is clear
is that this is an end of an era for Bit-
Torrent and I don’t see it going away
anytime soon.
Facebook, everyone’s favourite stalk-
er hangout has made yet another move
to conquer your life this week. The PS3
saw an update that includes Facebook
integration joining the Xbox 360 which
has Facebook and Twitter integration.
OK, you might want to brag about your
Achievements or Trophies to your
mates on Stalkerbook or Twatter, but
seriously, who is going to sit in front of
their TV and use this on an 8-foot in-
terface? I mean the Xbox doesn’t even
have a web browser so how are you go-
ing to check out the links and pics that
your friends send out via TwitFace?
Talking of Facebook, if the fuzz ever
come knocking, your inane status up-
dates could count as an alibi. Yes, you
heard right, a 19-year old Harlem resi-
dent was cleared of charges resulting
from a mugging in Brooklyn by an alibi
provided by making a status update on
Facebook from his Dad’s house. Am I
the only one who could see this as be-
ing really easy to fake? You could just
automate a status update, VNC into
your computer or just get someone
else to update on your profile for you
from your computer. Still the courts
subpoenaed Facebook for the IP ad-
dress which then pointed to his Fa-
ther’s house where he claimed to be at
the time of the mugging.
movie comes pre-loaded onto a flash
drive shaped like the new Star Trek
logo with Transformers 2 is set to fol-
low soon. Yours for £17.99 a pop.