The Solar Cell Tree Charger takes a lot less upkeep than your average household shrub, too. Just, ah, don't water it. As smart as it is, it looks like Muller's tree is just a prototype.

Vivien Muller, via http://www.jetsongreen.com/2008/08/solar-cell-tree.html, via Gizmodo, via Behance Network

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison are wondering whether sleep is an essential part of life or something that has evolved over time to avoid stress and kill time.

Press Release after the jump

The Asus Bamboo Series notebook – as with the new generation of Asus notebooks released to market from the second half of 2008 – is remarkably energy-efficient, thanks to the implementation of Asus' exclusive Super Hybrid Engine technology, which is the product of a comprehensive redesigning of the hardware, software and BIOS on the part of Asus' engineers. With the accrued power savings, Super Hybrid Engine reduces yearly CO2 emission by 12.3kg per notebook. Given that ASUS ships approximately 6 million notebooks per year, this works out to a massive 73.8 million kilograms of CO2 emission reduced per year, which equates to saving 36 million trees annually.

Taipei, Taiwan, August 28, 2008 – ASUS, recognized as a highly environmental friendly company in the Computers and Peripherals Industry by oekom in 2007*, today launched the ASUS Bamboo Series notebook, a groundbreaking bamboo-clad product that is truly green throughout every phase of its life – from its conception, production and use to its eventual recycling and disposal. In developing the ASUS Bamboo Series notebook, ASUS staff at all levels leveraged the full spectrum of environmental expertise that the company has accumulated since 2002 when it initiated its Green ASUS drive – before the RoHS and WEEE directives were enforced – and utilized the comprehensive green product design and management tools specifically created to encourage the disciplined adherence to green principles at a systemic level.

For solution providers, the key to going green entails looking beyond mere legal compliance and proactively inculcating green values among staff. ASUS is the beacon of success for this approach. In relation to the ASUS Bamboo Series notebook for instance, staff spanning the research and development, strategy development, manufacturing, procurement, quality control, sales and marketing and even administrative departments rallied behind a common raft of green principles set by a steering committee headed by the Chairman of ASUSTek Computer Inc., Jonney Shih. This was only made possible by the company-wide green design, manufacturing and procurement systems that ASUS has in place, as well as its considerable investment into green-oriented e-learning platforms and staff education programs.

Although the project seemed threatened in early 2006 from all sides these were minor compared to the problems to come. The biggest concern at the time was lack of an LCD panel manufacturer, but Negroponte and CTO Mary Lou Jepsen managed to charm another eccentric Taiwanese billionaire. Wen-Long Hsu—founder of southern Taiwan’s Chi-Mei conglomerate—is the owner of the world's largest collection of Stradivarius violins, and he played one for them when they visited to sign contracts.

By the fall, everything was working great in prototype form. Quanta agreed to run its first batch, and even agreed to run a suspend-resume hibernation test cycle 1000 times on each test machine. Normally, test units were give this cycle four times, so it was a particularly unusual request. Then, at 3am on the first day of mass production, Jepsen got a call. Everything was shut down; the laptops were going to sleep and not waking up.

"All hell was breaking loose." She hauled ass to the manufacturing lab with a few other guys and started pumping the caffeine.

Eventually a Quanta guy named Gary Chang and an OLPC guy named Richard Smith ("He's from Arkansas, looks like surfer dude") solved the problem. "We were calling it the second shot from the grassy knoll," says Jepsen. Apparently, as the system was shutting down, electromagnetic noise was corrupting data, screwing up the instructions that told the thing how to wake up again.

At around the same time, the maker of the wireless chips, Marvell, decided to update the firmware for the radio, and they started to crash. "We had four people in four time zones working on that problem," said networking engineer Michail Bletsas. "Mark Foster in Taipei, me in Boston, someone in India, and someone in Santa Clara. We had to program a workaround on the fly: It's in the radio, something you're not supposed to touch under normal consequences."

"A lot of those stories weren't told," says Jepsen. "We weren't hiding it, everybody knew, but we weren't broadcasting it. We figured it all out, and shipped a million of them."

Threat Level Rising
By late 2006, Intel had finalized its specs for the Classmate PC. Though it would cost $30 to $40 more than the XO—the "$100 laptop" in the end cost $188—the Classmate had a faster processor, Intel brand equity and the option of Windows XP as the OS. (Bulk buyers could also opt for Linux.) It was seductive in that it wasn't the revolutionary product that the XO was, but something more familiar, and in line with what ministers of education might have been considering already. What's more, it was a reference design that regional companies could license and customize to fit their needs. And, perhaps, countries rife with pirated software infrastructure had plenty of free programs to run from the black market.

As it began pilot program, Intel's strategy was seen as more traditional too: Laptops could go to teachers, or loaned to students. It did not enforce Negroponte's logical but strict mandate, that the laptops be given to the children, and that they should only be deployed when there are enough to go around.

In the middle of 2007, Intel and OLPC entered into a partnership that was probably more of a hindrance to each other's initiatives than any sort of help. From the start, the deal was vague, more of a mutual appreciation society than a true strategic alliance. Six months later, it had dissolved in acrimony. OLPC accused Intel of pitching Classmate to would-be XO customers; Intel griped that OLPC wouldn't stop asking that the Classmate be discontinued in favor of the XO.

Meanwhile, Intel's more profit-minded operatives were hanging out in Taiwan, spinning the baby laptop idea to one of Quanta's arch competitors, a little known company called Asus.
On June 8, 2007, while both the XO and the Classmate were still deep in pilot testing, Asus introduced the Eee PC, a $400 mini-notebook running a warm-n-fuzzy flavor of Linux. Not only did it resemble the Classmate more than a little, it was unveiled at a press conference hosted by none other than Intel. It would be ready for sale worldwide by that winter, and when it did become available, boy did it sell like hotcakes.

Sales Figures, Sales Facts
"Selling like hotcakes" is an expression that doesn't mean anything in particular. In many cases, "selling a million" doesn't really mean anything specific either. I've heard OLPC people say they've hit the million mark, but in terms of actual shipments, it's not true.

Due to issues that have nothing to do with hardware—and largely to do with Negroponte's greater mission of educating the world's poor—the XO spent most of 2007 in beta testing. In early November, OLPC launched the "Give 1 Get 1" $400 charitable promotion for US buyers, but the first real bonafide XO deployment happened in Uruguay in on December 1. Confirmed orders might have topped a million at this point, but the number of existing XOs, both sold in the US and deployed en masse to schoolchildren in Peru and Uruguay, hovers around 500,000.

Ask Intel how many Classmate PCs are out in the wild, and you get a vague stat, somewhere in the "hundreds of thousands." Intel, too, promises large numbers to come. Portugal will be buying 500,000 of them for the coming school year, for instance.

The Eee PC, though, is already nearing 2 million sold, having hit 1.7 million in the first half of 2008. It is on target to reach a promised goal of 5 million by the end of the year. (By contrast, OLPC will most assuredly not reach 1 million by the end of 2008.)

The success of the mini notebooks has largely been due to price (even expensive ones rarely touch $600) and their intentionally internet-friendly design (you're not going to load up Photoshop CS3, but browsing and email checking work fine). They are also boosted by the negativity surrounding Windows Vista: By running Linux or Windows XP, they present a desirable alternative to the bulkier, more expensive, resource-heavy machines required to run Microsoft's latest OS.

In the wake of the Eee's success, over 40 mini notebooks have hit the market over night. The top four best-selling notebooks on Amazon fall into this catetgory.

At this point, even if the millions of third-world students eventually get laptops, it's unlikely that the XO will be the one they receive. Still, the past two years are definitive proof that Negroponte can take credit for the birth of an entirely new kind of PC.

And Negroponte does claim credit for the Eee PC's success. In fact, he says it's why he introduced the next version of the XO laptop—a radical two-touchscreen device aimed at a $75 pricetag—so early.

Encore?
I asked him why, with the first XO so clearly in its early stages of shipment, would he show off the XO-2. Sure, he doesn't have customers at Best Buy who may hold off because they know what's coming, but it seemed to take away from the momentum of the original device, not to mention confirming some of its criticisms (underpowered, cramped keyboard, etc.).

"When we announce something now that will be in play two years from now, it's partly to give the manufacturers something to start copying now," he says, elaborating, "If you go back two years and you look at the press, [the XO] was dismissed, it was not possible. Then came the Classmate, then Asus. If I underestimated anything, it was how fast people would [copy] it, even if they didn't get down to the same price or didn't have the same features. It was a movement—a hardware trend—that happened because of OLPC."

He also hopes that the announcement of the XO-2 concept, one that only exists in pictures, will stimulate small developers who work on components. Jepsen's new company Pixel Qi will focus on the next-generation of LCD touchscreen, one that can be made as cheaply as current screens today, but have capacitive touch built right into the active matrix, making it thinner than an iPhone screen. Others who saw the XO-2 renderings have already begun pitching solutions to the group.

Not a Manager
If there's one criticism made against Negroponte that's indisputable, is that he changes his tune.

In the beginning, Negroponte repeatedly affirmed that the XO was to run "Linux or some other open source operating system." After a long struggle that could easily be the subject of another series, the XO has recently been made capable of booting both its own Linux OS with Sugar interface, as well as Windows XP. (Critics say that Negroponte never allowed OLPC's Linux OS to mature so that it could stand up to pressure from the Windows advocates.)

Likewise, he was adamant at the beginning that his laptop be the only one shipped to these third-world educational programs where there isn't so much a "market" as there is a case for charity. He says now that if there is a true market—schools and families with the means and desire to buy their own laptops—others can serve it.

Inside OLPC, the leader's mercurial nature and changing priorities proved too much for the talent he had assembled. On the software side, Walter Bender and Ivan Krstic left after open disagreements with Negroponte—mostly pertaining to the adoption of Windows, but also to the overall goals of the program. Jepsen left in January 2008 in what she says was an amicable split, though other hardware experts including laptop maestro Mark Foster had abandoned ship earlier, possibly because they couldn't get along with Jepsen. Most people seem rankled by the credit that Yves Behar took as the "OLPC designer," most notably in a Wired article that would seem laughable to anyone who read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.

When talking to staff members, there is a sense that no one really got along, and that the religion that Negroponte had instilled in his lieutenants, enough to get them to hang together for two years, has dissipated. The rocky Intel alliance and the move toward Windows were just the final disillusionments. Negroponte spoke the painfully obvious to BusinessWeek last March: "I am not a CEO. Management, administration and details are my weaknesses."

Pulling an Obi-Wan
Still, Negroponte and whoever has stuck by him charge onward. He said, to us and to others, "OLPC is not a laptop company." He himself said that to be taken seriously, you have to build hundreds of thousands of laptops every month; Quanta currently outputs a reliable stream of around 50,000 per month. Now that the mini-notebook movement is in full swing commercially, perhaps the focus should veer from hardware development. Why then stay in the hardware game? Perhaps it's telling that, on the OLPC website's own "Progress" page, nothing is mentioned after December 2007.

Bletsas—who remains hard at work on OLPC today—says that if OLPC does not stay in business, the laptop makers who followed the XO design cues will start doing what they do best: bumping the specs, upping the prices and keeping product too expensive for the foundation to use it in its educational mission. "Unless we keep designing, showing the world it's doable, I don't think they will follow in that path," he says. "If we stop at this stage, they are not going to come down enough for us to use their machines. We have to push them at least one step further."

Want more on OLPC's secret origins? Jump back to the earlier sections:
Part 1 - Genius, Hubris and the Birth of the Netbook
Part 2 - US and Taiwan's Hardware Lovechild

Why not?

Considering that it was 3-year-old Alyssa Hayes's 30-inch-long Barbie fishing rod (above, in her hand) that hooked and landed a North Carolina state record channel catfish (also above, along with her grandfather David) weighing 21 pounds using 6-pound test line.

Here's the Winston-Salem Journal's August 20, 2008 story with the details.

Wilkes County man uses child's fishing rod to land record-setting fish

A Wilkes County man used his granddaughter's Barbie Doll rod-and-reel combo — all 2-½ feet of it — to reel in a new state record channel catfish that measured 2 inches longer than the fishing pole.

David Hayes landed the record-breaking fish, which weighed 21 pounds, 1 ounce, on Aug. 5 from a private pond in Wilkes County while fishing with his granddaughter Alyssa, 3.

According to Hayes, the unusual fishing experience began in the early evening with a trip to the garden for bait. After collecting several black crickets, Alyssa and he went down to the pond behind the house to fish for bluegill, an activity the pair have enjoyed together since Alyssa was barely big enough to hold a fishing rod.

Like previous fishing trips, Hayes baits the hook and Alyssa catches the fish, using her hot pink Barbie doll rod-and-reel combo. It is a routine that usually works well — until that afternoon when nature called at the most inopportune time.

"After catching two or three bluegill, Alyssa turns to me and says 'Papa, I've got to go to the bathroom. Hold my fishing rod'," Hayes recalled. "A few minutes later, the float went under and I saw the water start boiling up — I knew right then that I had my hands full with that fishing rod."

It took Hayes about 25 minutes to land the fish, which measured 32 inches in length and 22 ½ inches in girth. Once he got it to the bank, Hayes said he was pretty certain his channel cat would exceed the current state record, an 18-pound, 5-ounce fish reeled in by Wesley Trucks of New Bern in August 2007.

The fish was weighed on certified scales at Thurmond Grocery. It was certified by Kin Hodges, a fisheries biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.

The international scientific community is very enthusiastic about the possibility of cloning a baby mammoth recently discovered in Yamai, Siberia. Read all about the Mammoth Creation Project and what it means to the world at large.

The Cosmo Hydromassage TV Bathtub is a spectacular two-in-one, combining a 17-inch LCD flat screen TV with a whirlpool tub. It fits two people, so woohoo to that! Despite the cost — about $4,580 — this is something you'd need to splurge on, due to the sensitive electronic nature. Please don't go DIYin' this.

Many people claim that LPs still offer the best audio experience when it comes to music thanks to the warm nature of records compared with the cold, hard digital formats. For folks who want to preserve their music collection in MP3 format, they can always fall back on the Crosley Keepsake USB LP-Ripping Turntable. This device requires a PC as a middleman, connected to it via USB and uses a bundled software to transfer all LP recordings into MP3 format, letting you enjoy your old tunes on an iPod. The turntable itself is made out of solid wood for that classic look, and it comes with a metal and resin handle along with chrome snap closures for an overall elegant look. You can pick up the Crosley Keepsake USB LP-Ripping Turntable for $149.95.

Add a comment | From: Crosley Keepsake USB LP-Ripping Turntable | Visit Ubergizmo

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Many people claim that LPs still offer the best audio experience when it comes to music thanks to the warm nature of records compared with the cold, hard digital formats. For folks who want to preserve their music collection in MP3 format, they can always fall back on the Crosley Keepsake USB LP-Ripping Turntable. This device requires a PC as a middleman, connected to it via USB and uses a bundled software to transfer all LP recordings into MP3 format, letting you enjoy your old tunes on an iPod. The turntable itself is made out of solid wood for that classic look, and it comes with a metal and resin handle along with chrome snap closures for an overall elegant look. You can pick up the Crosley Keepsake USB LP-Ripping Turntable for $149.95.

Add a comment | From: Crosley Keepsake USB LP-Ripping Turntable | Visit Ubergizmo

There isn't much too say about this next green innovator, Designer Gerard Brion, except that he is passionate about his artwork. He is very passionate. In fact, with regular household items, some glue and paint Gerard Brion has spent 15 years of his life creating a detailed replica of Paris.