TechRoar

It’s quite astounding how algae can aimlessly exist on earth for about 1.7 billion years before people realize how very important they are for green solutions today. Research exploits algae and how they can be used to reduce greenhouse emissions and produce biofuels. Algae are the world’s fastest growing plants and are one of its best photosynthesizers.

They literally ‘eat’ carbon dioxide and Isaac Berzin of Greenfuel Technology decided to treat the organisms to a buffet. MIT’s Cogeneration plant bubbles exhaust gasses through tubes of algae. Berzin says “in the ten seconds or so that the bubbles are spending in the bioreactor 80 percent of the CO2 is moved and 85 percent of the NOX.” Greenfuel, self-labelled victims of the economy are shutting down but the important thing is that their technology still exists.
Carbon sequestration is also used to clean up the atmosphere. The process involves pumping emissions underground into basalt beds or coal seams. Emissions will be cut down by about 90% but algae still rule the roost. This is because they actually get rid of the CO2 instead of storing it somewhere. Sequestration uses about 40% of a plant’s power and it runs the risk of leaks. In 1986 a natural CO2 leak in Cameroon 1700 people and 3500 livestock. Hiding our problems away in the rock bed will not do, we need to terminate them. The second advantage of algae is how highly harvestable they are and how many useful products we can obtain from them. What captures imagination now though, is their use as a substrate for biofuel.

Algae can produce up to 300 more times than your common biofuel crops such as rapeseed and palms. They don’t take up arable land and can be harvested weekly since algae grow up to 30 times faster than other biofuel crops. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory conducted research that showed that potentially 780 square miles of algae-filled desert land could produce 7.5 billion gallons of biofuel. Some algae produce a mixture of hydrocarbons pretty similar to crude petroleum while others just leak out a variety of oils. Solazyme maximised oil production by scrapping photobioreactors and growing algae in the dark on a cheap sugar diet.
The only reason that your car isn’t being powered by pond scum right now is that the system is not economically viable. Algal biofuel ends up priced at about $30 a gallon. Circulating material inside the bioreactors, drying out the mass of green muck and chemically converting it all into fuel simply requires too much energy.
With Greenfuel Technology, the pioneer of the field gone, many are asking who out there is left to continue the research. While many of the algae-biofuel companies out there are pale ghosts of Greenfuel, a few are making headway into cheapening the whole process of growing algae. Solix in particular, is one to watch as well as Solazyme, a company that focuses a lot on economic viability.
So what do we do right now? Since growing algae just for biofuel is only good for research and not implementable results, companies need to use the plants to eliminate carbon dioxide at its source and consider the by-products a bonus.
The future certainly has a lot in store. If you remember the TR10 liquid battery, it only takes some imagination to see what combining various technologies can do. The sun could power photobioreactors completely, feeding its algae and running its machinery.

E-book readers began creeping into the market just before the dawn of the new millennium and their popularity has increased ever since. The smell of a new book and rustle of its paper beneath ones fingers are the charms of traditional reading but sometimes, the nearby bookstores just don’t have what you’re looking for. Online stores take ages to deliver the real thing and sometimes e-books are the only solution for the impatient bibliophile. Worming through chapters of a book displayed on the glaring white screen of a computer robs reading of half its pleasure. This is why e-reader devices are so great. You can curl up and read off a non-glaring, papery texture quite comfortably and download content with great ease. Let’s go over some of the best devices this year has to offer.

(i) Amazon kindleDX
Successor of the successful, the DX tops kindle 2 with its larger (9.7”) screen, rotating display, massive storage capacity, native PDF support and of course, its price. 3G wireless technology delivers books from the Kindle store, newspapers and magazines subscribed to right into your hands. Personal files might have to go through Amazon’s hands to reach your DX through an email system or you can just drag-drop supported formats (.AZW .AZW1 .TXT .MOBI .PRC) when the device goes into USB mode. The official kindleDX website on Amazon has thousands of words on the product; if you want to look a closer look at all its features.

(ii) BeBook 2
The new BeBook’s revamped hardware (they included a touchscreen too!) has to be what raises eyebrows because the only other sensation it creates is curiosity since it isn’t out on the market yet. The original device was wonderfully flexible though. The internal memory might only be a third of what the kindleDX has to offer, but BeBook gives you the option of storing reading material on memory cards too. It supports a wider range of file formats than the kindle and also has no shopping restrictions. You can download e-books (even free ones) from anywhere. The new device can only improve on what already exists. I’m anxious to try it out.

There’s plenty of software out there that allows you to read ebooks on alternative devices such as iPods and Smartphones. Mobipocket and eReader are two of the more popular ones; but no matter how good the software is, your reading experience will only be as good as the handheld device. iPod screens are small and annoying and like smartphones, they’re prone to flash you with reflected glares. Your other options for reading e-books are stiff seating sessions in front of a computer screen or squinting your way through an entire novel on a phone, even with the adjustable text size.

The $300+ pricing of e-book readers put them in the category of luxury items but they’re well worth the cost. The read-aloud feature lets devices such as the kindle and BeBook put the kids to sleep while you attend to other matters while built in mp3 players provide background music for those who like that sort of thing. These gadgets can hold en entire library of paperbacks, yet only tax you with the comfortable weight of a single book. They are compelling buys for gadget enthusiasts that enjoy reading.

A great percentage of future gadgets will depend on OLEDS so it’s time we provided a little insight into this technology. Organic Light Emitting Diodes were truly born in 1990, when years of research produced a highly efficient polymer that emitted green light. Layers of organic semi conductors are sprayed onto a screen (or polymer).
An applied voltage causes electrons to move into the emissive layer, leaving the conductive layer full of ‘electron holes.’ The electrons and their holes recombine in the emissive layer and this causes light to be given out. The emitting layer contains different compounds which give out red, blue and green light.
Combined, these three compounds can give out around 16 millions different colours. That’s pretty impressive, to say the least.

Do you remember how much fun rubber pencils were when they were all the rage? OLED screens are just as flexible since the technology can be printed onto almost anything so we can even have ultra-thin or transparent displays too. (This makes the screen very lightweight; another advantage.)
The best part is that these futuristic screens are environmentally friendly. The OLED components are green. The screens are very bright but their power consumption is so low that this technology is the future of lighting too. Imagine pairing OLED devices with photovoltaic technology (solar power). The anticipation to see how Green technology really gets is spine-tingling.
So without further delay, let’s see what the century has dished up so far.

(i) Google Vision
The retractable, transparent screen is only the portal of all the information Google plans to bring you. Advanced image recognition will tag whatever you aim the device at. When on vacation, you’ll no longer be the ignorant tourist since Google Vision will identify any landmarks you happen to point at too. The global positioning system will let you use this device to navigate as well.


(ii) OLED lighting
There really isn’t much to say here. They’re environmentally friendly and we can look forward to a whole range of creative OLED lights since the technology can be printed onto a vast number of surfaces. There’s almost nothing out on the market now but Philips lets you order while OLED panels to use or play about with.

(iii) Samsung Notebook
Feast your eyes on the world’s first OLED laptop.
The 12-inch display is razor thin and the whole laptop only weighs a kilogram.
The prototype does have people wondering about the mouse pad, strange keypad feel and battery space but perhaps by the time this is commercialised Samsung’s end product will be something that is completely satisfactory.

The consumerism of nations today is the driving force behind the slaughter of the environment. Resources die away and industrial smog pours into our atmosphere so that by the end of the day, we get what we want – and what a lot of people want are computers. The average desktop PC uses ten times its weight in materials, fossil fuels and chemicals to manufacture. What if you could make a difference by buying something a little less destructive? The following innovations aren’t 100% perfect, but they’re leading the way to a greener future for sure.

(i) Asus U6 Bamboo Laptop
320 GB • 4GB • Intel Core 2 Duo • GeForce 9300M GS

Asus hasn’t just laid strips of wood over a plastic cover. Its new Ecobook is an honest attempt to become better friends with the environment. They’ve fashioned bamboo into an attractive casing. Any plastic used comes from recyclable raw materials and the components of this laptop have not been sprayed, painted or electroplated. Stiffened card (recycled paper) forms the Ecobook’s protective cover. Tree-huggers: eat your hearts out. Don’t worry about acres of destroyed forest because bamboo is as renewable as it gets: it grows a couple of feet each day.
The ExpressGate application allows this laptop to start up in seconds and save battery life. There is also a LED indicator which switches between green and red to alert as to what energy consumption mode you are in.
The bamboo Ecobook was announced in 2007 but today it still stands as a top contender in green computing. Asus is still exploiting reusable resources so maybe it will outdo itself in the future.


(ii) Dell Bamboo Eco-computer
Intel® Pentium™ Dual Core T4200 (2.0GHz/800Mhz FSB/1MB cache)

As the first computer company to join the Climate Group we anticipated Dell to coming up with something like this. Its Ecomputer is 81% smaller than your average CPU and it requires 70% less power. Its bamboo shell is filled mostly with recycled garbage and together they’re priced at around $500. Like Asus, Dell sees more bamboo in its future. Its studio hybrid might even evolve metaphorically to become the first computer you grow a plant inside.

There are manufactures that provide matching computer accessories but if buying bamboo is your effort to reduce your carbon footprint, do a little research first. A lot of companies just place strips of wood over a perfectly normal, environment-hating computer to make it look nicer. We need green substitutes to make a real difference, and not superficial coatings.

Imagine a pocket-sized piece of technology that could tell you the number of calories burned, steps taken, miles walked, quality of sleep and intensity of exercise you’ve had all day. That’s pretty much what the Fitbit Tracker is; a tiny, wireless device you can use to record your fitness. A stack of algorithms knitted tightly around accelerometer motion sensors and squashed into an attractive, miniature package make the nifty gadget that gathers data about your daily activity and uploads them onto a personal site. Alternatively, you can view the data straight from the Fitbit Tracker itself. The blue OLED display is easy to read and it also includes a picture which shows your overall activity level. So even glancing at the device will let you know when to quicken your step.

Tests have shown the Tracker to be over 95% accurate when recording data about your daily activities. It is not going to be as precise when you’re doing things like cycling and it certainly wasn’t designed use in a swimming pool. Fitbit isn’t waterproof either, although it is water-resistant and hence safe to wear on your wrist. The attached accessories are a wristband and belt holster. The duty of the Fitbit charger is quite obvious; the juice pumped into the tiny tracker is enough to make it last 10 days. Besides charging, the base station also serves as a wireless port into which the tracker dumps fitness information. You don’t need to be within range for it to work. The Fitbit records and stores detailed daily data for a week and summarised daily data for a month.

The Fitbit website is where your data finally ends up and you can make that as private or public as you wish. The synchronising software runs on Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X. The website is free to use and a great place to meet people with similar health goals. It allows you to create online groups with this people and includes a tool to ‘track’ what the fitbit device doesn’t; your weight and daily nutrition (i.e. calorie intake).

The Fitbit Tracker will be available in the summer 2009 and sell for $100 in the USA only. They will certainly be available worldwide sometime in 2010.