EcoGeek raves about Nanosolar, a new startup developing the so-called "Third Wave" of solar technology. Founded by two Stanford Ph.D. candidates, Nanosolar offered to bring the cost of solar energy down cheaper than coal. And now, after raising $150 million in capital and building a factory in Germany, they're talking $2/Watt -- squeeking just below coal's $2.1/Watt.

This is big news. And important news. The real alternatives to fossil fuels rely on renewable energy sources. And the real answer to re-greening the planet comes from developing countries switching from coal-fired plants to something sustainable. If the cost of solar power drops below that of coal, we'll see countries like China and India moving away from fossil fuels, and this is where the huge environmental gains are going to be made.

You can read more about Nanosolar in this New York Times article, this National Post article, and on the company's website.

August Zachrisson used GPS and a suitcase to make the largest drawing in the world. For someone so tech-savvy, I'm surprised that his site is all graphics. But whatever.

These are the kinds of artistic projects I like to see: ideas that really push the envelope of what technology can do, or that bend the expected uses of that technology. Who would think to use a parcel delivery service to affect a drawing on a world map?

Maximum PC employs a few audio "experts" to see if compressed MP3 files make a big difference to sound quality.

With the possible exception of the USB Key that survived a washing and drying cycle, no other Maximum PC Challenge has ever surprised us as much as this one. It’s downright humiliating, in fact, that in many cases, we were unable to tell the difference between an uncompressed track and one encoded at 160Kb/s, the bit rate most of us considered the absolute minimum acceptable for even portable players.

They also come out pretty solidly in favour of variable bitrate encoding, which I'm sure is no big surprise to anyone.

Sony's Aibo is Returning

That's the rumour, at least. Aibo was always a neat looking toy -- maybe a little too cute, but hellishly robust in features: camera, visual recognition, wifi, voice recognition, and a solid AI. Now, according to the totally reputable Stuff magazine, Sony is going to give Aibo another chance and have it interface with your PS3 and PSP.

The old Aibo was totally drool-worthy for anyone with an interest in robotics -- the new Aibo, with redesigned, cooler body and proposed interface options, is even moreso. I mean, it's no voice-command R2-D2, but that's only because I have a real dog.

Link to story on Engadget
Link on Wikipedia to more Aibo sites

Vector Magic

Vector Magic is an awesome utility developed at Stanford that turns ordinary bitmapped photos or line art into vector graphics. It's fast, it's free, and it apparently outperforms Adobe Live Trace and Corel PowerTRACE -- which also makes it wicked.

You can see pretty much what it's capable of in the picture above. There are some more great samples to view on the Vector Magic site. The bitmap I played with didn't come out perfectly, but it was pretty darn close, and any modifications it needed could be done easily in Illustrator. This is a really handy site for anyone doing a lot of desktop publishing. I'm looking forward to playing with it as the software develops.

Link to Vector Magic

The Hug Shirt

One of the coolest uses of modern technology I've heard about, and one that I hope will pave the way for cooler and even better stuff.

The hug shirt is designed to transmit a hug from one wearer to another. There are sensors under the red parts of the shirt that record things like body temperature, pressure, duration, and heartrate. The data is then transmitted by Bluetooth to your cell phone, which is then sent to your friend's phone, and by Bluetooth to his shirt.

Wild enough for you? This is definitely one of the better arguments in favour of me owning a cell phone.

Link

Prof's "Super Laptop" Scares Kid

I was talking with Rob today about how cool it would be to install a GPS transmitter in one of our servers. If it were ever stolen, you could hilariously walk up to the guy's front door and be all, "Excuse me, but, like, you've got our server...?"

It reminded me of this post on boingboing, where a prof goes into painful detail on not only the super high-tech security he has on his now stolen laptop, but the consequences that will befall said laptop thief should he ever be caught. It's funny just to imagine this kid filling his pants as each sentence ups the stakes of the crime.

Link (via boingboing)

Cockroach-Controlled Robot

Garnet Hertz is a Fulbright Scholar, Research Fellow at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and is a doctoral student at the University of California Irvine. He's also originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and is just full of "way out there" ideas -- like Doctor Moreau with a technology fetish. His latest one is having a cockroach control a robot. There's a really funky video of the project posted at YouTube, but for you more literature-oriented people, he was interviewed by Gizmodo and talks at length about the reasoning behind this project and some of his other work.

Although it doesn't mention this anywhere, Garnet did actually receive some funding for this project from the Saskatchewan Arts Board. Which is good, because funding bodies should be putting money toward development of these cutting-edge ideas. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

Link to YouTube video
Link to interview (via Gizmodo)

World's Coolest Fireplace

Heat & Glo have developed what is quite possibly the coolest fireplace ever made. You plug it into a standard 220 volt outlet and give it a constant supply of water, either from a direct line or its own built-in reservoir, and this beautiful machine will give you fire.

The electricity splits the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen in the water, then ignites the hydrogen to produce the flame. Excess oxygen is released into the room, and the only by-product is water vapour -- no carbon monoxide detectors necessary.

Gizmodo blogged about this thing about a year ago, and the Heat & Glo website doesn't list any further pricing or availability information. It does say that each Aqueon is custom-made, and
prices the one in the picture at $49,900. I have to wonder if there are more expensive models out there. In any event, it's definitely drool-worthy, if priced far outside my limited means.

Link (via Gizmodo)