The New York Times published a story this week on the amount of energy many contemporary electric and electronic appliances use while apparently turned off:
It’s not that hard to engineer a more energy-aware computer: Dell introduced one in 2004 that drew 1.4 watts in “sleep” mode and just under one watt when “off.” But [...]
Nicholas Chavez, president of RFID Ltd., recently offered to indoctrinate RFID adversaries Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, authors of Spychips, a controversial expose on RFID technology. As a proactive response to book, Chavez invited the two authors to sit on an RFID advisory board based in Denver.
In a 24-page document Chavez has attempted to [...]
Arctic oil drilling will be this year’s big environmental litmus issue in congress, and New Hampshire congressmen are predicting that the bill will be made law. Drilling may take some long-term burden off US reliance on OPEC, but the refineries wouldn’t produce any accesible reserves for at least one decade. Congressmen also urge the manufacturing [...]
The Basel Action Network describes itself as “the world’s only organization focused on confronting the excesses of unbridled free trade in the form of ‘Toxic Trade’ (trade in toxic wastes, toxic products and toxic technologies) and its devastating impact on global environmental justice.” On October 24 it issued a report titled “The Digital Dump: Exporting [...]
Shenandoah National Park had less “ozone days” this year than in the entire decade. An ozone day is when O3 hits unhealthful levels. Drops in industrial and private emissions may have something to do with the cleaner air, as well as massive pollution control emplaced by local power plants. But the park still has a [...]
A new Stanford study predicts drastic climate changes in the next 100 years due to greenhouse gas accumulation and CO2 buildup. The study suggests that recent global warming analyses may actually have been too modest in their predictions: the research team placed less emphasis on man-made pollutants, and the simulation was still consistent with other [...]
Blue Gene, IBM’s most advanced supercomputer, recently reset the benchmark for CPU processing speed. The 65,536 processer computer more than doubled its own prior record of 136.8 terraflops (trillion calculations/sec), clocking in at a stunning 280.6 terraflops. Private corporations can “rent” time on the supercomputer (it is popular with pharmaceutical companies running drug simulations), [...]