Toshiba has reported that it plans to launch a new range of SCiB batteries in March 2008 that charge up to 90% capacity in just five minutes and have a lifetime of 5000 charges without much reduction in charge (an effective lifetime of 10 years). The two versions, 2.4V and 24V, shouldn’t explode either, which is always a bonus. Although this battery is designed primarily for the hybrid car and electric bicycle market, as Engadget and DailyTech comment this would be incredible in the laptop market…
Tag Archives: computers
The internet is a major feature of reducing carbon emissions
A lot of the plans for sustainability try to provide the energy for what we already do using new sources of power. Whether you subscribe to the peak oil camp or you fear global warming or even if you want to prudent ahead of a possible recession caused by sub-prime mortgages, each problem has the same solution: use less. Buying less consumables, reducing food miles, rebuilding soils and producing electricity from renewables can only do so much.
Transport is a huge part of the energy (and money) we spend. A future coming to terms with the ‘Peak Century’ will need to travel much less distance for work, play and neccessity. The 50 mile commute seems illogical now at close to $100 dollar a barrel of oil. If oil gets harder to extract and prices rise, that commute won’t just be an annoying expense, it’ll mean bankruptcy. Fortunately new technology has arrived, seemingly perfect timed to coincide with reducing our carbon footprint and energy consumption.
A geologist recently said “My hopeful view is that we’ll be living like we did at the turn of the 20th century, but with computers.” I like the analogy. The internet and low-energy computers offer us a real potential of making a low carbon economy yet still providing jobs and a worldwide community. As Worldchanging puts it, the ‘High bandwidth, Low Carbon future’ could be both sustainable and more personally fulfilling. Google is investing $100Million in Green computing and the Asus EEE laptop uses 11 watts. All this talk of choose your own price music, online markets for fiction and e-readers is important because it’s a first step to creating an entertainment economy that could work in the low-energy world that’s coming, sooner or later.
Thermoelectrics – conduct electricity well but heat badly
Usually, heat and electric conductivity go hand in hand. Now, thanks to the emerging nanostructure technology movement, scientists think they can separate these two.
Previously thermoelectric devices were far too inefficient to be of use. But by adding nanoscale structures a few billionths of a metre across, the heat conductivity of a material can be disrupted whilst the electricity passes through fine, ramping the efficiency up massively. Imagine a computer chip that doesn’t get heated as it works, or a solar cell that uses heat as well as light to generate electricity. Thermo electrics are already starting to get efficient enough to cool your car seat – how soon before they start to be used in the growing low energy pc market?
Top 87 Bad Predictions About the Future
Just what it says: here are 87 predictions about the future (and the original list at Wikipedia this list appears to be based on) that turned out, as the future became the present (and then, inexorably, the past) to be Just Plain Wrong. (Via John C. Wright.)
The section on computers gives you a taste:
- «Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.» – Popular Mechanics, March 1949.
- «There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.» – Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), maker of big business mainframe computers, arguing against the PC in 1977.
- «I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.» – The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
- «But what… is it good for?» – IBM executive Robert Lloyd, speaking in 1968 microprocessor, the heart of today’s computers.
UPDATE: Added link to Wikipedia list of failed predictions, which the 2spare.com list appears to be based on.
(U.S. Army Photo via Wikimedia Commons.)
[tags]predictions, futurism, computers[/tags]
Pulp-based computing
In computers, we have software and hardware. Jokingly, the human brain is sometimes called wetware. Up next: pulpware!
OK, technically it’s hardware–wires, sensors and computer chips–embedded in paper or cardboard. A spiral of conductive ink can be a speaker, or a touch sensor. Two layers, and a page can tell when it is being bent. Among the possible creations are books that talk or light up when their pages are turned (personally, I can’t think of anything more annoying!), or boxes that can tell you how much their content weighs. (Maybe with voice messages. "Don’t even try it, buddy! I’m a hernia-in-waiting!")
The project was outlined at the recent International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing in Innsbruck, Austria. Here’s a video of the production process and some applications. Here’s the original paper. And here’s the research project’s website.
(Via New Scientist Tech.)
(Photo from MIT.)
[tags]computers, MIT, technology, paper[/tags]