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News articles on Technology

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Mongabay.com news articles on technology in blog format. Updated regularly.

Carbon capture and storage could help combat global warming
(6/12/2007) While solar power and hybrid cars have become popular symbols of green technology, Stanford researchers are exploring another path for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas that causes global warming.


World's largest movement has no leader but 100M employees
(6/11/2007) The world's largest movement has no name, no leader, and no ideology, but may directly involve more than 100 million people, said a green business pioneer.


Google helps protect Amazon rainforest
(6/10/2007) Google is working with a indigenous tribe deep in the Amazon rainforest to protect their lands from illegal encroachment, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. For the first time, Google has confirmed details of the project. Working in conjuction with the Amazon conservation Team, Google Earth's technology is being used to monitor illegal mining and logging that threaten the lands of the Surui tribe in Brazil. Google is working with satellite providers to significantly improve image resolution in some of the most remote parts of the Amazon basin.


Geoengineering could stop global warming but carries big risks
(6/4/2007) Using radical techniques to ,engineer, Earth's climate by blocking sunlight could cool Earth but presents great risks that could well worsen global warming should they fail or be discontinued, reports a new study published in the June 4 early online edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


Intel pushes its environmental initiatives
(5/23/2007) Intel Corp. said is removing lead from its next generation of computer chips. Instead the company will use an alloy made up of tin, silver, and copper.


IBM launches "green" chip
(5/22/2007) IBM is touting the "green" credentials of its newest and most powerful microprocessor, the "Power6."


Sugar could power hydrogen fuel cars says VTU researcher
(5/22/2007) Sugary carbohydrates could be used to produce low-cost hydrogen to power fuel cells report researchers writing in the May 23 issue of PLoS ONE, the online, open-access journal from the Public Library of Science ( www.plosone.org)


conservationists team with justice dept to fingerprint carnivores
(5/22/2007) A new study in the May issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management reports that scientists from the New York State Museum, Wildlife conservation Society and other groups have teamed up with the New York State Department of Criminal Justice to developed a new technique that uses fingerprints to track the fisher -- an elusive member of the weasel family, and the only carnivore species known to have unique fingerprints.


Remote sensing tools used to predict bird species richness
(5/14/2007) Scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland have taken a novel approach to studying biological diversity by making use of laser remote sensing (lidar). WHRC scientists examined the relationships between bird species richness and habitat metrics derived from lidar data acquired by aircraft. They then explored the efficacy of predicting bird richness and abundance based on these metrics.


iPod can distrupt cardiac pacemakers
(5/11/2007) An iPod can tigger monitoring malfunctions in cardiac pacemakers due to electromagnetic interference, reports a study presented by a 17-year-old school student to a group of heart specialists at a meeting of the Heart Rhythm Society in Denver, Colorado.


Technology presented at Google can track billboard viewers
(5/8/2007) A new technology provides an affordable way for advertisers to track the effectiveness of their advertising by measuring how many people are looking at their billboards and screens.


Cost of stabilizing climate 0.1% per year
(5/4/2007) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its long awaiting installment on climate change mitigation, arguing that the costs of offsetting global warming will be much lower than some claim. The IPCC estimates that emissions can be reduced rapidly using existing technology at a cost of 3 percent of GDP, or 0.12 percent per year over the next 25 years, though new technologies could further reduce this cost. While the projections are encouraging, they may be conservative. Some analysts, including the well-respected Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, have calculated that emissions targets that would stabilize the climate could be achieved at no net cost and possibly even a profit. Even McKinsey & Company, a leading management consulting firm, agrees, putting the net cost of reducing emissions by 46 percent at zero.


Apple defends green credentials, promises to do better
(5/4/2007) In a open letter posted Wednesday, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs countered claims by green groups that the iPod and computer maker lagged in recycling and removing toxic chemicals from its products. He said the company is already an industry leader when it comes to the environment and that Apple will continue to reduce its impact on the planet.


Military technology uses satellite signals to catch poachers
(5/2/2007) Wild animals sought by poachers for their skins, meat and bones have a new means of protection developed by a visiting scholar at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF). Steve Gulick, an electrical engineer who calls himself a biologist wannabe, has designed a metal detector specifically to pick up the presence of poachers' weapons and send an electronic signal, via satellite, to law enforcement authorities.


Poor governments will need to pay $175 for $100 laptop
(4/27/2007) The governments of Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya will be asked to pay about $175 for each OLPC laptop, a computer targeted for children in developing countries. The device was originally estimated to cost $100.


Cell phones, text-messaging revolutionalize conservation approaches
(4/15/2007) Cell phones have been adopted at a pace unmatched by any technology in the history of mankind. While conventional use of these devices continues to be the expand, mobile phones are also increasingly being viewed as tools for conservation and development. Ken Banks, currently a Visiting Fellow on the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, understands this well. Banks established kiwanja.net as hub for the latest information on how technology, in particular mobile phones, can be applied to tackle issues of economic empowerment, conservation, education, human rights and poverty alleviation.


Measures to drive adoption of super efficient cars in the U.S.
(4/11/2007) To reduce its growing dependence on foreign oil the United States could implement relatively low-cost measures to put millions of super efficient vehicles on American highways, said energy efficiency expert Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in a speech at Stanford University. The measures could significantly cut oil usage, help fight climate change, and make U.S. roads safer.


Brazil to give Amazonian tribes Internet access to fight deforestation
(3/30/2007) Brazil will offer free satellite Internet connections to indigenous tribes in the Amazon according to a report from Reuters. It says that the plan will help reduce illegal logging by enabling natives to monitor and report on illicit activities.


Biofuel Cell Produces Electricity from Hydrogen in Plain Air
(3/27/2007) A pioneering biofuel cell that produces electricity from ordinary air spiked with small amounts of hydrogen offers significant potential as an inexpensive and renewable alternative to the costly platinum-based fuel cells that have dominated discussion about the hydrogen economy of the future, British scientists reported here today.


Cell phone batteries could be powered by OJ
(3/26/2007) Researchers at Saint Louis University in Missouri have developed a fuel cell battery that can run on virtually any sugar source -- from orange juice to tree sap -- and may last three to four times longer than conventional lithium ion batteries.


Balloon technology could cut cost of solar energy 90% by 2010
(2/21/2007) With high energy prices and mounting concerns over human-induced climate change, there is intense interest in renewable energy, especially solar, which produces no pollution and is readily available in the form of sunlight. In recent years, however, the solar energy market has been hampered by supply shortages of refined silicon, the critical resource needed for solar cell fabrication. Further, because solar installations traditionally require a large surface area to capture as much sunlight as possible, solar arrays often take up real estate, occupying land used agricultural production and other purposes. Without government subsidies, solar is not presently viable in many areas.


Robots aid in search for Ivory-billed woodpecker
(2/17/2007) Scientists have installed robotic cameras to help in the search of the world's most elusive bird, the Ivory-billed woodpecker.


$100 laptop for poor children will cost $130
(2/15/2007) The $100 laptop designed for poor children in developing countries looks like it will cost $130, at least initially, according to the computer's manufacturer, Quanta Computer Inc. In a statement Thursday, Quanta said it ship between 5 million to 10 million units this year as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, an effort launched by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Laboratory.


Data centers use at least $7.2 billion in electricity globally
(2/15/2007) U.S. data centers consume 45 billion kilowatts of energy per year, according to a new study, commissioned by computer chip maker AMD. Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and a consulting professor at Stanford University, calculated that in 2005 total data center electricity consumption in the U.S., including servers, cooling and auxiliary equipment, was approximately 45 billion kWh, resulting in total utility bills amounting to $2.7 billion. Globally, data centers used $7.2 billion in electricity.


Military technology used to catch poachers in Congo
(12/6/2006) conservationists are using military technology to catch poachers in the act, according to an article published in the December 9, 2006 issue of New Scientist. The article says wildlife managers are using small seismic detectors developed by New York City-based Wildland Security, a firm that builds sensors for detecting wildlife crime.


Microsoft wants in on $100 laptop for poor children
(12/6/2006) Looks like Microsoft may want to be involved in the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) after all. Reports indicate that Microsoft wants to make its Windows CE operating system, one usually installed on handheld devices, available on the OLPC notebook computer, a $100 laptop designed for use by children in developing countries.


Green computing - Dell releases energy-saving server
(12/4/2006) Dell released a premium line of energy-efficient servers that consume considerably less power than regular models, joining a list of firms that offer consumers 'greener' products.


$100 laptop arrives in Brazil
(11/27/2006) The $100 laptop has arrived in Brazil. According to the Associated Press, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Friday received a prototype version of the laptop, which has been billed as a durable low-cost PC for children in developing countries. 50 of the laptops are expected to be tested in Brazilian schools beginning today.


87% of Americans have used Internet for science research
(11/20/2006) 40 million Americans use the internet as their primary source of news and information about science according to a new study by the Pew Internet Project and the Exploratorium, a museum based in San Francisco. The study also reports that 87 percent of adult internet users said they have used the internet to do science research.


$100 laptop for poor children ships
(11/19/2006) The first ten $100 laptops have shipped from their Taiwanese manufacturer according to a report from News Corporation. The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) -- the nonprofit group behind the device -- reportedly tested the laptops, which were hand-built, at the U.S. State Department last week. The laptops have been billed as a durable low-cost PC for children in developing countries. OLPC says it will begin production once it has orders for 5-10 million machines. Already the governments of Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Nigeria, Thailand, and Israel have expressed interest in the machines which have received support from Google, AMD, Brightstar, News Corporation, and Red Hat, but not Microsoft.


Amazon Indians use Google Earth, GPS to protect forest home
(11/14/2006) Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians are using Google Earth, Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping, and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions, which include profound knowledge of the forest ecosystem and medicinal plants. Helping them is the Amazon conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization working with indigenous people to conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in South American rainforests.


Bacteria can generate renewable energy from pollution, help fight global warming
(10/26/2006) Currently, most energy production generates carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming and local pollution. At the same time that carbon dioxide concentrations are rising in the atmosphere, fueling higher temperatures, burgeoning population growth of humans and livestock is producing ever-increasing amounts of organic pollution and waste. Now researchers at the Center for Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute of Arizona State University are working on a way to solve both problems using bacteria to convert organic wastes into a source of electricity. Bruce Rittmann, Director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute, and his team of researchers are developing microbial fuel cells (MFC) that can oxidize organic pollutants and create electricity from pollution.


Bacteria can ensure clean water say researchers
(10/24/2006) Water is shaping up to be one of the most critical problems facing humanity. With water consumption far outstripping population growth rates due to surging industrial and agricultural demand, the World Bank estimates that 40 percent of the world's population -- more than 2.5 billion people -- are enduring some form of water scarcity. In China, where massive river relocation projects to shift water from the south to the dry north are under consideration, an official government survey found that some 300 million Chinese drink unsafe water tainted by chemicals and other contaminants, while 90% of China's cities have polluted ground water. Elsewhere, development experts say that access to reliable, safe and affordable water is key to poverty alleviation efforts and that addressing declining groundwater supplies and water pollution is be critical to raising the quality of life in poor regions.


NAND PCs may have environmental benefits over standard hard disk PCs
(10/13/2006) Fujitsu announced it will start shipping PCs that use NAND-flash drives instead of standard hard drives. While the new format will be substantially more expensive -- on the order of $670 to replace a 20GB hard drive with a 16GB worth of flash memory -- it will make the laptops lighter and more shock-resistant, extend battery life by 30 minutes and improve system performance on start-up. The shift may have ancillary benefits as well: less energy usage and reduction of components that use metals. The following originally appeared on October 28, 2006 on mongabay.com.


Face recognition web search engine to launch soon
(9/29/2006) The Malmo, Sweden, based company Polar Rose will soon be introducing a Web-based search engine that can find photographs of people by analyzing pictures and identifying faces. The search engine­-which will be the first of its kind in the world­-is the result of research carried out by Jan Erik Solem at Technology and Society, Malmo University College. He will publicly defend his thesis on Friday, September 29


Amazon rainforest has its first wireless city under poverty alleviation initiative by Intel
(9/20/2006) Intel unveiled what it is calling the "World's Most Remote Digital City" in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The wireless, high-speed Internet network installation in Parintins, a town on an island in the Amazon River, is part of the tech firm's initiative to treat the world's poor as a market. Some economists have argued that addressing the world's poor in such a manner could bring benefits that they have not seen through historical aid efforts.


Shift from hard drives to flash may have environmental benefits
(8/28/2006) A leading technology research group says flash, or solid state memory drives may soon replace the standard hard drives in laptops. Over the past few years, flash memory technology has been claiming an increasingly sizeable share of the market, particularly in the form of USB drives. According to the Gartner Group, the NAND flash market has grown from 1.56 billion in 200 to 11.42 billion in 2005, with even higher projections for the next two years. This summer, Samsung set a new bar by releasing computers that utilize flash memory storage, negating the need for traditional magnetic disk media. The implications of a shift for laptops are significant for a number of reasons including changing performance demand, market trends and investment opportunities. Unconsidered at this point, but nonetheless compelling, is the possible environmental impact of such a transition.


Carbon dioxide-eating enzyme could fight global warming
(8/9/2006) A new technology could help fight climate change by letting carbon-dioxide enzymes do the work. According to Mark Wendman of the UK-based Inquirer a Canadian firm has licensed production rights to an enzyme that scrubs carbon dioxide from smokestacks and other concentrated sources. The byproducts from the CO2 scrubbing process are carbonate and hydrogen gas, which could serve as a fuel source.


Shell chairman calls for clean coal technologies to fight global warming
(8/4/2006) In a talk given last week at the prestigious Royal Society in Britain, the outgoing chairman of Shell Oil said that cleaner-burning coal technologies are urgently needed to minimize greenhouse gas emissions from the ongoing use of fossil fuels in the coming decades.


$100 laptop for children may be nearing production
(8/1/2006) The $100 laptop may be nearing production after One Laptop per Child (OLPC), the nonprofit group behind the device, confirmed that the governments of four countries are in talks to purchase the machines.


Eco-Friendly Computers and Monitors Identified
(7/22/2006) More than 60 desktop computers, laptops, and monitors from three manufacturers were recognized today as part of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funded effort to identify high performance, environmentally friendly computer equipment. All of the products meet the new EPEAT green computer standard and they are listed online in the EPEAT database at ww.epeat.net.


Brazil, U.S. renew Amazon research agreements
(7/22/2006) Thursday Brazil and the U.S. renewed two Amazon forest research agreements. Brazilian Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Dr. Luis Manuel Rebelo Fernandes signed two continuation agreements for research on the Amazon: the Large-Scale Biosphere - Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) and Biological Determinants of Forest Fragments Program (BDFFP). Implementation of the programs will be lead by Brazil's INPA, or the Brazilian Institute for Research in the Amazon.


Technique could add "tens of billion of barrels" to Saudi reserves
(7/10/2006) An oil recovery technique using steam injection could add "tens of billion of barrels" to Saudi Arabia's reserves said Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. The paper reports that earlier this year U.S.-based Chevron Corp. began a field test of a technique that could pump heavy crude oil that previously considered unrecoverable. The story shows that high oil prices will continue to drive drillers to pursue traditionally marginal sources of energy, even ones that a particularly difficult to recover and refine.


Ozone hole recovery slower than expected
(6/29/2006) Scientists from NASA and other agencies have concluded that the ozone hole over the Antarctic will recover around 2068, nearly 20 years later than previously believed. Researchers from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have developed a new tool, a math-based computer model, to predict the timing of ozone hole recovery. Their findings will be published tomorrow in Geophysical Research Letters.


Consumers want environmentally friendly computers
(6/26/2006) A study conducted earlier this year by Ipsos-MORI on behalf of Greenpeace found that consumers say they would be willing to pay more for an environmentally friendly computer. The amounts ranged from $59 in Germany, $118 in UK, $199 in China and $229 in Mexico.


Venture Capitalists, China and Green Technology
(5/24/2006) A Bay Area venture capitalist with a storied past, has set his sights on "green technology" and ultimately China, after some compelling remarks from state representatives at a recent conference. Early this spring, Chinese officials named solar and clean coal technologies as two of their three pre-eminent priorities for investment and development in the near future. For a country with burgeoning energy needs surpassing what power is presently available, this is both realistic and positive news for environmentalists and economists alike. Hoping to capitalize, John Doerr and his associates are now funneling cash into the emergent green technology sector, which he, and an increasing number of other investors believe to be the next big thing.


More iPod capacity? Just Add Water, say Drexel researchers
(5/11/2006) Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes (GB) of information. Imagine an iPodTM playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies. Now imagine if this could be achieved by combining a computing principle that was popular in the 1960s, a glass of water and wire three-billionths of a meter wide. Science fiction? Not exactly.


Apple expands recycling program, waste not shipped overseas
(4/21/2006) With Earth Day around the corner, Apple today announced an expanded version of its recycling program, offering computer take-back and recycling with the purchase of a new Macintosh system beginning in June.


Global warming could dry Caribbean, Central America
(4/14/2006) Parts of the Caribbean and Central America are likely to experience drier summers by 2050 according to research presented by UCLA atmospheric scientists in the April 18 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Analyzing 10 global climate computer simulations from various agencies, the researchers found that the majority of the computer models predict a substantial decrease in tropical rainfall to occur by mid-century. By the end of this century, the models show that summer rainfall could decline by 20 percent or more in parts of the Caribbean and Central America.


Global warming causing stronger hurricanes
(3/16/2006) The link between warmer ocean temperatures and increasing intensity of hurricanes has been confirmed by scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Last year, two studies published in the journals Nature and Science found a strong correlation between rising tropical sea surface temperatures and an increase in the strength of hurricanes.



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