Innovation Toronto

Internet ‘in running’ for Nobel Peace Prize

innovation2 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:18:56 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

The internet is among a record 237 individuals and organisations nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The number of nominations surpasses last year’s record of 205 nominations.

The internet’s nomination has been championed by the Italian version of Wired magazine for helping advance “dialogue, debate and consensus”.

The director of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, told BBC News that the organisation had received “thousands of nominations” for the coveted prize.

“Some were nominated by one person, others by 10, others by 100,” he said.

The secretive organisation does not release the list of nominees, but nominators sometimes announce their choices.

Read more . . .

The internet earns a nomination for 2010 Nobel Prize (engadget.com)
The Internet Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize (mashable.com)

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A Place to Bet Real Money on Movies

innovation2 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:00:15 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Think that this spring’s “Robin Hood” movie will be a blockbuster at the box office? Next week you will be able to put your money on it.

Cantor Futures Exchange, a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald, expects to open an online futures market next month that will allow studios, institutions and moviegoers to place bets on the box-office revenue of Hollywood’s biggest releases. Last week, the company learned from regulators that customers could start putting money into their accounts on March 15.

“I’ve worked in the futures industry for a long time,” said Richard Jaycobs, the president of Cantor Exchange, who has worked with derivative markets and the cotton exchange. “And none of the products has the overall appeal that this does. This just has a tremendous potential audience.”

Betting on the success of Hollywood releases has long been a parlor game for moviegoers. In 2001, Cantor Fitzgerald bought the Web site HSX.com (for “Hollywood Stock Exchange”), where users can place bets with play money on a film’s box-office success; smart traders win little more than satisfaction. Mr. Jaycobs said that he hoped to lure a sizable portion of that site’s 200,000 active users to the real futures exchange.

But buyers beware: if “Avatar” is any indication, the public isn’t always so wise about Hollywood fortunes. Most users of HSX.com predicted a flop, and if those users had placed real money on the Cantor exchange, they would have taken a serious hit.

Read more . . .

Film Futures Market Set For April Launch (nymag.com)
A Futures Site Coming to Bet on Movie Ticket Sales (nytimes.com)
HSX Goes Real-Money (seekingalpha.com)
Hollywood Stock Exchange Is Becoming A Real Money Exchange In April. Seriously. (techcrunch.com)

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Eye concept – a glimpse of Tesla’s future?

innovation2 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:51:32 +0000

The all-electric Tesla Roadster is indeed a fine-looking, high-performance automobile,

but its projected $US109,000 price tag will likely put it out of reach of the much sought-after Generation Y demographic. Tesla’s less-pricey Model S four-door sedan is more of a refined, subtly-classy car – again, not something the fun-loving twenty-somethings will be flocking to. So, how does an electric car company come up a vehicle that the young folks will like? Easy, they get some of those kids to design the car for them. In Tesla’s case, the result is a stunning concept vehicle called the Eye.

The Eye was created by 11 students in the Transportation Design masters program at Turin’s Instituto Europeo di Design (IED). Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen was their mentor for the semester, and supervised the entire process. The intent was to design a C-segment (compact) affordable car for young, cosmopolitan buyers.

Read more . . .

tesla EYE concept (designboom.com)
Geneva 2010: IED Tesla EYE Concept (autoblog.com)

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3D TV is here

innovation2 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:34:25 +0000

After all the hype prompted by the success of Avatar in cinemas and the flood of 3D technology unveiled at trade shows like CES 2010, 3D TV is finally becoming a reality in living rooms.

All the major players are well and truly on the 3D bandwagon and they’re set to make a lot of noise to try and entice consumers on board too. To help you navigate the 3D waters as various companies spruik their particular brand of 3D technology we’ve taken a look at what’s on offer, when it will hit shelves and how much it will cost.

Panasonic

Panasonic debuted the world’s first 3D Full HD Plasma Home Theater System at CEATAC Japan in 2008 and is aiming to sell the world’s first Full HD 3D (FHD3D) home theater system through a partnership with US retailer Best Buy. The system will consist of a 50-inch Panasonic VT25 plasma 3D TV, 3D capable DMP-BDT350 Blu-ray player and one pair of active shutter glasses. The retailer will be selling the system at a launch event at the Union Square Best Buy in Manhattan on March 10 with plans for several hundred Best Buy stores to have VT25 displays in the near future.

Panasonic’s VT25 series are FHD3D sets that provide full 1080p resolution to both the left and right eye and will be available in four screen sizes ranging from 50- to 65-inches.

The system is expected to sell for around US$3,000, while a 50-inch VT25 on its own is expected to cost around US$2,500. These prices represent a discount of close to 50 percent compared to Japanese prices recently announced by Panasonic and is designed to help the company achieve its target of selling one million 3DTVs worldwide this year.

Read more . . .

Panasonic 3D home entertainment system goes on sale to a country in mourning (engadget.com)
Who will buy the first Panasonic 3D TV? (news.cnet.com)
Panasonic, Best Buy double down on 3D TV (news.cnet.com)
Samsung Debuts 3D TV Lineup (mashable.com)
Panasonic’s VT25 3DTVs will be nearly 50% off Japanese prices, launch this week at Best Buy (engadget.com)
Samsung to bundle glasses with 3D TVs (go.theregister.com)

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Storing megawatts: Liquid-metal batteries and electricity

innovation2 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:19:17 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Making aluminum requires a lot of electricity. That’s because the metal bonds tightly to oxygen and it takes a lot of energy to break that bond. In essence, the process of making aluminum is a giant battery with the silvery metal being reduced to purity at the cathode while oxygen bonds with the carbon anode to make, you guessed it, CO2. It takes roughly 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity to make just one kilogram of aluminum via electrolysis.

But what if instead of making aluminum, one used the process to store electricity?

“What’s a big current sink? Aluminum smelters,” explained Luis Ortiz, research director for materials scientist Donald Sadoway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), at last week’s ARPA-E summit. “Maybe the aluminum industry is sitting on the answer [to large-scale electricity storage] all along.”

Unfortunately, thanks to that CO2 gas floating away, this aluminum-making process turns out to be a very bad battery—it is simply not reversible. But David Bradwell, a graduate student in Sadoway’s lab, tweaked the process to involve liquid metals for the anode, cathode and even electrolyte and evolved a battery that has a high charge transfer, long life and costs “below $100 per kilowatt-hour,” according to Ortiz. “It is as good or better than lithium ion in energy density but cheaper than lead acid.”

Read more . . .

Blog – Energy-Dense Silicon Batteries Get $3M (technologyreview.com)
Blog – New Charging Method Could Slash Battery Recharge Times (technologyreview.com)

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Zep’lin flying boat ponders the future of electric vehicles

innovation2 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:49:38 +0000

A boat that flies.

Now there’s a vehicle Phileas Fogg could really have used. Zep’lin is a blue-sky concept developed by industrial designer Damien Grossemy during a five month internship at Renault which imagines the use of solar panel sails and electric propulsion to liberate the yacht-like vehicle from terra firma.

Setting out to “explore new design language of electric vehicles,” Grossemy has come up with a land anywhere vertical architecture that incorporates a propeller drive, flexible wing and rudder system that would enable the craft to tilt sideways to make the most of the Sun’s rays.

The Lithium Chase

innovation2 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:32:26 +0000

: Image by lennox_mcdough via Flickr

For many years, few metals drew bigger yawns from mining executives than lithium, a lightweight element long associated mostly with mood-stabilizing drugs.

Suddenly, the yawns are being replaced by eurekas. As awareness spreads that lithium is a crucial ingredient for hybrid and electric cars, a global hunt is under way for new supplies of the metal.

Toyota Tsusho, the material supplier for the big Japanese automaker, announced a joint venture in January with the Australian miner Orocobre to develop a $100 million lithium project in Argentina. That deal came only days after Magna International, the Canadian car parts company that is helping develop a battery-powered version of the Ford Focus, announced that it was investing $10 million in a small Canadian lithium firm that also has projects in Argentina.

They were the latest in a series of deals and projects announced over the last year, reflecting a new urgency among companies to assure themselves future supplies of the metal.

“There is a sea change under way,” James D. Calaway, the chairman of Orocobre, said. “We are at the front end potentially of a very significant increase in the demand for lithium for the emerging electric transportation sector.”

Mr. Calaway added, however, that the timing of any increase in lithium supply and demand was difficult to predict in large part because electric cars had yet to take off in any big way.

About 60 mining companies have begun feasibility studies in Argentina, Serbia and Nevada that could lead to more than $1 billion in new lithium projects in the next several years, while dozens of smaller projects are being proposed in China, Finland, Mexico and Canada.

The companies are competing for construction financing, and the future of most of the projects will depend on how popular electric cars eventually become. That is an open question since batteries remain expensive, recharging stations need to be developed, and consumer taste for cars that depend on regular stops at electric outlets remains untested.

“It’s moving so fast,” said Edward R. Anderson, president of TRU Group, a consultancy firm that specializes in the lithium industry. “There are a lot of people throwing money into this, and a lot of people are going to lose their money.”

In the meantime the four biggest current producers, which mine and otherwise gather lithium in Chile, Argentina and Australia, say they are planning to expand long-running projects as future demand warrants.

In Bolivia, which has almost half of the world’s reserves, the leftist government is building a pilot production plant and is drilling exploratory holes. That Bolivia is a remote, unstable country often hostile to foreign investment has helped spur interest in producing lithium in neighboring Argentina and Chile, in Australia, and in the United States. Several Canadian and American companies are making claims about future production prospects in Nevada, though few analysts foresee large-scale production from that state.

While most experts are skeptical that meaningful amounts of lithium can be produced domestically, they maintain that adequate supplies will be available from sources outside of Bolivia for many years to come and note that the biggest producer, Chile, is a dependable American ally.

Most of the lithium market serves a variety of industrial applications. About a quarter of all lithium produced is used for energy storage, in everything from cellphones to laptop computers to digital cameras.

That proportion stands to increase sharply if battery-powered cars take off. Lithium-ion batteries are the favored battery type for electric and hybrid vehicles because they carry more energy with less weight than other materials and because they lose their charge more slowly. They store about three times as much as energy per pound as a nickel-metal hybrid battery.

Read more . . .

Is Lithium 21st Century’s Oil? Part I (seekingalpha.com)
Blog – New Charging Method Could Slash Battery Recharge Times (technologyreview.com)
Toyota secures lithium supply in Argentina (sfgate.com)
Living With The Side Effects Of Lithium-ion Batteries (treehugger.com)
Google Reader Share: Toyota locks down lithium for hybrid batteries with new mining deal (green.venturebeat.com)

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Carbon nanotubes offer new way to produce electricity

innovation2 — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:17:08 +0000

Scientists have discovered that a moving pulse of heat traveling along the miniscule wires known as carbon nanotubes can cause powerful waves of energy.

These “thermopower waves” can drive electrons along like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface of ocean waves, creating an electrical current. The previously unknown phenomenon opens up a new area of energy research and could lead to a new way of producing electricity.

The team of scientists at MIT coated the electrically and thermally conduction carbon nanotubes with a layer of reactive fuel that can produce heat by decomposing. This fuel was then ignited at one end of the nanotube using either a laser beam or a high-voltage spark, and the result was a fast-moving thermal wave traveling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse. Heat from the fuel goes into the nanotube, where it travels thousands of times faster than in the fuel itself.

As the heat feeds back to the fuel coating, a thermal wave is created that is guided along the nanotube. With a temperature of 3,000 kelvins, this ring of heat speeds along the tube 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of this chemical reaction.

It is the heating produced by that combustion that also pushes electrons along the tube, creating a substantial electrical current.

Combustion waves — like this pulse of heat hurtling along a wire — “have been studied mathematically for more than 100 years,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, but he was the first to predict that such waves could be guided by a nanotube or nanowire and that this wave of heat could push an electrical current along that wire.

In the group’s initial experiments, Strano says, when they wired up the carbon nanotubes with their fuel coating in order to study the reaction, “lo and behold, we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak” that propagated along the wire. After further development, the system now puts out energy, in proportion to its weight, about 100 times greater than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery.

Read more . . .

Researchers Discover New Way of Producing Electricity (usnews.com)
Heat-Channeling Carbon Nanotubes Produce 100 Times More Energy than Li-ion Batteries [Nanotubes] (gizmodo.com)
Combustible carbon nanotubes give off electricity, make really tiny fires (video) (engadget.com)
Nanotech ‘fuse’ for novel battery (news.bbc.co.uk)
Thermopower Waves and Nanopollution (worldchanging.com)

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Monitoring greenhouse gases

innovation2 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:03:46 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Highs and lows

You might think that measuring the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong.

IN NEGOTIATIONS on nuclear weapons the preferred stance is “Trust but verify”. In negotiations on climate change there seems little opportunity for either. Trust, as anyone who attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen can attest, is in the shortest of supplies. So, too, is verification.

Barack Obama was asked when he was in Copenhagen whether a provision by which countries could peek into each others’ assessment processes was strong enough to be sure there was no cheating. He answered reassuringly that “we can actually monitor a lot of what takes place through satellite imagery”. That statement conjured up thoughts of the sort of cold-war satellite system that America used to identify and count Russian missiles. But the president was being a bit previous; at the moment, no such system exists, because America’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite that would have fulfilled the role, was lost on launch this time last year. The purpose of OCO was to work out the fate of carbon dioxide that is emitted by industrial processes but does not then stay in the atmosphere—about 60% of the total.

America is planning to build a new OCO. In the meantime, however, a small group of scientists labours away on Earth, doing its best to monitor emissions at ground level. At the end of February a number of these researchers met at the Royal Society in London, to discuss what they were up to.

Measuring gas levels day in, day out can look a little humdrum to outsiders, including those who hold the purse strings. They tend to prefer scientists to experiment and test hypotheses, not just tally things. But that attitude galls the greenhouse-gas measurers, and not only because it denies them money. It also ignores the fact that careful measurement is a way of discovering new things, not just of checking the status quo. Monitoring is not just a necessary handmaiden of science—it is the real thing.

De bas en haut

Governments are required by treaty to inform the world about their greenhouse-gas emissions. To do this, they take a bottom-up approach, using data about how much of the relevant gases all sorts of activities, from steelmaking to dairy farming, are expected to produce and how much of each of those activities is going on. The researchers at the meeting work top down, looking directly at what is in the atmosphere, and how quickly it accumulates.

Ray Weiss of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, has been studying the difference between these approaches. In most cases, he has found that the top-down estimates are appreciably higher. In some, such as that of sulphur hexafluoride, a powerful greenhouse gas that is used as an insulator in high-voltage electronics, the trends as well as the values are different: bottom-up accounts say emissions are falling; top-down analysis says they are going up.

Andreas Stohl of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research and his colleagues have been looking at weather patterns to discover where some of these gases are emitted. The level of a gas seen at a particular monitoring station depends on where it came from and which way the wind was blowing, so if you have a number of stations and some data on how their readings change with wind directions, you can have a good guess at the source.

Among Dr Stohl’s conclusions is the positive one that China now seems to be emitting less HFC-23, a powerful greenhouse gas produced by the refrigeration industry, than it did in 2005. This suggests that the large amounts of money invested through carbon markets in reducing such emissions may be having an effect. More detailed studies might show precisely which industrial regions the gases are coming from, and thus reveal what is going on with specific HFC-23-mitigation projects.

For gases that are sometimes or always produced biologically, such as carbon dioxide and methane, a less geographic way of assigning sources is possible. Living things treat carbon atoms of different weights slightly differently, and these differences show up in the weights of the gases they churn out. So it is possible to distinguish, for example, between methane that has been stored in permafrost and methane that is made by rotting vegetation.

Read more . . .

IMF proposes global climate change fund (guardian.co.uk)
Concerns mount over vague Japanese climate bill (businessgreen.com)
Black Carbon: A Visible but Overlooked Factor in Warming (time.com)

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Magic Fingers: Digging Into Multi-Touch Technology with Both Hands

innovation2 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:48:54 +0000

: Image by Eliel via Flickr

At Perceptive Pixel’s offices on Manhattan’s West Side, Jefferson Han stands in front of a megasize multi-touch screen and runs his fingertips across the display. Each finger leaves a trail of colored pixels in its wake, causing the display to look, briefly, like it has been scratched by a set of digital claws.

Han, who founded Perceptive Pixel in 2006 and serves as the company’s chief scientist, next uses his index finger to draw a loop on the 100-inch display. It causes a menu of options to appear on the screen, not all that different from using a mouse to click on a drop-down menu. Of course, Han doesn’t need a mouse, or a keyboard for that matter. He selects one of his menu options, which are arranged in a loop resembling the one he drew to pull up the menu, and away he goes.

Perceptive Pixel’s technology is best known for the role it played in helping cable news network CNN create its “Magic Wall,” a dynamic, on-air graphical representation of voting results during the network’s coverage of the 2008 presidential election. Although Han acknowledges that multi-touch is “interesting” at the level of gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone, the technology comes into its own only when you’re able to manipulate objects on a display screen using both hands.

Creating software to make multi-touch work properly is the hardest part of developing these systems. “The interface is such a paradigm shift,” he says. “You can’t just bolt the software onto existing hardware.” For this reason, Han and his colleagues have essentially created new operating system for touch-sensitive technology that recognizes an infinite number of touch points—ideally, allowing multiple users to manipulate the same display simultaneously.

Read more . . .

Touch Technology History (touchuserinterface.com)
T3 Multi-Touch Table unveiled at 2010 Nightclub & Bar Show (prweb.com)
Touch International Enhances Interactive Applications with the Multi-Touch Resistive Touch Screen Module (prweb.com)

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Innovation Toronto

Internet ‘in running’ for Nobel Peace Prize

The internet is among a record 237 individuals and organisations nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

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A Place to Bet Real Money on Movies

Think that this spring’s “Robin Hood” movie will be a blockbuster at the box office? Next week you will be able to put your money on it.

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Eye concept – a glimpse of Tesla’s future?

The all-electric Tesla Roadster is indeed a fine-looking, high-performance automobile,

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3D TV is here

After all the hype prompted by the success of Avatar in cinemas and the flood of 3D technology unveiled at trade shows like CES 2010, 3D TV is finally becoming a reality in living rooms.

Panasonic

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Storing megawatts: Liquid-metal batteries and electricity

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Zep’lin flying boat ponders the future of electric vehicles

A boat that flies.

The Lithium Chase

For many years, few metals drew bigger yawns from mining executives than lithium, a lightweight element long associated mostly with mood-stabilizing drugs.

Related articles by Zemanta

Carbon nanotubes offer new way to produce electricity

Scientists have discovered that a moving pulse of heat traveling along the miniscule wires known as carbon nanotubes can cause powerful waves of energy.

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Monitoring greenhouse gases

Highs and lows

De bas en haut

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Magic Fingers: Digging Into Multi-Touch Technology with Both Hands

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