You know what the coolest thing invented was? Tim Berners Lee is gonna explain it to ya...

Green power is getting even more literal thanks to University of Washington findings on tree power.  Electrical Engineers Babak Parviz, Brian Otis, and undergraduate Carlton Himes will be reading their own story in an upcoming edition of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer's Transaction on Nanotechnology for their success in powering an electrical circuit, entirely from a tree.

A continuation of last year's study on the electrical output of plants done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the UW engineers decided to measure the electrical output of trees as a possible source of green energy. Undergraduate Carlton Himes spent his summer under the beautiful emerald canopies of the Pacific Northwest forests, sticking nails and electrodes into tree trunks to measure their electrical output, discovering outputs of several hundred millivolts with regular consistency.


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Inversion tables bring Batman to mind, right away. It's almost an immediate response to seeing a photo of someone hanging upsidedown by his ankles in the middle of a room. I had an experience with an inversion table once. It was at a neighbor's house, a neighbor I was dating who also happened to be an underwear model and who's roommate had an inversion table. It stood in their all-wood, all-Zen living room with gigantic glass picture windows five or so stories high in downtown Seattle. Being 6' tall and living with a high sense of gravity, a few car wrecks under my belt; I have my share of kinky back days. The inversion table was of particular interest to me, as I recalled a recent therapy I endured in Germany for an entire year after landing on my head mid-back fip in kung fu class. Fistfuls of painkillers, muscle relaxers and once a month- a large leather belt strapped under my chin by which, I would hang from my head on a wooden board, tilted at a 45 degree angle.

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Generally, I post items to Gadgetry Report either because they are so terribly geeky that they have to be witnessed, or because the device is more than a little daft, and I'm posting with mockery in mind; this time, while the marketing language is over-the-top and very much snicker inducing, the device itself actually has merit. ChefStack is an automatic conveyer-belt equipped pancake making machine. It can, so the Web site says, produce up to 200 97% fat-free freshly made pancakes an hour. It's not even a little bit stupid.

I know. Sometimes I surprise even myself.

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iCPR Lite (www.icpr.it) is an application specifically dedicated to self-directed learning CPR, by a simple graphical tutorial. The last version also features a metromome to let you match the correct cardiac compression rate (100 bpm). Between the middle and the end of September we will submit the full version, including a state of the art feedback module dedicated to CPR training for lay persons and healthcare professionals.Also, on our website, you can watch a funny video titled "iCPR is better than nothing" originally created to improve awareness about CPR.This video is intended for fun purposes to properly learn CPR please contact a trained professional.Federico Semeraro

For info: www.icpr.it

icpr

At SIGGRPH this week developers from the University of Electro-Communications in via SIGGRAPHTokyo demonstrated the Pull-Navi. It's a hat that looks sort of like a crude robotic bug with rectangular wings is perched on top. The gizmo is connected to a GPS which, with the aid of six little motors, tugs the wearer's ears (forward, backwards, left, right, up or down) to direct the wearer's navigation. According to the developers, people follow the Pull-Navi's gestured directions naturally; pull the left ear, and the user turns left, pull both ears forward or backwards at the same time, and users speed up or slow down, respectively.

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Vacuum Tube Chess Set

This absolutely lovely and quite clever chess set was made by Paul Fryer out of vacuum tubes. Since the tubes are wired for electricity, they actually glow as you move them about the board. The color scheme—red for black and blue instead of white are inspired by the light saber color conventions from Star Wars. Fryer calls this art object "Chess Set for Tesla." There are more pictures here.

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Don’t you just hate it when you’re in the middle of a conversation with your sister and she just keeps texting somebody else, or takes a call, as if she’s a freaking heart surgeon on call and simply too important to talk to you—the actual, live, breathing person she’s sitting in front of—when she’s “linked in” to all of these other people?

Or maybe you’re the sister in this case.

Either way, since July is National Cell Phone Courtesy Month, we should all make an effort to use some common courtesy when using our phones.

Remember when you’re talking to a real person. Unless your wife is close to delivering her baby or you’ve got a family member in the hospital, wait to answer calls and texts until your visit or conversation is over.

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When I read stories like this one, two thoughts cross my mind. The first is, “Awesome! This is exactly what we need.” The second? “It’s about bloody time. Why haven’t we done this already?” Though sea turtle protection is long overdue—especially considering that all species of sea turtles are endangered—we can definitely welcome any protection now with open arms. Better late than never, right?

Since many sea turtles meet their untimely deaths in fisherman’s nets, a new device is being developed to target these nets in order to protect turtles. Fishery managers are using a Cape Cod company to develop a device that will allow them to continue using fishing nets while still protecting sea turtles.

Hopefully it’s not too good to be true.

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Ok, this is awesome. Synthetic trees that capture carbon emissions.

CNN reported out of London today that U.S. scientist are in the middle of creating a “synthetic tree” to collect carbon dioxide from the air.

Seriously.

"Each unit would take out a ton of CO2 a day -- which would be the amount of CO2 produced by 20 average automobiles in the U.S.A. And the cost of each unit would be about the cost of a Toyota. So that would mean if you added a five percent surcharge on automobile purchases that money could go to building units to remove the CO2 those vehicles are going to create."said Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wally Broecker of Columbia University.

They say it will be capable of collecting carbon approximately 1,000x faster than a real tree. So, how does it work, right?

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