This is an awesome idea that works well for guys. You can pee and wash your hands afterwards all in one spot! I am sure it would be a little wierd at first but I am sure people can get used to it easily. The water from washing your hands flows down to the bottom to rinse the urinal.

The idea is great for saving both water and space and I can easily see this idea implemented in Asia and would be great in small spaces. The idea was created by Yeongwoo Kim and is a iF Concept Design 2010 winning entry.

via Yanko Design and Treehugger and Laughing Squid

Here is a great recent article about lighting and pros and cons of each type of lighting when it comes to CFL, LED, Halogens, and Incandescent.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/25/HODL1EAQIE.DTL&type=living

This year is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day on April 22nd, 2010. Join the more than one billion people in 190 countries taking part on this day. Official Website

Bloom Energy is a Silicon Valley startup that unveiled on Wednesday its Bloom Energy Server which is a collection of fuel cells that can generate electricity at a low cost. A box the size of a pickup truck is made up of mainly sand and uses a electrochemical reaction between oxygen and natural gas to produce electricity.

This can be  an innovative advancement because it only uses solid oxide fuel cells and does not require any sun or wind and is twice as efficient as burning natural gas. The company was founded in 2001 and has about $400 million from venture capitals. The servers can provide electricity at 9 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour compared to 14 cents for power from the grid. This can give you back your return on investment in three to five years which is extremely good compared to the other green alternatives. Solar and wind technologies take a lot of up front costs and investments and makes it hard to justify the costs. Even with government incentives, solar power for homes still requires too much upfront costs especially since it takes at least 10 years to recouperate the costs. This can be a useful tool to provide portable electricity and also be useful to help bring electricity to poverty places that dont currently have electricity.

via SFGate

Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, IBM, and Alcatel-Lucent got grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for projects on improving energy efficiency in the IT and communicatio technology industries.

Yahoo got $9.9 million to design a data center that uses outside ambient air cooling.

Hewlett-Packard got $7.4 million for testing a data center design using alternative current and water cooling components.

Alcatel-Lucent got $1.8 million to test heat-sink structures and device-level liquid cooling technologies and another $300,000 to test methods to synchronize telecom network energy demand.

IBM got two grants totalling $4 million to develop liquid metal thermal interfaces for data centers and to develop software based cooling tools.