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"start up company Vu1 is adding another light bulb option (not to mention acronym) to the mix, the Electron Stimulated Luminescence (ESL) bulb. The Vu1 ESL innovation re-purposes technology from our tried and true friend, the cathode ray tube (CRT) television. ESL uses accelerated electrons to stimulate phosphor and create light, thus making the bulb surface glow."

In the past six months, flat-screen plasma televisions have accounted for nearly half of all TVs sold around the world. During the manufacturing process, plasma televisions release a gas called nitrogen trifluoride, or NF3, which does approximately 17,000 times more environmental damage than carbon dioxide. But because NF3 was not widely used when the Kyoto protocol was created, it is not classified and controlled as a harmful gas--so even though we've tightened the belt and reduced some emissions, we've missed new ones that are making things far worse.

Dubbed the "missing greenhouse gas," nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) was found by a recent study to have a global climate impact 17,000 times greater than carbon dioxide. The chemical is found in the LCD panels of cell phones, televisions, and computer monitors, as well as in semiconductors and synthetic diamonds. The chemical is not one of the greenhouse gases monitored by the Kyoto Protocol, due to the fact that LCDs were not produced in significant quantities when it was drafted.

Starbucks seems to be a place that carries a whiff of excess. In its own way, it has a lot in common with SUVs, hot tubs and television screens wide enough to fill a wall. That is, it represents the bit-by-bit extravagances that helped get us into the tight economic jam we find ourselves in today.

A controversial British documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" unfairly portrays several scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Britain's television watchdog agency ruled on Monday (7/21).

I've been testing a surging-protecting power strip called the Smart Strip by BITS. The Smart Strip works like this: it has a "Control Outlet" which controls six other outlets on the power strip. If you plug a computer into the Control Outlet, and it turns off or goes into sleep mode, the other "switched" outlets on the strip will be turned off. There are also three other outlets that are "always on". Most people use this power strip to turn off all their computer peripherals, or to shut down their home theater system, when they turn off their television.

Displays that use organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are more vivid than liquid-crystal displays, have much faster refresh rates, and draw less power, but so far, manufacturing difficulties have limited them to small sizes fit only for handheld devices. On December 1, and only in Japan, Sony released the world's first OLED television, featuring an 11-inch panel with a layer of light-emitting organic material just several hundred nanometers thick. Initially, Sony plans to manufacture 2,000 of the TVs per month.

A vision from the past.

Aparently, the new "focal point" for Green Energy supporters/entrepreneurs/enthusiasts

The paper itself is flawed suggesting that virtualisation can reeduce the number of servers required to 7% - enough to handle the average processing load. Webusers want instant reaction during the peak - for that you need spare capacity. Is this a surprise?

The Internet doesn't produce belching smokestacks or toxin-spewing drainpipes. Instead, the environmental impact of the data centers that power the Web and private networks is about as visible as the electrons moving around a company's servers. But visible or not, the ecological and economic costs of those servers are massive. A report released last week by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that U.S. data centers (collections of computers used to power businesses' and government agencies' IT infrastructures and Web sites) consumed around 61 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006 at a cost of about $4.5 billion. That's about 1.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption, more than the electricity used by American televisions, or equivalent to the output of about 15 typical power plants