A light bulb? Seriously? Well, yeah. But not just any old light bulb. A whiz-bang, low-energy, cool-to-the-touch, lives-practically-forever $10 light bulb. It’s from Cree, a big name in commercial and industrial lighting that uses light-emitting diodes, or LEDs — the...
Read more »Cree’s Bright Idea for Home Lighting: Rich Jaroslovsky
Photograph courtesy of Ideo
Attendees of Ideo's sanitation hackathon collaborated on tools for highlighting Ghana's open defecation issues.
Flush With Ideas: Hackathon Tackles Ghana’s Toilet Troubles
During a hackathon last week at the San Francisco offices of design firm Ideo, there were laptops, whiteboards, pizza and beer. Oh, and photos of feces on the walls. The 40 software developers who attended the Hack Sanitation event were...
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Photograph by Car Culture
Uber, which offers mobile software for booking black cars and other rides, hikes prices during peak times.
Uber Reverses on Hurricane Sandy Cab Price Hike in New York
Uber, the car service that lets people summon rides via a smartphone app, was hit with its own storm this week when New Yorkers accused the startup of unfairly profiting by charging higher rates in the wake of Hurricane Sandy....
Read more »IPhone Creator’s Nest Labs Turns Up the Heat With Latest Thermostat
As one of the creators of the iPod and iPhone, Tony Fadell raised eyebrows when he announced last year what he’d be doing for a second act. “A thermostat?” was the collective response from Silicon Valley. Fadell, along with fellow...
Read more »Bill Gates Funds Quest to Build Better Toilet to Combat Disease
When Bill Gates was at the helm of Microsoft, the fate of software products rested on his approval. The technology giant’s co-founder and former chief executive is now judging something completely different: toilets. With 1.5 million children a year dying...
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Photograph by Michael Grecco/Getty Images
Actor and environmental activist Ed Begley Jr. with his Bradley electric car in 1989.
Venture Capitalists Kill (Optimism Around) the Electric Car
(This blog was corrected to show that Jurvetson owns an electric vehicle.) Still wondering who killed the electric car? How about some of the country’s most powerful venture capitalists. OK, so they didn’t really kill the electric car, to reference...
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Illustration by Mike Agliolo/Corbis
An asteroid several miles across could push most of life into extinction.
How to Destroy Earth and Other ‘Apocalyp-tech’ Scenarios
With Earth Day this Sunday, my colleague Eric Roston over at the Sustainability channel put together the mother of all how-to slideshows: “How to Destroy the Planet.” Of course, he’s not bent on our collective destruction. As he puts it,...
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