Monday, February 8th, 2010
Image by jontintinjordan via Flickr
Patent nonsense
DO PATENTS help or hinder innovation? Instinctively, they would seem a blessing, especially for backroom tinkerers. Patenting an idea gives its inventor a 20-year monopoly to exploit the fruit of his labour in the marketplace, in exchange for publishing a full account of how the new [...]
Posted in Consider This, Economist, IP, Innovation Needed | No Comments »
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
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With the use of the new super material graphene, Swedish and American researchers have succeeded in producing a new type of lighting component. It is inexpensive to produce and can be fully recycled.
The invention, which paves the way for glowing wallpaper made entirely of plastic, for example, is published in [...]
Posted in Consider This, Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Innovation Needed, Nanotech, Project Energy, Promising for so many reasons, Resources, Science Digest / Science Daily, Shape of Things to Come?, environment | No Comments »
Friday, February 5th, 2010
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ON THE face of it the world’s big and publicly quoted oil companies should be celebrating some pleasing results this week. Royal Dutch Shell unveiled its results on Thursday February 4th, reporting that it had made $9.8 billion in 2009. Two days earlier BP boasted profits of $14 billion [...]
Posted in 5 Years Out, Buying Time, Economist, Innovation Needed, Project Energy, Shape of Things to Come? | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Concrete seems pretty inoffensive. It just looks like mud, and appears to do nothing except sit there and harden. The fact is, though, concrete is the world’s third-largest source of man-made carbon dioxide. Its production process accounts for at least 5% of the CO2 our species pumps into the atmosphere annually. [...]
Posted in Buying Time, Innovation, Innovation Needed, climate change, environment, gizmag | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
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IN THE ten years since hybrid electric vehicles first hit the highways and byways of America, they have come to represent 2.5% of new car sales. Yet, in places like Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC, every other car seems to be a Toyota Prius. That [...]
Posted in Consider This, Economist, Innovation Needed, Project Energy | No Comments »