In Brazil, ethanol can be made relatively cheaply from sugarcane, a production method that is proving so popular that companies are scrambling to keep up with domestic demand. Noble Corp. said today it is increasing its production of cane ethanol five fold. (Brazil is clearly striving to be a leader in alternative [...]

[Read more →]

Many innovations seem only to appear where there is a really unusual need, warranting an unusual solution. The Kawazu-Nanadaru Loop Bridge (河津七瀧ループ橋) in Japan is one such example: How do you build a bridge along a mountainside when the grade is so steep that switchbacks aren’t practical? This double spiral brings cars up and down [...]

[Read more →]

Reading a Wired article about China, Japan, and other countries racing to put humankind back on the moon, one would think that such efforts were only about the rights to claim some lunar resources and national pride. But the cold war, which provided the backdrop for the U.S. / Russian space race of the [...]

[Read more →]

Archaeologists Billy Quinn and Declan Moore are getting a lot of press for their new theory about the famous burnt mounds of Ireland (there called the fulacht fiadh), which date back as far as 2500 BC.
Quinn believes the mounds may be the nation’s oldest breweries, designed in an age before metalworking allowed the creation of [...]

[Read more →]

Ever since taking Barrett Hazeltine’s class as an undergraduate, I have been a supporter of appropriate technology (AT), in other words, technology designed to take into account social, economic, cultural, and environmental factors relevant to its intended use. Advocates of AT may question, for example, the appropriateness of installing computers in [...]

[Read more →]

The result of thousands of years in development, modern toothbrush technology has become quite sophisticated — and almost humorously complicated conglomeration of multicolored plastic, rubber, and bristles.
But it is not for everyone. In particular, toothbrushes must be replaced regularly and need to be disposed of properly because they are not recyclable or biodegradable. [...]

[Read more →]

The Philippines’ broadband Internet penetration may be low by Asian standards (less than 20%), so one would not expect “online” shopping to be taking off.
But almost 50% of Filipinos have mobiles phones, and the country is sometimes called the “txting capital of the world.” Thus it shouldn’t be a surprise that fast-fingered Filipinos [...]

[Read more →]

In shopping for holiday gifts, I often browse various gadget gift guides, only to get frustrated that most gadget gift lists feature the same five or ten products over and over again (and usually two of them are big-screen TVs and three of them are iPods).  So, I set out to create a different list, [...]

[Read more →]

According to a Washington Post article, more blogs are written in Japanese than in English, even though English-speaking web users far outnumber Japanese speaking ones.
Unlike Americans, who often times blog to stand out, the Japanese blog to fit in.
Japanese bloggers tend to write about the details of their days, products that they like, etc.; their [...]

[Read more →]

Ok, so you have been hearing for years that Korea’s population is the most Internet-connected in the world. And maybe you knew that Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Norway had caught up (at least in terms of penetration, if not blazing speed). And you probably knew that the United States lags many other [...]

[Read more →]