The glitz 'n' glam holiday iPhone cases have arrived, my friends. I've already introduced you to the bold and beautiful gold and metallic iPhone cases from Incase, but if you're looking for something that still shows off the sexiness of your iPhone, then you must look at these Diamond Series Cases. They sparkle like a real diamond, but with an inexpensive price tag of $23, you get the best of both worlds! Each case will fit snug to your phone for the ultimate protection and is made from high-quality hydrocarbon polymer material. Check out all the pretty colors below....
As a 24 Hours Of LeMons judge, it's my duty to think up sadistic Solomonically wise penalties for racers who transgress The Rules. Regionally appropriate penalties are always good, and thus was born the Ozzy Osbourne Inertial Penalty Horn... but more was needed. With about 20 minutes to go before boarding the plane to Houston, it hit me: Billy Gibbons! Yes, the front man for that Little Ol' Band From Texas is one of the heavy-dutiest car freaks in the world, so that means a real LeMons Houston racer ought to sport a beard with similar length and volume. But...
Scientists at Genomatica Inc. recently announced that they have developed strains of bacteria that are able to produce plastic without the use of oil or natural gas. The sustainable process utilizes little more than sugar and water to produce butanediol (BDO), which can be manufactured into everything from plastics and fibers to pharmaceuticals. Genomatica estimates that within a year the energy-efficient process will cost less than current hydrocarbon-based processes - a revolutionary development since close to 3 billion pounds of BDO manufactured each year. (more…)...
Regulating body heat is always a challenge during cold weather — it's always too hot or too cold, especially when running around town from crowded subway to overheated office. Helly Hansen's Odin PCM soft shell jacket solves the problem with technology that automatically adjusts according to your body heat. Fabric called Phase Change Material uses paraffin to store and release heat when needed most. Paraffin, a hydrocarbon, is most often used in sheet rock for residential buildings because it acts as an insulator. Usually found in wax form, paraffin melts as it absorbs heat, hardening again as it cools...
Cash From Quatar for Fisker Fisker, the maker of the upcoming Karma plug-in hybrid sports sedan (all-electric range of 50 miles with gas engine kicking-in to charge batteries over that, similarly to the GM Volt), has announced it has closed a $65-million round of financing led by an affiliate of the Qatar Investment Authority, a state-owned, state-funded sovereign wealth fund. Apparently the QIA wants to "strengthen the country's economy by diversifying into new asset classes." In any case, this new hydrocarbon-money should help Fis......
Everyone wants to go green when they shop, but calculating the CO2 impact of everything that went into the manufacture, transportation and packaging of one box of cereal versus another in your head is not in the realm of possible. Enter Rinen, Inc., a Tokyo-based, garage-based, startup premiering at TechChrunch50 today with OpenTrace.org, a web app which calculates the environmental cost of a product and can boil that down to a single comprehensible number. Want to get a rough approximation of that box of cereal's environmental load all the way back to the processing of the oats in it? Scan...
Ah nanotubes. Is there anything you can't almost possibly do? Well, now you can add bouncy cellphones to the list because a team of Clemson University researchers have developed a way to make beds of tiny, shock-absorbing coiled carbon nanotubes which could be used to cushion objects from damaging impacts. They hope that these coiled nanotubes could be used in everything from body armor to cellphones in the near future. Coiled nanotubes are nothing new, but the real breakthrough for the Clemson team has come in the production process. The problem was that no one had developed a way to...
