What a USB Port Hub Is
	Most of the peripherals currently available on the market connect to the personal computer through USB ports. Up to 14 or more types of electronic devices, each with different functions, can be bought today from just about anywhere, while a typical computer only has two to four standard USB sockets. Thus, if you want to use more than four peripherals at the same time, you will quickly realize that your computer is out of ports. [ADMARK= ... [read more >>]
	16 July 2008, 08:59GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

To Make More Efficient Solar Cells, One Has to Focus
	Solar cells are currently viewed as the star of alternative energy sources, being able to produce electric energy without the disadvantage of releasing greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the Earth's atmosphere as burning fossil fuels does. Sunlight provides an incredible amount of energy per square meter, although harnessing that energy has proven somehow difficult considering the low efficiency of current solar cell designs. ... [read more >>]
	11 July 2008, 02:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Germany Goes Green. Target: 25,000 Megawatts from Wind Power
	According to the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, quoting the Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee, Germany will build up to 30 offshore wind farms by the end of 2030 in order to increase the contribution of the renewable energy sources to the total amount of power produced by the country, thus cutting a significant mass of greenhouse gases currently emitted while generating energy by burning fossil fuels. The wind farms wi ... [read more >>]
	07 July 2008, 04:08GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Save Power: Give Electronics a Break
	The summer is here, the weather is getting hotter and you've already had to switch on the A/C – however, with the recent surge of all prices including electricity and... well, everything else, saving energy has become not so much a trend, as a must for most of us. And given that we're headed for a very hot summer, turning off the air conditioning and just lying very still close to a ventilator or sleeping in the pool or ... [read more >>]
	05 June 2008, 05:41GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Bright Supernovae May Be Explained through Quark Stars
	Similar to neutron stars, quark stars are believed to be highly compact stellar objects that have been created during the supernova explosion of a relatively massive star. Theoretically, these objects may exist and could be formed only of elementary sub-atomic particles known as quarks, although none has been observed directly so far in the visible universe. Compared to a neutron star, quark stars are slightly more compact. For example, a ... [read more >>]
	04 June 2008, 03:27GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Intelligent Alien Races Could Communicate Through Neutrino Beams
	The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI for short, has been surveying transmissions that would hopefully turn out be a sign from ET for the last couple of decades or so, although nobody seems to be calling. Now scientists believe that this may have something to do with the fact that we're only looking at signals in the electromagnetic spectrum, which would not be such a logical approach for a more advanced alien civiliza ... [read more >>]
	22 May 2008, 04:38GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Nuclear Fusion Laser Heats Matter to 10 Million Celsius
	The Vulcan laser, currently the most powerful in the world, was used recently to test future nuclear fusion reactor concepts. During the experiments Vulcan was able to heat matter to a temperature of 10 million degrees Celsius, hotter than the surface of the Sun which is averaging about 5,500 degrees Celsius. The released energy was concentrated on a spot measuring only a few thousandths of a meter for a couple of fractions of a second. ... [read more >>]
	19 May 2008, 09:17GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Solar Cell Beats Efficiency Record
	When talking about solar cell efficiency, even a rise of 1 percent, which to some may appear modest, is reason for researchers to celebrate. The previous solar cell conversion efficiency was averaging 21.9 percent. A new world record for solar cell efficiency has been set on Wednesday by a team of researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology in collaboration with colleagues from the Fraunhofer Institute, who achieved a relative ... [read more >>]
	17 May 2008, 05:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Google to Adopt Solid-State Drives Across Its Server Line-Up
	Google is allegedly planning to make the transition from conventional hard-disk drives to the more reliable and energy-efficient solid-state drives. The change will affect most of the search engine's servers located at Google's US headquarters sometime during the second quarter of the year. According to a news report issued by Chinese tech website Digitimes, Google will purchase solid-state drives from Intel. The dr ... [read more >>]
	12 May 2008, 07:03GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Oil Peak and the Renewable Abiotic Petroleum
	We are living in a civilization based on oil. It is an issue that makes us extremely vulnerable. That's because of the global "Peak Oil." The oil production follows a bell curve. Its peak is the moment when oil has been 50% depleted. After the peak, oil production decreases while its price starts to go up. Many scientists, bankers and investors consider that 2005 was the year of global Peak Oil. US domestic oil ... [read more >>]
	10 May 2008, 06:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Light Sticks Work
	What's better than having a light source that uses neither batteries nor light bulbs, gives off an intense light emission, lights up no matter if it’s held underwater or in plain air and can be carried wherever you may go? If I were to answer this question I would say nothing. Light sticks have been put on the market more than two decades ago and have since become the main attraction for children, experienced underwater divers and cam ... [read more >>]
	29 April 2008, 08:44GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Lightning and Humans
	There are three natural phenomena accompanying the storms that fascinated and frightened human mind since prehistory, when explanation for such powerful natural phenomenon were attributed to gods and spirits. The thunderbolt is an electric discharge accompanied by a vivid light and a powerful sound, which occurs between two clouds or between a cloud and the ground or objects on the ground. The thunder is a noise associated wi ... [read more >>]
	12 April 2008, 07:29GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Walking Robot Sets New Distance Record: 9 Kilometers
	The unofficial record set by the Cornell Ranger robot on April 3rd at Barton Hall, by making 45 laps around the running track, more precisely 5.6 miles or 9 kilometers. The robot would have probably continued to keep on going, however at some point it stopped and fell on his back probably due to low power supplied from its battery, it's not yet clear, said the Cornell Ranger robot development team. "We need to do some careful ... [read more >>]
	08 April 2008, 09:19GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Nanotubes Could Convert Radiation Directly into Electricity
	Usually, nuclear reactors use multiple stages to turn radiation into electrical energy. For example, first, uranium nuclei are split through nuclear fission, when energy is released in the form of heat and additional radiation. The heat resulted from the nuclear reaction is then used to turn water into steam, which is pumped into steam turbines that convert the thermal energy of the steam into mechanical work. The rotation of the turbine e ... [read more >>]
	28 March 2008, 05:16GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers View Replay of Ancient Supernova
	With the help of light echoes, astronomers have been recently able to measure the brightness of a supernova explosion which took place about 400 years ago. The so-called SNR 0509-67.5 supernova remnant is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy in the near vicinity of our own Milky Way. While the original light of the explosion would have been observed from the surface of the Earth 400 years ago, part of the light traveled towards ... [read more >>]
	20 March 2008, 12:25GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Energy Drinks Destroy Your Teeth
	Man, you drink some energy beverage and you work like a machine. At least, this is what advertising says. Science presents another story about drinking too much caffeine. And a new research published in the journal "General Dentistry" shows that energy drinks can make your teeth look like those of a meth consumer. And the consume of energy drinks is continuously rising... Previous studies showed that acidity in beverages like ... [read more >>]
	14 March 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Stellarator Type Nuclear Fusion Reactor Beginning to Take Shape
	The first phase of the build of the world's largest nuclear fusion reactor experiment, Wendelstein 7-X, has been completed with the installation of the first two half-modules, thus achieving 20 percent of the assembly of the inner core. All essential components of the reactor are ready for assembly, but even so, the project is scheduled for completion in no less than six years or so. The designated location for the Wendelstein 7- ... [read more >>]
	14 March 2008, 07:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Daylight Saving is Useless
	Daylight saving appeared originally in ancient times, but the first recorded proposal for the use of this convention came from Benjamin Franklin, during a visit in France, when he proposed that Parisians could make a more economic use of candles if they were to wake up earlier in the morning. In 1905, William Willett invented daylight saving time, or DST, also known in the United Kingdom as the summer time, and two years later he ... [read more >>]
	05 March 2008, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Scientists Get One Step Closer to Creating the First Nuclear Fusion Reactor
	Bringing the Sun to Earth, that's what nuclear physicists dream of today. The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, the inefficiency of renewable power sources and dangers posed by the use of nuclear fissionable fuels point to only one future energy-production solution, nuclear fusion. More than two thirds of the Earth surface is covered with the substance containing the fuel required to power such nuclear reactor, and if developed, the ... [read more >>]
	03 March 2008, 05:09GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Solar Cells of the Future Will Mimic Moth Eyes!
	The idea of solar cells is so cool! They would come with such cheap energy, and everybody would be a Captain Planet fighting pollution. But what many people still do not understand is that they are so inefficient at this moment. A new research published in "Applied Physics Letters" could come with a step further to the moment when solar energy will be most of the energy we use daily. "Some of that inefficiency is due to ... [read more >>]
	23 February 2008, 06:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Do Rockets and Missiles Work?
	Missiles were first launched 8 centuries ago by the Chinese, during their battles with the Mongols. The first Chinese missiles were propelled by gunpowder. When arrows and spears were stuck to it, the missile made a dreadful weapon. The Mongols were so impressed, that they made their own missiles employed against the Arabs. Arabs too assumed them and, from the Arabs, they passed into Europe. In 1429, the French troops led by Joanne of ... [read more >>]
	17 January 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How to Use Solar Energy
	We are consuming the fossil fuels at a rate that will deplete them by the end of this century. For a long time, it has been thought that atomic energy would be a solution, but the Cernobyl event warned about the immense risks coming with this source of energy. Solar energy would be a more secure and no-cost alternative. The Sun, like any star, produces energy through atomic fusion. Atmosphere reflects about 30 % of the sun ra ... [read more >>]
	15 January 2008, 06:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

4 Facts About Geysers
	Islanders blamed them on the witchcraft, the Inca on the spirits of the ancestors. Geysers are a type of hot spring that erupt periodically, ejecting a column of hot water and steams into the air. Their emergence needs a combination of factors (water, heat and fortuitous plumbing) that exists in only a few places on Earth, and so they are fairly rare phenomena. Moreover, they are instable and short-lived. There are about 1,000 wo ... [read more >>]
	09 January 2008, 08:14GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

What Really Happens When Water Ice Melts?
	Who would be so insane even to study such an effect? Well apparently, chemical companies find no laughing matter regarding such processes and are barely waiting to get their hands on the model followed by the water molecules during the melting process of ice. What appears to be as a well known natural process for most of us has, in fact, no mathematical model describing the behavior of the molecules inside the solid water crystal. Thus ... [read more >>]
	09 January 2008, 06:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How to Get Energy From Wind, Rivers, Tides and Waves
	Windmills have been used even since the 6th century in Persia (Iran). Unlike the later type used in Europe, this one had a vertical ax with sails which worked on horizontal supports. Mill stones from the inferior end ground the cereals for getting flour. The first mention of a windmill in Europe is that of Bury St Edmunds from Suffolk, England. The first European windmills were the type pillar mill. The sails rotated on an al ... [read more >>]
	07 January 2008, 16:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Low Energy Bulbs Could Cause Severe Headaches!
	Do you want to save the Earth? Then, use energy-saving light bulbs: they consume one quarter of the energy of conventional light bulbs. They save 2,000 times their weight in greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide). This would worth their five times higher price. But watch out: this could bring you a severe headache! While the British Migraine Action Association warns that fluorescent bulbs have triggered in 2007 epilepsy seizure in a ... [read more >>]
	04 January 2008, 05:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Life and Energy
	We associate energy with movement, but any living organism needs energy for fueling life processes, even long ones, like growth and reproduction. On Earth, the whole life energy comes from the Sun. Plants capture the Sun's energy, animals eat plants as food. Plants can store the sun energy in chemicals. The other organisms take the energy indirectly from the plants, through parasitism (fungi) or eating them (plants). Other can eat ... [read more >>]
	03 January 2008, 10:38GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

World's Largest Building: Crystal Island!
	This construction will match the size of Mother Russia and its thirst for size and territories. The work on the Russia Tower started in September 2007, and – once finished – will be Europe's tallest building, being 612 meters (2,008 feet) high. But the new project, called Crystal Island, will overshadow this, as it will be the world’s biggest building when finished. The man in charge with the design is the same British architect ... [read more >>]
	28 December 2007, 05:51GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Where and Why Did Skating Appear?
	The oldest skate crime and Tonya Harding may have lived 5,000 years ago. This is the age of the most ancient archaeological proofs of bone skates (carved of animal bones), which are also the oldest human powered transporting means that have been discovered so far. But, the reason that made people start skating on ice is still not very clear, as ancient bone skates have been discovered in various locations spread across Central an ... [read more >>]
	27 December 2007, 03:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

European Servers Will Eat Up More than the US Ones
	Taking care of the environment has become the year's trend. We have energy-aware devices to shut down in order to preserve power, and more recently, we have entire datacenters fueled by Zero Carbon-Dioxide energy back in Iceland. US is not one of the countries to be proud of when it comes to energy savings. A recent study commissioned by AMD that compares the energy consumption countrywide has unveiled a different story. Jonathan K ... [read more >>]
	12 December 2007, 11:41GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Google Says “Lights Out!” to Germany and Austria
	No, it has nothing to do with the recent allegations that the respective Wikipedia pages have Nazi supporting content, it has nothing to do with the fact that the two countries speak the same language, it is an attempt to raise awareness of a nationwide energy conservation, called "Licht aus! Für unser Klima" or "Lights out! For our climate". What actually happened is that the Google homepage had a black ba ... [read more >>]
	10 December 2007, 07:26GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Is It Dangerous to Your Health to Mix Energy Drinks with Alcohol?
	Energy drinks help you pump more alcohol than usual. But this does nothing more than to increase the effect of alcohol, as revealed by a novel study made at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Student subjects who mixed alcohol with energy drinks were twice more vulnerable to injuries, and twice more likely to get into the hospital or ride with a drunk driver, compared to those who did not drink alcohol accompanied by energy dri ... [read more >>]
	08 November 2007, 05:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Energy Drinks Can Be Dangerous for the Heart
	Energy drinks are advertised as if they were the ones pulling the weights when you go to the gym. Some of their chemicals can even induce the contrary effect of what you really want. And a new research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2007 and carried at the Wayne State University showed that blood pressure and heart rate spurred in healthy adults drinking two cans of a popular mark of energy drink daily. ... [read more >>]
	07 November 2007, 03:44GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

High Energy Cosmic Rays Are Fueled by Fossil Magnetic Cocoons
	What speeds cosmic rays close to the velocity of light? Huge magnetic cocoons linked to galaxies whose black holes are inactive could solve the puzzle: the way the energy rich cosmic rays reach Earth, when normally they should have long finished their resources. Cosmic rays represent high-speed atomic nuclei, mainly hydrogen, coming mostly from objects within our galaxy, like supernova remains and pulsars. Still, the ultra-hig ... [read more >>]
	23 October 2007, 05:45GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Is This the Solar House of the Future?
	The electricity bill gives you a headache every time. What if it could simply disappear? After all, the Sun offers its energy for free and we use it all the time. The solution could be the solar houses, that heat water, dry laundry and power an electric car for free, with the help of sunlight. MIT students have created an entirely solar-powered house, called the Solar7, for the Department of Energy's annual Solar Decathl ... [read more >>]
	18 October 2007, 05:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Solar-Powered Jacket Charges Your Devices While Outside
	You just love drinking your coffee outside on some bar’s sunny terrace. But what do you do if your iPod’s or your mobile phone’s battery is low? Well, now technosexuals (or ‘technological geeks’, if you like) that love to spend time in open air will see their dream come true. This is better than the solar powered backpacks and solar-paneled LCD mobile phones from Motorola. The Italian fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna Holditalia ... [read more >>]
	03 October 2007, 07:15GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dell Loves Nature, Goes for Carbon Neutrality
	Dell announced a new rather radical plan of reducing its environmental footprint by the way of a new partnership with its customers in order to build a global scale community dedicated to the improvement of the environment. This program makes Dell the first major computer systems manufacturer and vendor to launch such an extensive carbon neutralizing strategy. This new environmental strategy is aimed at neutralizing the carbon emissions ... [read more >>]
	27 September 2007, 09:22GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Battery of the Future: Paper Made, in Whatever Shape You Want and Fueled by Sweat, Urine and Blood!
	A battery is in many cases that which impedes the size of many gadgets and implantable medical devices from dwindling. That's why the battery of the future is lightweight, ultra thin and completely flexible. The battery of the future has just been designed by a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The new model is completely integrated and can be printed like paper, rolled, twisted, folded, or cut into any desired shape withou ... [read more >>]
	06 September 2007, 06:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Sun Goes for Efficient Data Centers
	Sun Microsystems is keeping pace with the global computer related industry of upgrading and overall transforming the data centers into more energy efficient places. The company announced that three of its data centers that were recently built in Santa Clara, California; Blackwater, United Kingdom and Bangalore, India, are using last generation energy efficient computing and cooling systems. The largest of the three data center ... [read more >>]
	22 August 2007, 10:35GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Breakthrough: A Time Machine, at Last?
	Time traveling is being transferred from fiction to reality. A new time machine concept could accomplish an old dream mankind has always had, enabling future generations to travel into the past. The new approach is not based on exotic, theoretical forms of matter, but still requires technology that we do not have today, and major issues would be the stability of machines traveling back in time. Gravity, bonding matter with spaceand tim ... [read more >>]
	21 August 2007, 05:12GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Energy Generators for Laptops
	There are two classical ways to power up and use a laptop. The first and the most comfortable is to plug it into the main power grid and compute happily ever after, or until the next power outage. The second method is to draw power from the internal laptop battery and this is the most used method for the "on the move" computing. While powering a mobile computing solution from the main power grid affects and nullifies th ... [read more >>]
	17 August 2007, 08:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Computing with $99
	A desktop computer for just $99. This is what the company behind the Zonbu desktop PC is offering and promoting. $99 for a desktop may seem petty change but there is a catch: the unit comes with no monitor, mouse, keyboard or optical DVD drive. On the bright side, Zonbu offers from the start the full versions of more than 20 popular types of Linux based open source programs ranging from email clients and browsers to office applications. ... [read more >>]
	15 August 2007, 05:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Green Grid Perspective
	The Green Grid is an association of several high-tech companies, most of which are active in the computer hardware manufacturing segment, that was created as a group that could lay the base for industry wide accepted practices, metrics and technologies that should help improve data center energy efficiency. Since its conception more than a year ago, the Green Grid grew to have more than 80 members, not only from the computer i ... [read more >>]
	10 August 2007, 05:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Google: "Turn Off Your Monitor Now!"
	Google gets involved into all kinds of campaigns and some time ago, it announced that the search giant fights to save energy in order to reduce the climate change. This is quite a commendable attempt started by Google and it's obvious the Mountain View company needs help to reach its final goals. In the past, it was rumored that a potential black version of the Google's official search page would reduce the energy usage ... [read more >>]
	10 August 2007, 03:50GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Going Green or Being Efficient?
	The green trend that extended through the entire world did not jump over the computer industry and concerns about power consumption and energy efficiency were felt primary by the processor and mobile computer manufacturers. While the processors are coming with all kinds of technologies to make them run in a more energy efficient manner, laptop and notebook manufacturers are devising new ways of increasing battery life while using RoHS[ADMA ... [read more >>]
	09 August 2007, 11:25GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Energy Efficiency, Where?!
	Most hardware manufacturers and vendors, from processors to hard disk drives manufacturers, are claiming that their products are going green, which means better energy efficiency while keeping performance at a high level. While this may very well be the truth, the high power to performance ratios are not enough to stop the increasing power consumption that is currently registered across data centers and other places where computer systems ... [read more >>]
	06 August 2007, 05:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Do Humans Have Such High Running Endurance?
	We tend to consider us some helpless creatures. We do have weak muscles and lack fangs when compared to the apes and monkeys. But many ignore one issue: our ability of walking on land surpasses that of any primate: we can sustain a steady 20 km (12 mi) /h over long distances (it is, of course, a genetic ability developed by training, and we won't see this in sedentary people). This ability enabled early humans to hunt on the Afri ... [read more >>]
	31 July 2007, 06:16GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Maglev Wind Turbine, Producing Electricity from Wind
	Wind power is the fastest growing energy source today and the most efficient in the world. Its long-term technical potential is believed to be five times current global energy consumption, or 40 times current electricity demand. However, there is one disadvantage, the fact that conventional wind mills take up a lot of space. In fact, in order to produce the current electricity demand, 2% of the entire land area on Earth would ... [read more >>]
	30 July 2007, 06:30GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Space Solar Power Fans: The Pentagon Wants Your Ideas!
	The Pentagon opened up a web-based system for soliciting ideas on space-based solar power and it wants as many citizens as possible to participate to the quest for potential applications of the technology, according to one of the officials leading the effort. Although the idea isn't exactly new, it's the first time the National Security Space Office, or NSSO, has conducted a study that relies heavily on Internet col ... [read more >>]
	26 July 2007, 06:33GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia