The Kyouei Design house has come up with the fantastically titled, Mobile Light, which incorporates a small solar panel bed at one end and a light at the other. Activation is automatically instigated once the ambient light levels fall below a certain threshold, which ensures the stored energy is put to good use quickly. Sure, it may not output enough of the bright stuff for you to make it down the stairs safely, read a book in bed or take a piss without dribbling all about the floor / toilet rim, but that’s what the main lights are for.

The Mobile Light says you are sophisticated, environmentally conscious, as well as being hot on interior design. The only reason you would want to portray these qualities is because your over styled bachelor pad has seen more lonely nights than you care to remember, and you’re hoping a hottie will say, “Gosh, your stylish, want to have sex?” It’s not gonna happen. [Kyouei Design]

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The Kyouei Design house has come up with the fantastically titled, Mobile Light, which incorporates a small solar panel bed at one end and a light at the other. Activation is automatically instigated once the ambient light levels fall below a certain threshold, which ensures the stored energy is put to good use quickly. Sure, it may not output enough of the bright stuff for you to make it down the stairs safely, read a book in bed or take a piss without dribbling all about the floor / toilet rim, but that’s what the main lights are for.

The Mobile Light says you are sophisticated, environmentally conscious, as well as being hot on interior design. The only reason you would want to portray these qualities is because your over styled bachelor pad has seen more lonely nights than you care to remember, and you’re hoping a hottie will say, “Gosh, your stylish, want to have sex?” It’s not gonna happen. [Kyouei Design]

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It may not require 1.21 gigawatts of electricity for you to spring forward tonight—that is, tomorrow at 2am—but a new study does show that rather than save energy, Daylight Saving Time may very well lead to added energy consumption, potentially costing the country many billions of dollars.

The great state of Indiana (biggup Hoosiers woohoo!) only started observing DST in the past few years, and not everyone in the state observes it yet. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara saw this as a unique opportunity to study electricity consumption, comparing usage before and after the transition, and even usage between those observing DST and those not.

The results of the study say that while lightbulbs are used less because of the added daylight, air-conditioning in the summer and heating in the fall are used more than they would with an hour less daylight. Overall, the cost to Indiana residents was around $8.6 million a year in higher energy bills, plus up to $5.3 million per year in “increased pollution costs.”

According to the Census Bureau, the population of Indiana is 6 million while the overall US population is 300 million. Even though energy demands certainly change from state to state, you can easily see that even if this trend extends across just the north half of the country, it could be plenty expensive.

The funny thing is, although the Energy Policy Act of 2005 added an extra month of DST to the calendar, nobody had actually studied whether or not DST saves energy. Feel free to introduce your own tragicomic energy-loving, science-hating, competency-shunning Texas Republican joke below—I’m just too weary of this crap to think of one. [USA Today]

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OK, Gigabyte’s Cool Rain Memory Cooler was never featured in Blade Runner, but just look at it. Surely, it must be the most awesome way to bring some cool to your memory. Using a water based cooling system, the Cool Rain unit, which we mentioned earlier, can accommodate memory in dual channel form, has a radiator that flips open, uses two heat spreader units that ensure efficient cooling and also has an obligatory blue LED, which gives that futuristic look we wished our sneakers would have. (Yes, L.A Lights rocked.) The Cool Rain unit supports both single and dual sided RAM, while the ultra slim pump and water tank add to its unnecessarily showy design. Naturally, we’d let Gigabyte’s Cool Rain fill our memories with watery cooling events any day. [Newlaunches]

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It may not require 1.21 gigawatts of electricity for you to spring forward tonight—that is, tomorrow at 2am—but a new study does show that rather than save energy, Daylight Saving Time may very well lead to added energy consumption, potentially costing the country many billions of dollars.

The great state of Indiana (biggup Hoosiers woohoo!) only started observing DST in the past few years, and not everyone in the state observes it yet. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara saw this as a unique opportunity to study electricity consumption, comparing usage before and after the transition, and even usage between those observing DST and those not.

The results of the study say that while lightbulbs are used less because of the added daylight, air-conditioning in the summer and heating in the fall are used more than they would with an hour less daylight. Overall, the cost to Indiana residents was around $8.6 million a year in higher energy bills, plus up to $5.3 million per year in “increased pollution costs.”

According to the Census Bureau, the population of Indiana is 6 million while the overall US population is 300 million. Even though energy demands certainly change from state to state, you can easily see that even if this trend extends across just the north half of the country, it could be plenty expensive.

The funny thing is, although the Energy Policy Act of 2005 added an extra month of DST to the calendar, nobody had actually studied whether or not DST saves energy. Feel free to introduce your own tragicomic energy-loving, science-hating, competency-shunning Texas Republican joke below—I’m just too weary of this crap to think of one. [USA Today]

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The image above isn’t something from James Cameron’s Aliens of the Deep. No, it’s actually an artist’s rendering of a spam e-mail with the subject, “HAVE YOU EVER HEARD THAT YOU ARE GETTING FAT?” The images below represent some of the most notorious code the world has seen, including PWS-Lineage, Stormy, MyDoom, Mytob, IRCBot and Netsky.

Artist Alex Dragulescu renders these eerie 3D images using the neutralized code of viruses, worms, spyware and Trojan horses. He gets the code from the security firm MessageLabs, which commissioned the works. Dragulescu explains:

API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity.

Why does this remind me so much of all those movies where scientists culture supposedly neutralized biological viruses, and the next thing you know 97% of the earth is dead? No, Alex, we wouldn’t like a signed, numbered digital copy of your virus collection on our hard-drive, no matter how safe you say it is! [Alex Dragulescu via Gizmodo AU]

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OK, Gigabyte’s Cool Rain Memory Cooler was never featured in Blade Runner, but just look at it. Surely, it must be the most awesome way to bring some cool to your memory. Using a water based cooling system, the Cool Rain unit, which we mentioned earlier, can accommodate memory in dual channel form, has a radiator that flips open, uses two heat spreader units that ensure efficient cooling and also has an obligatory blue LED, which gives that futuristic look we wished our sneakers would have. (Yes, L.A Lights rocked.) The Cool Rain unit supports both single and dual sided RAM, while the ultra slim pump and water tank add to its unnecessarily showy design. Naturally, we’d let Gigabyte’s Cool Rain fill our memories with watery cooling events any day. [Newlaunches]

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A user at Niketalk forums posted up these images of an iPod nano that went up in smoke this morning. The forum user, MJair was awoken at 2AM by the fire alarm going off. On a quick panicked inspection of the room, an “orange glow” near his PS3 was seen. That orange glow was nothing less than a fire, approximately a foot wide in length, which was said to be rapidly spreading. Checkout more images of the nano wreckage below.

Luckily, neither MJair or his PS3 were harmed, but the source of the fire seems to have been his first gen iPod nano. Unfortunately, the nano was not as robust as the iPhone that took on a semi, meaning its thin, MP3 playing days are now truly up. Unless we want to go the way of the nano, we really should replace the batteries in our own fire alarm. [Niketalk; Thanks, Vince]

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The image above isn’t something from James Cameron’s Aliens of the Deep. No, it’s actually an artist’s rendering of a spam e-mail with the subject, “HAVE YOU EVER HEARD THAT YOU ARE GETTING FAT?” The images below represent some of the most notorious code the world has seen, including PWS-Lineage, Stormy, MyDoom, Mytob, IRCBot and Netsky.

Artist Alex Dragulescu renders these eerie 3D images using the neutralized code of viruses, worms, spyware and Trojan horses. He gets the code from the security firm MessageLabs, which commissioned the works. Dragulescu explains:

API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity.

Why does this remind me so much of all those movies where scientists culture supposedly neutralized biological viruses, and the next thing you know 97% of the earth is dead? No, Alex, we wouldn’t like a signed, numbered digital copy of your virus collection on our hard-drive, no matter how safe you say it is! [Alex Dragulescu via Gizmodo AU]

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The European Space Agency is launching the first Automated Transfer Vehicle tomorrow in French Guyana. Though it looks like a satellite, the ATV, christened Jules Verne, is really an unmanned cargo-hauling robot capable of carting 7.6 tons of supplies and other astro-crap up from earth, and even tow the International Space Station itself to a higher orbit. And it’ll do a lot of this stuff with no guidance from the carbon units:

The most notable is the ATV’s automatic rendezvous and docking technology - the ship can find its own way to the station and attach itself without any human intervention.

Other vehicles are manually driven in—optical sensors on the ATV steer and line up the truck for docking, as you can see in the images below (taken from the amazing BBC News video you can jump to below). Yes, the ESA refers to this automated linkup of ATV and ISS as “mating.”
Note to self: Space stations are not safe hideouts during robot revolts.

Tomorrow’s launch will be carried off by an Ariane 5 rocket, and the double-decker-bus-sized ATV will be the heaviest payload ever carried by one. The maneuver will be trickier than usual, with the upper stage of the rocket igniting twice, to get it up there and then again to boost it safely over the Pacific Ocean. [BBC News]

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