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Gadget recycling dumps lead in Chinese schools
JEROEN BOUMAN/PANOS
Technology CHINA’S HEAVY METAL OVERDOSE
CALIFORNIA has told car makers to start producing hybrid vehicles that can be plugged into the electricity mains. Last week the state’s Air Resources Board ruled that makers must produce at least 58,000 “plug-in” hybrid vehicles for sale in California between 2012 and 2014. Regular hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius use an engine to charge their batteries. Plug-in hybrids go one better as their batteries can be topped up from the mains, cutting fuel consumption further. Under the ruling, car makers have the option to produce 25,000 zero-emission vehicles instead, powered by fuel cells, say. Plug-in cars are the more viable option, says Luke Tonachel of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. “These cars are ready to roll,” he says.
760 thousand patent applications lie unexamined at the US Patent and Trademark Office as applications outpace the hiring of examiners
–All the world’s e-waste–
Social networks in three dimensions SOURCE: US GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE
California powers up plug-in cars
Wong analysed dust at locations around Guiyu, a Chinese village heavily involved in e-waste recycling. He found that dust from roads next to e-waste workshops had 370 times more lead than samples from roads 30 kilometres away (Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es071873x). He also found that the lead levels in Guiyu’s school grounds were up to six times the accepted limit for Canadian schools. “Hopefully studies like this will lead to the European Union placing circuit boards firmly on the hazardous waste list,” says Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, a toxic waste watchdog based in Seattle, Washington. Wong had previously found elevated levels of toxic organic chemicals in the breast milk of women living near e-waste sites in China.
The top five technology brands people around the world say they have issues with
Cellphones could double up as cardiac defibrillators in an emergency. Ben Saketkhou of Boca Raton, Florida, has filed a US patent (2007/0270909) on a clamshell phone equipped with electrodes. When flipped open and placed on the chest, it delivers a shock to the heart. The phone also sends its GPS coordinates to the emergency services. Just don’t hit the wrong button when you’re chatting.
1 2 3 4 5
General Motors
SOCIAL networking sites are already pretty popular. So how do you improve on the internet’s hottest web offerings? The answer could be to make them three-dimensional. Start-up company Vivaty of Menlo Park, California, is creating a hybrid of conventional social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and virtual worlds
like Second Life. Rather than filling a web page with photos, a list of hobbies and their favourite software applications, as users of Facebook do today, Vivaty users will get access to a virtual room. They can adorn the walls with photos, watch a virtual television that plays YouTube or invite friends over to join them. Instead of chatting by sending each other messages, Vivaty users will be able to speak “in person” via 3D avatars. Vivaty will be offered to Facebook users this year.
GIZMO
GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?
SOURCE: BRANDCHANNEL.COM
Think about this next time you upgrade your PC: toxic metals from old electronic goods are finding their way into school grounds in China. Seventy per cent of the world’s discarded phones and computers are exported to China. Most are processed in family-run workshops, where the circuit boards are ripped out of old equipment and heated over open fires. This melts the solder, allowing individual components to be removed and resold. The bare circuit boards are then burned. But as Ming Wong of Hong Kong Baptist University points out, circuit boards contain a lot of heavy metals. Burning them releases fumes containing metals such as lead and copper, which pose a danger to people’s health. Lead damages the central nervous system and lungs if inhaled, for example.
Almost any surface can be made touch-sensitive using a camera that monitors the colour of different parts of your fingernails. Pressing down your fingertip shifts the distribution of blood, making parts of the nail lighter and other parts darker. This has allowed researchers at the University of Nottingham, UK, to build a touchsensitive “rock” that purrs when stroked and growls when grabbed.
“When I hit the water, I feel like a rocket” American swimmer Michael Phelps on Speedo’s LZR Racer, a tight-fitting, ultrasonically bonded, seam-free, whole-body swimsuit that helped wearers break 13 swimming records in the past month. Critics say the unfair advantage afforded by the suit renders records meaningless (Los Angeles Times, 27 March)
www.newscientist.com
5 April 2008 | NewScientist | 23
Technology CHINA’S HEAVY METAL OVERDOSE
CALIFORNIA has told car makers to start producing hybrid vehicles that can be plugged into the electricity mains. Last week the state’s Air Resources Board ruled that makers must produce at least 58,000 “plug-in” hybrid vehicles for sale in California between 2012 and 2014. Regular hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius use an engine to charge their batteries. Plug-in hybrids go one better as their batteries can be topped up from the mains, cutting fuel consumption further. Under the ruling, car makers have the option to produce 25,000 zero-emission vehicles instead, powered by fuel cells, say. Plug-in cars are the more viable option, says Luke Tonachel of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. “These cars are ready to roll,” he says.
760 thousand patent applications lie unexamined at the US Patent and Trademark Office as applications outpace the hiring of examiners
–All the world’s e-waste–
Social networks in three dimensions SOURCE: US GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE
California powers up plug-in cars
Wong analysed dust at locations around Guiyu, a Chinese village heavily involved in e-waste recycling. He found that dust from roads next to e-waste workshops had 370 times more lead than samples from roads 30 kilometres away (Environmental Science and Technology, DOI: 10.1021/es071873x). He also found that the lead levels in Guiyu’s school grounds were up to six times the accepted limit for Canadian schools. “Hopefully studies like this will lead to the European Union placing circuit boards firmly on the hazardous waste list,” says Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, a toxic waste watchdog based in Seattle, Washington. Wong had previously found elevated levels of toxic organic chemicals in the breast milk of women living near e-waste sites in China.
The top five technology brands people around the world say they have issues with
Cellphones could double up as cardiac defibrillators in an emergency. Ben Saketkhou of Boca Raton, Florida, has filed a US patent (2007/0270909) on a clamshell phone equipped with electrodes. When flipped open and placed on the chest, it delivers a shock to the heart. The phone also sends its GPS coordinates to the emergency services. Just don’t hit the wrong button when you’re chatting.
1 2 3 4 5
General Motors
SOCIAL networking sites are already pretty popular. So how do you improve on the internet’s hottest web offerings? The answer could be to make them three-dimensional. Start-up company Vivaty of Menlo Park, California, is creating a hybrid of conventional social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and virtual worlds
like Second Life. Rather than filling a web page with photos, a list of hobbies and their favourite software applications, as users of Facebook do today, Vivaty users will get access to a virtual room. They can adorn the walls with photos, watch a virtual television that plays YouTube or invite friends over to join them. Instead of chatting by sending each other messages, Vivaty users will be able to speak “in person” via 3D avatars. Vivaty will be offered to Facebook users this year.
GIZMO
GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?
SOURCE: BRANDCHANNEL.COM
Think about this next time you upgrade your PC: toxic metals from old electronic goods are finding their way into school grounds in China. Seventy per cent of the world’s discarded phones and computers are exported to China. Most are processed in family-run workshops, where the circuit boards are ripped out of old equipment and heated over open fires. This melts the solder, allowing individual components to be removed and resold. The bare circuit boards are then burned. But as Ming Wong of Hong Kong Baptist University points out, circuit boards contain a lot of heavy metals. Burning them releases fumes containing metals such as lead and copper, which pose a danger to people’s health. Lead damages the central nervous system and lungs if inhaled, for example.
Almost any surface can be made touch-sensitive using a camera that monitors the colour of different parts of your fingernails. Pressing down your fingertip shifts the distribution of blood, making parts of the nail lighter and other parts darker. This has allowed researchers at the University of Nottingham, UK, to build a touchsensitive “rock” that purrs when stroked and growls when grabbed.
“When I hit the water, I feel like a rocket” American swimmer Michael Phelps on Speedo’s LZR Racer, a tight-fitting, ultrasonically bonded, seam-free, whole-body swimsuit that helped wearers break 13 swimming records in the past month. Critics say the unfair advantage afforded by the suit renders records meaningless (Los Angeles Times, 27 March)
www.newscientist.com
5 April 2008 | NewScientist | 23