Archive for April 3rd, 2008

Actual camcorder not transparent. It’s the world’s smallest 1080p camcorder, states Sony, and it actually looks pretty capable unlike some other super-compact HD camcorders I’ve seen. It’s extremely small, obviously, but it’s got a nice lens with 10x optical zoom and a 2.7-inch LCD screen. It does face recognition and assigns more bits to that location […]


Actual camcorder not transparent.
It’s the world’s smallest 1080p camcorder, states Sony, and it actually looks pretty capable unlike some other super-compact HD camcorders I’ve seen. It’s extremely small, obviously, but it’s got a nice lens with 10x optical zoom and a 2.7-inch LCD screen. It does face recognition and assigns more bits to that location of the frame, which is nice.

I don’t really like that it only records to Sony’s Memory Stick Pro DUOs, but did you really expect anything else from Sony? That’s always been their modus operandi: great product with collateral damage in the form of memory sticks, bad drivers, DRM, proprietary programs, and so on. I don’t think they’re going to change up any time soon.

Via [crunchgear]

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Woot! has the Apple iPod nano 8GB available for $134.99 refurbished, which is a whopping $34.01 cheaper than the Apple Store refurbished model, which sells for $169 (and $64.01 cheaper than the $199 for a factory-new one). [Woot!]


Via [Gizmodo]

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Apparently scientists (and some of our readers, surely) have known that we have the ability to grow oil for years, and not in the grow-corn-make-oil kind of way. The Brazilian Copaifera langsdorfii can be tapped (ala maple syrup) for a natural diesel fuel that requires only easy filtering before being poured into a truck. (This picture is of the tree’s cells.) The catch? The diesel only has a shelf-life of about 3 months.

So how many trees would it take to match the oil output of, say, Saudi Arabia? Check our stats after the jump.

Saudi Arabia Oil Output Daily
11 Million Barrels

Output of One Acre of Copaifera langsdorfii Yearly

25 Barrels

Number of Acres Needed To Match Saudi Arabia Yearly Output

182,500,000 (Total Trees: 18,250,000,000)

Number of Acres in North America Alone

6,050,697,738

Number of Acres in North America Used For Corn (2007)

90.5 million

Amount of American Corn Spent on Ethanol

15% and growing

Frequency Corn Needs Replanting
Every Season

Frequency Copaifera langsdorfii Needs Replanting

Every 90 Seasons

UPDATE: Gallons of Oil In One Gallon of Diesel

7 (thanks lailoken!)

Some interesting metrics to consider. On a worldwide scale, it doesn’t seem all that impossible to alleviate oil shortages with plants…and the natural carbon offsets seem worthwhile. It’s just too bad these trees take 15-20 years to mature (by which time we plan on flying around in a hydrogen Jetsonmobile).

Is anyone out there a specialist on the topic who could enlighten us in the comments? [abc via treehugger]

Additional Sources
: [world factbook] [nass] [yahoo] [popular mechanics]


Via [Gizmodo]

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