Straight from the future, a very cool 3.5-watt OLED desk lamp. Solar-powered bags for Africa, a solar coffee maker, and an overview of green phone apps.
TOPLESS stands for "Thin Organic Polymeric Light Emitting Semi-conductor Surfaces" (not your first guess, eh?); it's a three year, £3.3M project financed 50% by the UK government and 50% by a consortium with the goal of creating "high quality white light generating single polymer, and efficient large area single pixel
device architectures." In the video here, you can see one of their very cool OLED Desk Lamp prototypes in action.
The “solar messenger bags, which have a removable flap with a solar panel that charges a built-in LED light and USB connection, are so far drawing fairly positive response from the locals African Hersman.”
“Nearly every day, we get news of a new cell phone app that will help us shop for eco-friendly this or that, figure our public transit route for us, help us find recycling outlets, or control the thermostat in
our home. There are hundreds of "green" apps, all claiming to make our lives more eco-friendly if we use them. So, are people using them and are they making anyone's life greener?”
“Finally, here's a pretty cool solar coffee maker. It was created by designer Gun Ho Lee, and while we have some doubts on how well it would work, it definitely looks better than most coffee makers...”