Envirobank’s “cash for cans” reverse vending machines hold up to 3000 containers and accept PET (#1),HDPE (#2) and PVC (#3) plastic, brown, clear and green glass and aluminum cans. Deposit your recyclables in these and you’ll get credits for discount shopping.

Pretty nice incentive to recycle your goods huh? It may not give out snacks, but Envirobank claims that their machines cut CO2 emissions, reduce waste disposal and collection costs, and even provide advertising and fund raising opportunities for those who need it.

Vending Machine from Ellie Harrison on Vimeo.
So the other day we saw a vending machine that quenches your thirst during an emergency. The British now have their own vending machine that does one better. It dispenses snacks when the BBC reports bad news about the economy.

Why, we would be fed all day here in the US. I can get behind this kind of machine. The whole deal is actually an art project designed and created by Ellie Harrison as part of her residency at the Plymouth College of Art. The monitor on the right tracks the BBC’s RSS feed, and whenever doom and gloom news stories hit, you get a snack.

As you may or may not know Japan is prone to many an earthquake. Japan’s major cities have an extended underground transportation system. So when a quake happens, people could be potentially trapped for long periods of time and suffer from dehydration.

That’s where these updated vending machines come into play. During an emergency, they’ll give out free drinks. But…Won’t people just turn into A-holes and start fighting over the drinks?

It’s one thing to get lost in a car, a town, a city. It’s something else entirely to get lost in a supermarket while driving a shopping cart. Apparently Grocery stores are more dangerous and confusing than any of us knew. Especially to the elderly. It’s a real concern. They get confused.

One minute you’re pushing your cart by the oatmeal, hitting a few stock boys with your cane, bitching about the government, talkin’ about the good old days when bread was 50 cents, when next thing you know you’re in the frozen food section with a pregnancy test in your 80 year old hand and a fresh fish sticking out of your purse. Wth?

General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs. I had to read that twice myself. It’s just a laboratory success for now, until it can be made to work in products that can be mass-produced and affordable.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

See that picture above? That’s Cady. She died at age 10 in a car accident. A mad scientist by the name of Dr. Panayiotis Zavos infused her DNA into a cow’s egg to study human cloning.

Dr Zavos (Isn’t that a creepy mad scientist name?) assures the public that the human/cow hybrid model is for study only, not for world domination or anything. He says that he would never implant anything but human to human tissue, even though Cady’s mother would allow it. But a documentary filmmaker who witnessed his work says that Zavos has implanted 11 other cloned 100% human embryos into four women who are prepared to give birth to the first human clone. The procedure is a criminal offense in Britain and illegal in many other countries.

An acoustics engineer named John Stuart Reid from the UK, is creating a machine that does the unthinkable. He claims it will enable people to “read” the “dolphin language.” The device is called the Cymascope, and it converts the sounds dolphins make when communicating into images, which can then be mapped into a sort of dictionary, then later “read” by people trying to understand what that dolphin is going on about.

I’m guessing half of the chatter is LOL and OMG or how they totally owned that human. The Cymascope uses a pool of water monitored by a video camera, along with some sand, brass plates and a violin bow. It sounds pretty wacky.

They are always coming up with more ways to sell us things. Now a new type of billboard is on the way, displaying ads suited to your individual tastes as you by. The odds are pretty good that a fair amount of these ads will be for fast food and gadgets.

You can thank Yahoo Japan, who plans to install billboards with not only cameras, but also facial analysis tech to identify your age and sex. They will also display content like news and weather. I wonder if that facial analysis will tell teens they need Clearasil.

Typically a battery functions with lithium ions flowing between a negatively charged anode, usually graphite, and the positively charged cathode, usually cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate. But three years ago, an MIT team reported that it had engineered viruses that could build an anode by coating themselves with cobalt oxide and gold and self-assembling to form a nanowire. The “virus batteries” have the energy capacity and power performance similar to rechargeable batteries.

The prototype battery is a coin battery, but the idea is that cell and larger batteries could be made from this process and that one day it will power cars, boats and everything else. As it stands right now, it can go at least 100 charges before performance goes down. That will change of course.

In previous reports from Greenpeace, HP, Lenovo, and Dell haven’t done very badly, but the trio has failed to meet Greenpeaces expectations this time. They made promises they could not keep. All three had promised to eliminate PVC and brominated flame retardants in their products by the end of this year, but now they will apparently not be able to meet that deadline.

The only one to offer up a new deadline is Lenovo, who says they will now do it by the end of 2010. On the other end of the spectrum, Philips has jumped from 15th place to 4th, largely due to new recycling initiatives.

A world where gadgets are powered by blood? It could happen sooner then you think. It won’t be long until our gadgets are full fledged living entities soon after that. Maybe. In a not too distant future Piezoelectric nanowires may reside in our blood vessels. They would use the energy created by blood flow to power gadgets. Stuff like pacemakers, iPods, anything designers can dream up really.

It sounds pretty amazing, but the reality is that it may cause some sort of new diseases in our bodies or make us more susceptible to them. These things never work out the way you think. If it happens at all, it won’t be for a long long time hopefully.

The idea of hackers bringing down the entire US power grid is scary. Most people think that this scenario strictly belongs in sci-fi movies and that it couldn’t happen, but according to security analysts, the threat is real. The threat is a real possibility due to the use of smart grids involving two million devices, which are largely wireless, sending data back and forth between power stations and homes.

Researchers at Seattle based IOActive claim that they have proven that the devices are vulnerable to virus attack by hacking. Equipment worth just $500 was enough to create a worm virus which spread rapidly across the network. Had that been a real hacker, there would have been some serious damage.

When you think about the homeless, you likely think about wool blankets, shopping carts and cardboard box shelters. Add the cell phone to that list. According to advocates who work with the district’s homeless, the proportion of homeless people who own and use a cellphone is 30% to 40%.

It seems bizarre, but the gadget once considered a luxury, is now being used by the homeless to keep up with food stamp programs, housing applications and checking emails. There’s also the obvious need for the 911 feature. It makes sense, as a pay as you go phone with 200 minutes can cost about $20 or $30. It’s a lifeline.

We may never be able to swim as fast as fish, but guys like Ted Ciamillo are hard at work to make sure we can at least get second place. The Greek engineer has come up with a contraption called Lunocet, which is basically a dolphin-inspired 2.5 pound monofin.

It’s lightweight and made of carbon fiber and fiberglass, and spans almost a meter. It’s capable of propelling swimmers almost 33 miles per hour, converting nearly 80 percent of the applied energy into thrust. The appendage is efficient, lightweight and fast. And can propel swimmers almost twice the speed of Michael Phelps.

What you are looking at in the pic above is a virtual reality helmet that recreates sights, smells, sounds and even tastes from far-flung destinations. Created by British scientists, the device will allow users a life-like experience of places such as Kenya’s Masai Mara while never leaving home. You could greet friends and family on the other side of the world as though they were present in the same room. Previously, scientists have only had success with virtual reality technology recreating sound and vision. This helmet named the Virtual Cocoon could change all that.

The prototype helmet connects wirelessly to a computer which feeds information about a virtual world or another part of the real world. It features a high definition high dynamic screen that produces pictures ten times darker, or 30 times brighter than the conventional television. A tube is connected to a box of chemicals which releases smells under the wearer’s nose, while a similar device can spray flavors directly into the mouth and provide a texture of sensation.