A research team at Stanford has developed a refrigeration device the size of a thermos. What’s interesting is that it uses no electricity. Zip. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Instead, it contains some kind of coolant that becomes cold when it’s exposed to heat.

Details are scarce, but the units would be fairly cheap to produce at about $50. The price makes it an ideal way to deliver medicines and cold water to developing countries as well as having a bunch of other uses a bit more noble then your next camping trip. It’s a great breakthrough. All a user would need to cool any given thing is fire, which is readily available.

Firebox is known for their oddball gadgets. We’ve covered our share right here on this site. Turns out they’re offering a wrapping paper service along with their gadgets. Crap Wrap features brown parcel tape instead of clear tape, the gift will have uneven edges and paper that was cut very wrong. Just select that type of wrapping paper when you check out and you can send these off to someone special.

The idea is that these gifts won’t look so professionally wrapped. Which will make them think that you actually wrapped it. Because everyone knows you wrap gifts like a grade school kid overdosing on Ritalin, while using the awkward green-handled lefty scissors.

It’s that time again. Greenpeace has released their new Guide to Greener Electronics. Compared to last year, there are many changes. Some you might expect, some you may not have foreseen.

Some manufacturers went up on the scale, while others went down. Nokia is the standout at the top, right at the 7 out of 10 mark, but poor Nintendo… The Big N is once again stuck at 1 out of 10. How did Apple fare? They fail once again and drop to the 14th position out of 18 companies.

Nanotechnology strikes again, making technology seem like magic. Chemists from the University of Zurich have developed a new fabric that never gets wet. Never. Not even when completely submerged in water for two months. Nope. Not wet yet. The fabric is made of polyester fibers that are covered in a layer of 40-nanometer-wide silicone nanofilaments.

The nanofilaments are spiky and this causes the water to sit in a sphere above the fabric, while a permanent pocket of air is protected below. Think self-cleaning clothing, or truly spill resistant furniture. Another plus is that it reduces drag in water by 20%. So Michael Phelps better get himself a new swimsuit or be beaten by it.

Man with two first names and New Orleans resident, Ronald Richard was minding his own business, mowing the lawn when he felt a hard object hit him in the chest. In the exact spot where he had his Motorola RAZR. Richard later took off his sweater and discovered the .45-caliber slug. His phone had taken a bullet for him.

According to paramedics, the angle of the bullet and the cellphone made all the difference. Otherwise he would be dead or seriously injured. The interesting part is that Richard normally clips his cell phone to the hip pocket of his overalls. On that day he hooked it to the chest area of the overalls just over his heart. So, does he owe his life more to his overalls or his phone?

Usually our focus is on shiny new gadgetry, but let’s not forget gadgets of old. In this case a Vampire killing kit that has likely put to rest one hell of a lot of undead mo-fos in it’s time. This 200-year-old vampire killing kit was recently sold at an auction in Missisippi, where the bid ended at a staggering $14,850! That’s a pretty expensive way to kill a Vampire.

In the kit you get such useful tools as: A cross, Bible, Hand gun and silver bullets(In case you get confused and set out after a Werewolf), Holy oils, Holy water, Mirrors, Candles, Garlic, Wood and metal stakes. I’m not sure who the buyer was, but I’m guessing some vampire in Mississippi is in for some serious pain.

If you’ve been following the election coverage, you know by now that CNN played their hologram card. Jessica Yellin appeared Live from Chicago via hologram and talked with Wolf Blitzer. She shimmered slightly around the edges, and I can’t even tell you what she was saying because my nerd brain just kept repeating, “Help me Wolf Blitzer, you are my only hope.”

The technology was as creepy as we’ve always imagined and happening in the middle of vote counts, seemed totally weird and un-necessary. I believe they said that they used something like 44 HD cameras in a ring to get her every movement, all communicating with the studio cameras as well. Hey, if we’re gonna have holograms on election night, it’s better her then a grinning Emperor Palpatine.

In an attempt to keep in the good graces of the Justice Department, Google and Yahoo are looking into revising the deal for an advertising partnership between the two companies. An anonymous person close to the negotiations has said the revisions are drastically scaled back from the original talks.

The new deal would have an agreement term of just 2 years; much less than the original plan for 10 year. It also would limit the amount that Yahoo could earn from ads placed by Google to just 25 percent, which may help ensure Yahoo stays in the advertising game. Google advertisers would also have the option to opt-out of placing ads on Yahoo at their own discretion.

According to the TimesOnline the lack of High-tech garbage cans in UK cities have pedestrians complianing. But not for long. Next year hundreds of bomb-resistant bins with “blast intelligent technology” and LCD screens displaying the news will be placed throughout London’s financial district.

Many bins had to be removed during the 1980s at the height of the IRA bombings as bombs were regularly left in them. So, London has been without places to put their garbage for nearly 30 years? I thought that’s what the BBC was for? I kid. I kid. Though putting the news on garbage bins has a certain irony to it.

We’ve been hearing from a couple of sources that on Monday, Circuit City will be closing a whopping 155 stores and leaving the consumer electronics business for good. Most store closings are expected to be done by December 31, 2008. A full list of stores will apparently be revealed in the next few days. Not entirely unexpected, but still sad for those CC employees losing a job during the holiday season.

Toys ‘R’ Us long known as the place where a kid can be a kid, will now be offering iPods and Eee PCs. They aren’t new to electronics, but they’ve never been big on gadgetry in general, except for their Zune sales that began last year.

Now they will be offering iPods in an “iPod boutique,” where you can purchase shuffles, nanos, touches and accessories all in the hopes that they meet their bottom line. I can see it now. An “iPod boutique,” with no employee in sight. The Eee PC will be offered in black and white, with 7-inch Linux and XP versions available for $269 and $299.

Scotch tape is pretty damn versatile. Right up there with duct tape. But I bet you never thought about scotch tape creating X-rays. . Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have discovered that peeling Scotch tape in a vacuum tube generates X-rays. How they came up with the idea of putting scotch tape in a vacuum in the first place is anyone’s guess.

You can imagine their surprise that a 99 cent roll of tape can give you an X-ray. They managed to develop a slightly blurry X-ray image of a finger using the tape. They think that further research can yield a low cost/low power X-ray machine for use in areas of the world where the money and electricity aren’t available for standard machines.

Flying in a plane made of paper of any kind sounds dangerous, but ‘buckypaper’ isn’t paper at all, at least not what we’re used to. It’s a new type of carbon nanotube that may usher in a new lightweight, high strength composite. It was discovered accidentally while trying to create the same conditions that exist in a star. Buckypaper isn’t ready for prime-time just yet, but the potential is amazing.

The tube-shaped molecule is dispersed in liquid and then filtered through a fine mesh, creating a very thin yet powerful film, called buckypaper. The molecule has a large surface area, and that’s what gives it the incredible strength: when stacked to become a composite, you have something 10 times lighter, but maybe 500 times stronger than steel, while conducting and dispersing heat like copper. It could find a wide range of uses in areas like aviation, computers, batteries, armor, even fuel cells.

September games sales actually showed the first decline since March of 2006 according to the NPD Group, however things are still not looking too tough for the gaming industry. September of 2007 saw a huge hike in sales due to the release of Halo 3 which is contrasted by slightly lower sales this last September of 2008.

The drop is sales was not the only change of events for September, either. Due to the price cut of the Xbox 360 models, Microsoft saw a significantly noticeable boost in sales for its console from 195k units sold in August, to 347k units sold in September of this year, bringing it ahead of Sony’s PS3. Microsoft dropped the price to $50 less than the Wii and half of what the PS3 costs, making it the least expensive current-generation game console on the market.

The State of New York has now begun offering driver’s licenses embedded with RFID chips, which they are calling enhanced driver’s licenses (EDLs). This comes just after New York became the second state in the country to offer RFID embedded identification that can be shown at the border in place of a U.S. passport. The chip in the new licenses will have the ability to be scanned by authorities in order to identify citizens entering the state from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean. International travelers still need to produce an old fashioned passport to enter the country.

Since New York knows that many people do not trust RFID technology, you can still get the old RFID-lite version which does not act as a passport. According to authorities, no personal information will be stored or transmitted by the chip, only an identification number. Should you be interested, the new licenses will cost you an extra $30 over the $50 licensing fee. Hopefully they’re working on technology that makes you not look like a dork on your DL picture.