Van Gogh was well known for painting over previous paintings, art lovers have always wanted to know what these previous painting may have looked like if they were ever preserved. Luckily with a new technology it has become possible to see old paintings in a new light (Literally). Scientists from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, along with University of Antwerp in Belgium, worked on Van Gogh's 1887 Patch of Grass. A square area measuring 17.5 by 17.5 centimeters shows a women's head looking slightly left. Owned now by the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands, the picture was subjected to a technique known as X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, which allows experts to map the chemicals on it.

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It’s now official that simply putting the eco wrapper on the phone is not exactly the way to go green, we did cover earlier on how Apple made no announcement on green initiatives at its launch. A dissection of the new device revealed its batteries which have the recyclable logo blackened. This confirms that you will not be able to recycle your old batteries after you’re done using it.

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There are inventions that make it easy for us to do a mundane task and then there are inventions which make us wonder how many people’s life it may change. The LifeStraw is one such invention, capable of purifying water on the go and directly from the source to the user. Capable of purifying water through chromatographic techniques as well as common filter methods, the LifeStraw can process 700 liters with a 1 year expiration and 3 year shelf life. That’s roughly 2 liters a day for the Personal model. Bacteria and viruses that cause diarrhea and other digestive sickness are safely removed from non-saline water sources. The personal model does not filter heavy metals like mercury or parasites such as Giardia. LifeStraw, however, has a Family model that is capable of removing, for all intents and purposes, all viruses, parasites, and bacteria even in turbid water. With a capacity of 17,000 liters the Family model uses a fixed reservoir and tubing to supply the filter unit with an on-off valve. Intended for in home use the Family edition is less portable and requires more frequent and thorough cleaning. The LifeStraw was studied and tested by the University of North Carolina and developed by Vestergaard Frandsen of Switzerland and the USA.

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Showcased at the green pavilion in the Green IT Promotion Council Hokkaido Toyako Summit was Toshiba's IT Power Measurement Unit. It is aimed at reducing power consumption at homes and remotely monitoring and controlling energy status. The unit is connected with power distribution boards at homes. The power measurement unit measures power used for each system and transmits the data to Toshiba Home Appliances' server using the "IT Home Gateway" communication terminal for Feminity. Users can check their current power consumption and cumulative power consumption by month, for example, on the company's "Feminity Club" Web service using PCs, digital TVs and mobile phones. Solar cell energy status can also be displayed.

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We had mentioned about it last month and now Samsung has gone ahead and launched the Eco Phone (aka SCH-W510) a "green" HSDPA phone made from natural corn in its construction and does not use lead, mercury, or any such harmful materials. The phone comes with all the standard features in a modern day mobile device like a 3MP camera, Bluetooth, multimedia player and the sorts.

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During the Hokkaido Toyako Summit (July 7-9, 2008), Sharp will exhibit its environmentally conscious products and advanced environmental technologies, specifically, LCD TVs and solar cells and modules. One of the exhibit is the 26V-inch Low Power Consumption LCD TV (Prototype) which approximately uses one-fourth power of a 28-inch CRT TV having nearly the same screen area. Even compared to existing LCD TVs, the low power consuming design uses about one-third the power and has around one-half the annual energy consumption.

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Seems someone from apple read our blog on the 3G iPhone and other products as being harmful to the environment according to Greenpeace. News that the new iPhone 3G will come in packaging made from potato starch. Dutch company PaperFoam, maker of carbon-friendly packaging, is providing millions of paperfoam packages to Apple.

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According to a recent repost, chemical used to make LCD televisions and semiconductors could cause more global warming than coal-fired power plants. Nitrogen trifluoride is a "missing greenhouse gas," and is used in chemical vapor deposition, which makes liquid crystal displays, semiconductors, and synthetic diamond. This chemical's globe-warming effect could be 17,000 times stronger than that of carbon dioxide. What's alarming is that the production of this chemical can double up to 8,000 metric tons in 2009, however this gas is not among the six gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol international climate change agreement. This year alone, its production would release the equivalent of the global-warming emissions from Austria, totaling some 67 million metric tons. This spells doom, because it amounts to more global-warming pollution than all the industrialized world's emissions of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and of sulfur hexafluoride that are considered more intoxicating.

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Although not many people think about how much power their computers consume and its direct effect on the environment simply because some components just appear to not use any energy when in reality they are power gulpers. The new WD Caviar GP is a 500GB 3.5-inch SATA HDD, so what's so new about it you say? Well, its one from the Green Power initiatives by WD. By consuming just 3.3 watts in idle mode beating other drives by almost five watts it reduces carbon emissions by 13.8 kilograms a year.

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Ecotopia has developed this sleek looking portable Eco mini fridge for you to cool during hot summers. This Eco mini fridge can be defined as a perfect blend elegance and aesthetics. The company has taken good care to see this green portable fridge does not use any refrigerant, eliminating the need of recycling. The Eco mini fridge is idyllic for picnics, travelling, and office use. You can also convert this mini fridge into a heater keeping hot food warm at the flick of a switch as it is featured with an advanced thermoelectric system.

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Samsung today announced two environment-friendly mobile handsets, W510 and F268 at World IT Show in Seoul. W510 is Samsung's first mobile phone with 'bio-plastic' made from natural material extracted from corns. Moreover, when producing W510, Samsung did not use any heavy metals, such as Lead, Mercury, and Cadmium, and applied water-soluble coating. Samsung F268 with all the accessories including charger and headset does not contain BFRs(Brominated Flame Retardant) or PVC. Samsung F268 has an alarm function to encourage users to unplug their charger when the devices are fully charged.

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LG Flatron W2252TE stakes claim of being the world's most energy-efficient monitor. It sports a 22-inch widescreen LCD and offers a 45% power reduction on other models, a saving of 40 watts.; thus reflecting on electricity bills. However the screen still comes with toxic chemicals that come with all electronics, and LG hasn't changed anything about the actual materials the monitor is made from. In related news Dell, has become the first company of its type to offer goods that use less power than the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star standard. It is also boasting a new record in recycling 102m pounds of IT equipment from customers in 2007, a 20 per cent increase on the previous year.

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What is touted as the biggest announcement for this year with the apple iPhone 3G may have an often ignored flaw. Jobs announced the new iPhone will be available July 11th for half the price it sold at last year, but what was not mentioned was if the new phone was green. Apple has been criticized by some environmental organizations for not being a leader in removing toxic chemicals from its new products, and for not aggressively or properly recycling its old products. When asked about the new iPhone's green stand, a spokesman who is responsible for all of Apple's environmental initiatives said she didn't know whether the new iPhone meets the "Green Apple" standards set last year.

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What do you think are the big internet companies doing when they say they are going green? One single Google search query consumes 2 to 8 watt-hours of energy. To put this on a scale, Google processes petabytes of information on a daily basis while indexing the web and doing other various things. If we average this out to 4.5 watt hours per query, and consider Google is easily handling 400 million queries a day based on comScore metrics, then we can see 1,800,000,000 (1.8 billion) watt-hours of energy being used daily just for basic search queries. When a big company like Intel or Google refers to "greening" or "going green" with their server technologies the first step is finding a renewable or more efficient power source. Generally wind-power and biomass come to mind, but we're going to need more than that to power the web as you can already see. You have to remember that a website like Youtube doesnt just rely on some hard disks spinning in some guys dorm. The amount of heat produced by these data centers is another intimidating issue we have to face… With the currently technology available we're forced to use AC units and massive cooling centers to keep all of the servers at around 70 degrees or less. The hot air gets pumped out of the centers and usually outside, although some companies are finally using this excess heat to power office buildings and heat up pools in surrounding areas.

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The Eco-friendly MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer Graphics comes with the Hybrid Freezer cooling technology that boasts the most power-saving environmental protection and the most efficient Hybrid Freezer cooling radiators. Utilizing the Hybrid Freezer technology, users can strictly monitor the temperature and control the ventilation for a more silent operation, high computing performance and effective heat dissipation. MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer Graphics Card is based on 65nm G94 GPU and includes 64 stream processors, and DDR memory on 256-bit memory interface. MSI N9600GT Hybrid Freezer Graphics Card also supports the latest technology such as NVIDIA SLI Technology with PCI-Express 2.0 interface for blistering graphics performance.

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