With its power-hungry gadgets and thousands of delegates flying in from across the world, a technology conference hardly seems an appropriate venue for championing green issues. But the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week was an attempt to demonstrate that technology may be about saving the environment rather than damaging it.

Fujitsu Biblo, a Japanese company, will launch a laptop, which is moving away from plastic. The Biblo PC has a case made partially from corn oil. Using corn reduces the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during its creation by 15 per cent.

The Organic LED screen uses less power than normal TVs and delivers a better picture. Although OLED screens are small, Samsung showed off a 32-inch model.

Nokia’s latest drive is to encourage people to buy a phone made from recycled and reused parts — the Nokia 3100 Evolve. Nokia's Green Plug promises to help the environment by using software that lets gadgets talk to their power supply. If no more charge is needed, the plug will switch itself off.
Shanghai-based Horizon was displaying a generator, which needs only water.

Mysterious cloud found

Astronomers claim to have discovered a clue to the origin of antimatter — a mysterious lopsided cloud in the central region of the Milky Way.

The team of astronomers, led by Georg Weidenspointner of Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, has made the discovery using four-years-worth of data from ESA’s orbiting gamma-ray observatory Integral.
The cloud shows up due to the gamma rays it emits when individual particles of antimatter — in this case, positrons encounter electrons, their normal matter counterpart and then annihilate one another. However, it is not sure whether these positrons can escape from the stellar debris in sufficient quantity in a bid to explain the size of the observed cloud.

Fashion: Women at risk

For women boasting of a fringe benefit for their hairdo, here’s a warning — if behind the wheel, the curls could kill you.
Researchers in Britain have found that the fashion for long fringes among women drivers is putting their lives at risk on the road — in fact, they are just a “hair’s breadth” from disaster.
“With the latest trends requiring styling round the face and eyes, it’s essential we are aware of safety,” Jacky Brown of Sheilas’ Wheels, which sponsored the study, said.

The researchers came to the conclusion after carrying out a survey on women drivers in Britain to find out whether eye-skimming celebrity styles affect them. As many as 67 per cent of women have a hairstyle that can fall in their eyes while they are at the wheel, the poll revealed.

Culture’s influence on brain

When it comes to solving the same visual perceptual tasks, a new study has found that people from different cultures use their brains differently.

Researchers in the US have carried out the study and found that cultural differences, known to influence memory and perception, are also reflected in brain activity patterns in people.
“Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it’s the culture that does the training,” lead researcher John Gabrieli of McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT said.

The researchers came to the conclusion after analysing the brain activity of a group of 20 people — 10 East Asians who recently arrived in the US and 10 Americans.

'Ringing in the ears'

Do your ears ring after being exposed to loud noise? Well, the racket may be due to nerves that sense touch in your face and neck, says a new study.

Touch-sensing nerve cells step up their activity in the brain after hearing cells are damaged. Hyperactivity of these touch-sensing neurons likely plays an important role in tinnitus, often called “ringing in the ears”. People with tinnitus sense ringing or other sounds in their ears or head when there is no outside source.