Daily Technology News

Most Americans live and work in buildings awash in chemicals blamed for asthma, lung cancer, and a host of other maladies.

The best way to clean the air could be with a green thumb, according to Bill Wolverton, a former NASA environmental scientist who has spent more than 30 years studying how plants purify the air. The results of his research could come to market this fall as a household air filter that looks like a potted plant.

A U.S. version of the EcoPlanter, sold in Japan, is being produced. It’s supposed to provide the air-purifying power of more than 100 potted plants.

(Credit: Bill Wolverton)

“Every chemical we tested, plants could take them out,” said Wolverton, who originally worked on life support systems for the moon and Mars.

Plants absorb and convert airborne poisons to energy and food. At the roots, ever-adapting microbes munch on toxicants.

Wolverton worked to enhance those processes and has licensed his technology to Phytofilter Technologies, an upstate New York state startup. It’s creating potted plant air filters to sell for several hundred dollars each later this year.

The device has a fan at the base of a plant pot, drawing and trapping toxins near the roots, where hungry microorganisms dwell. A version has been sold in Japan for seven years as the EcoPlanter, which includes a mold-killing ultraviolet light.

The self-cleaning filter is supposed to pack the purifying power of more than 100 plants and destroy poisons that are only trapped by carbon, zeolite, and high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters.

Phytofilter founder Martin Mittelmark also developed a plant-based filtration system for a building at Syracuse University this spring, backed by funding from the Environmental Protection Agency.

In recent years, air quality tests by the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, found that levels of toxins in offices shrank by 75 percent with the presence of only six plants per room.

Wolverton thinks his technology on a larger scale could clean the exhaust from power plants by trapping air pollution in water, then feeding it through a closed system of marshes. A similar tactic taken by small towns in Mississippi turns sewage into fertilizer by diverting it through marshes. But Wolverton sees more interest coming from developing nations including China and India.

“Universities in the U.S. are geared up to use mechanical means to clean up the environment, and when you mention plants to some of these engineers, that’s sissy to them,” he said.

For now, Wolverton plans to give away plant filters to residents of formaldehyde-polluted trailers in areas still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. The technology cut formaldehyde levels by 600 percent in trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in tests he explored with the Sierra Club.

Common building products and furniture are also laced with formaldehyde and toxins including flame retardants. And scientists increasingly link chemicals in consumer electronics to myriad health woes.

Plants can offset indoor air pollution from industrial chemicals in consumer electronics, buildings and furniture. Could they clean up coal power plants too?

(Credit: Good Magazine)

Emissions from laser printers can be worse for the lungs than cigarette smoke, according to an Australian study released in August. Toxic flame retardants float from TV sets and desktop PCs within household dust.

The World Health Organization blames bad indoor air for nearly 3 percent of diseases. Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors, where air is more polluted than outside and can contain more than 900 volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, according to the EPA.

“The newer, more energy efficient buildings are sealed tighter and create more of a problem because chemicals offgas from practically everything in them,” Wolverton said.

“Green” buildings might use paints and varnishes without VOCs, which don’t release headache-inducing fumes. But standards for green buildings too often overlook the use of plants, Wolverton said. “You need plants to act as lungs in buildings.”

Several plants in a 200-square-foot space will improve the air in most rooms, according to Wolverton, who recommends potting in inert pebbles or clay mix rather than soil, in which mold can grow.

A well-drawn guide to household plants that absorb formaldehyde, benzene, and trichloroethylene comes from graphic artists at Good Magazine, who used Wolverton’s research.

Based upon chemicals in common consumer products, for instance, a peace lily might be ideal for a laundry room, and a new couch could be flanked by bamboo palms. Among the plants researchers found to have potent air-purifying qualities are the Eureka palm, lady palm, peace lily, and rubber plant.

However, people with curious cats or dogs might beware of lilies, poinsettas, and other plants that may poison them. The Pet Friendly House lists plants that won’t hurt pets who chew on their leaves.

NASA and Disney are teaming up to put a figurine of ‘Toy Story’ space ranger Buzz Lightyear on the Space Shuttle Discovery when it launches on Saturday. The toy will be taken to the International Space Station, the destination for the shuttle.

(Credit: Disney)

Talk about cross-promotion.

One of the closest things to Disney World’s Orlando, Fla., home, is NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and this is relevant because on Friday, it was announced that among the objects expected to be blasted into the sky with the planned Saturday launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery is a figurine of Toy Story space ranger Buzz Lightyear.

Disney World, of course, is where the new Toy Story Mania ride has just opened.

The idea behind putting Buzz Lightyear aboard the Space Shuttle has to do with the “Toys in Space initiative NASA and Disney are starting. This is an educational program designed to inspire children’s interest in space and celestial discovery.

This is all also relevant to me because on June 10, I’ll be hitting the highways for Road Trip 2008. I’ll start in Orlando, Fla., and before I visit many of the South’s most interesting destinations, I’ll be stopping by both Disney World and Kennedy Space Center.

At the theme park, I expect to visit and do a story on the Toy Story ride, and at the NASA facility, I hope to be able to see the Space Shuttle land.

If the latter happens, however, I won’t be seeing Buzz Lightyear, as the toy will have stayed behind on the space station.

Stay tuned to the Road Trip, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I’m doing on Twitter.

Chris DiBona’s job–manager of Google’s open-source programs–is a balancing act.

Google consumes a lot of open-source software for its own highly profitable business. But as he oversees the search powerhouse’s open-source work, DiBona has to ensure that the company reciprocates. It can’t be all take and no give.

Chris DiBona, Google’s manager of open-source programs

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Free and open-source software advocates can be powerful allies–but also vocal critics. For example, some have critized Google for its lack of support for the Affero GPL license, which can require those using software for a publicly available network service to share modifications they’ve made to an AGPL software project.

DiBona thinks Google strikes the right balance, though, by offering its own modifications back to many open-source projects, advocating the philosophy in general, and trying to nurture the next generation of open-source programmers.

DiBona has been steeped in open-source software for more than a decade. Before his job at Google, he worked for Slashdot, still an influential virtual water cooler for open-source discussion. Slashdot was part of Linux server maker VA Linux Systems, which had a spectacular initial public offering in 1999 followed not long after by a drastic cutback.

DiBona will be preaching the open-source gospel at the Google I/O conference Wednesday–”open source is too good to be true and thus must be magic,” according to the agenda–but I sat down with him beforehand to hear his view of open-source software at Google.

What’s the view of open source within Google?

I asked myself, “Who am I trying to address?” The world of open-source business? No. The world of the open-source enthusiast? No. I’m really looking to work with open-source developers. We came up with these goals for our group: to support open-source development in general, which means to support open-source infrastructure; support the release of open-source code, from Google and in general; and to create more open-source developers, because especially when I started, there was a perception that Google took a lot of people from the open-source world and then went away. It was partly true, because people would come here and say, “Wow, I’ve been working on my open-source project forever, and I want a new problem,” and we have a very good class of new problem. So they kind of went away.

That was too bad. The last thing we wanted as a company was to hurt the release of open-source software, because we consider it pretty important. We use a ton of it. Every engineer we bring on–how much open-source do they want to use? We have new packages and new libraries being brought into the company all the time. It’s our group’s job to track that. As we brought people in, we wanted to be sure more open-source developers were being created. So that’s where we came up with the Google Summer of Code, and now we have a high-school flavor of that as well. I think we’ve made a very real impact in creating new people in the open-source world.

I’m curious about maintaining a balance between contributing back to upstream projects vs. maintaining your own internal forks. How do you go through that evaluation?

Google considers some projects more important than others. Obviously the Linux kernel is incredibly important. Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel. We have a fairly large kernel team, and we employ people whose job is just to work on the external kernel. Andrew Morton is a good example of that. We try to make sure those guys patch out (submit their modifications to the main open-source project) whenever they can. It’s usually more dictated by the engineer’s time than it is any lack of desire on our part. I always wish we were able to release more, but it takes time for an engineer to do that. For the larger efforts, it’s a little easier because there are more personnel on it.

The same thing goes for our compilers (software that translates programmers’ code into instructions a computer understands). The great thing about our compiler team is they patch as a matter of their jobs. They’re always patching out things from the compiler work we do internally to the outside world. We recently released the new linker, Gold–Ian Lance Taylor works for us on our compiler team. He’s been on the GCC team forever. He used to be at Cygnus (a company that developed GCC). We have a lot of ex-Cygnus people.

Then there are Googlers who just want to patch into an existing projects. They found a bug, they want to add a feature. That takes no time at all. Our team looks at the first couple patches an engineer wants to send out, makes sure the engineer knows what they’re doing with the outside world, then they’re basically given free rein to do that. They keep us posted on what they’re patching. We want to make sure our code gets out to the projects as fast as possible because projects keep on iterating. If you don’t get your patches in, they won’t get accepted, because they’ll be too old or won’t matter. If you’ve got a patch, getting it out there fast is better for us, because then as that project iterates and comes back into the company, we don’t have to reapply a patch.

What are the most important open-source projects you ingest?

The kernel, compilers–GCC, the Python interpreter. Python is very important to us. Google App Engine–it’s a Python hosting system, basically. Java is very important to us, and that’s become open-source now. We have some very good Java people working for us–Josh Block, Neil Gafter–they’ve got a great handle on that technology.

Once you get past those three projects–the compilers, the languages, the kernel–then you go to the libraries. For us that’s OpenSSL, zlib, PCRE. MySQL is hugely important to us. Past that, it starts tapering off pretty quick.

Has the open-sourcing of Java changed anything for you?
Not really. I think it had more impact on the outside world than for us. Java is a fairly mature language now. We’ve been using it for a long time. Before, it was the JCP (the Java Community Process to govern Java’s future)–it had the rubric of openness around it. It was never really not so open. There are questions around what open source means now around Java, specifically J2ME (Java’s mobile edition for gadgets such as cell phones) and the TCK (the technology compatibility kit).

Are you using a super-uber-customized Linux kernel, or are you guys pretty much vanilla?

I don’t think there’s such thing as a customized Linux kernel anymore. The kernel is incredibly flexible. It’s got all these different architectures. I think the Linux kernel itself is this ubercustomized thing.

But do you have a lot of in-house customizations?

Not a lot. Google is exposed to some interesting hardware before the rest of the world. So internally we’ll be sampling code for that hardware. So that’s pretty custom stuff. But eventually that goes to the outside world. We funded some work with a group in Berkeley called Xorp to bring high-speed Broadcom networking chip functionality to Linux. It’s not in our interest to keep control of it ourselves. So is it customized? Absolutely. But is it heavily customized? I don’t think it is as heavily customized as you might think.

Is it true you still use 2.4 kernels?

In some places, sure.

How about for the core search product?

I don’t know how it’s partitioned out. When you think of Google, you think of search being on top of a kernel that’s static. It’s not always like that. It differs on data centers. I think 2.6 predominates, though.

There’s been discussion about reciprocity. When General Public License (GPL) version 3 came out, the Free Software Foundation dumped the Affero clause out of GPLv3 and split it out into a separate license. Eben Moglen (co-founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and then counsel to the Free Software Foundation) said, to paraphrase, “If Google starts getting too parasitic, then we’ll re-evaluate it.” How worried are you of getting a negative perception of using more than you contribute?

I do worry about this. I think it is a largely incorrect perception. You can always give out more, and there are always people who will never be satisfied. Could we be giving back more? Sure. One of the ways I ameliorate that problem is (through) projects like the Summer of Code. Google is releasing every year, not counting Android or the really large open-source projects like GWT, a new project every two or three weeks. Or patching hundreds of projects a month. I conservatively estimate we’re releasing about a million lines of code a year from the company.

If you talk to open-source developers–people who are working on projects–I think they understand that. It came back to who do we want to interact with. I always felt the enthusiast community would understand that eventually, and I think that’s true. There are some people who are upset with us because we didn’t embrace the Affero-style GPL, but it’s not practical for us to do so. When they had an Affero-style clause in GPLv3, the thing I told Eben was, “Listen, you can adopt whatever you want. We’ll still keep on backing up the FSF and the SFLC as much as we can, but it means we won’t be able to use that license inside, because it won’t be practical for us to do so.” I think that’s a very realistic response. The Affero GPL is out there. That’s great for the people who use it. It’s just not for us.

That’s the thing about free software. You’re not obligated to use it. We have enough fine-grained control within the company that we don’t use things we don’t want to use.

What are your preferred licenses?

We generally release under the Apache License–Apache 2. We think it has the fairest language of the licenses. And the GPL requires a lot of management–more than we have time for to run a project well under that license–patch flow and all that. Apache 2 encourages people to take the thing and run with it. That’s what we’re going for when we release code, whether it’s to have people adopt technologies we really like, or for API examples. That said, we’ve released things under the GPL, LGPL, GPL version 3, BSD. We default to the Apache License.

To what extent to you subsidize gurus to sit around and work on important projects?

We’ve got people like Jeremy Allison and Andrew Morton and some of Guido (van Rossom)’s time. He’s been working pretty heavily on Google App Engine and Mondrian. It’s more common that we…try to make open source a part of their job, so they’re patching out to the libraries they use. We think that’s more healthy than having people whose job is just working on an open-source project.

You use open source a lot internally. Do you have some kind of intellectual property vetting or review before you use it?

We do. There are two ways we do this. When somebody wants to bring a piece of code in from the outside world–open-source or commercial–you need to put it inside a special directory we call “third party.” They’re required to put in a file called readme.google (that describes) where they got that software, how it’s licensed, what category that license falls under. We look for things that are obvious. There are some projects that have dubious intellectual property provenance, and we know those, and we know the people who run them, and we tend not to use those ever.

Since Google doesn’t distribute a lot of software, we have it easier than companies that ship hardware and software. We have a couple situations where that does happen–the Google Search Appliance, some of the downloadable applications. Those get a little extra attention. Similarly, when we have larger projects like Google Android, we have a higher ceremony–every two weeks we get together and see if the license picture has changed.

The tracking model works really well for us. We have tools written where a program manager or a release manager can turn on a certain level of warning within the build tool and it will tell them what open-source software they have and how they have to comply with it. At that point we set up a mirror for them as they get closer to release.

So that’s the first way we track things. The second way is whenever a Googler puts in a changelist now–this is something we’re just starting to do–we compare it against all known open-source code on the Internet using our Code Search product. We compare the changelist that comes from your average Google engineer against that database of code and we look for intersections. When we find an intersection, we take a look and see if it’s truly a copy. And if it is, we make sure it’s in the right directory and that it’s properly labeled. And we call up the engineer if it isn’t and make sure it gets tagged properly so we can do the right thing by these licenses.

That tool is kind of in its infancy. We’re trying to figure out ways to automate what it does. But it’s great because it scales programmatically. Our group’s goal is not to break builds or stop development. It’s to enable developers to use as much open-source as possible. We think it’s healthy, because then they’re not writing that code, they’re writing other code.

Do you vet code for patent or copyright?

No. We have legal people on our lists. We have two main lists that track these things. Open-source licensing for incoming code and open-source releasing for outgoing code. Legal has a presence there. Patents are incredibly tricky.

Is it easier to get hired at Google if you have experience maintaining your own open-source product or patch?

If you have made a name for yourself in open source, clearly it helps. If you have a healthy project in open-source, I believe it helps. One thing I see on hiring committees is when somebody has an open-source history, it’s really great. You can just look at that history. Interviews are great, but they’re not very deep. They’re only 45 minutes long. So how can you really get a feel for if a person is good at programming, at computer science?

Or at social relations, for that matter.

Open source really reveals that incredibly quickly. You can look at their code, at their activity on mailing lists, how they deal with bugs from real people, and real user problems. That’s an incredible resource.

The Summer of Code isn’t really a recruiting program. If it is, it’s a really expensive one. Last year we created about 2 million lines of open-source code across the 900 students who took part. Of those probably a third are going to stick around with their projects, because the rest have to go back to college.

We have a couple students who have been in the program two or three years. The whole point is to support kids over the summer so they can go and program and not get some other job that has nothing to do with computer science. It’s our fourth year doing it. This year we’ve go 1,109 students doing it across 95 countries.

Hybrid Technologies is preparing a ‘”green” sports car to submit in the Automotive X Prize contest, according to a report in Popular Mechanics.

The car will come in two versions: one for the Auto X Prize that will have a gasoline engine and battery and another all-electric version.

The as-yet-unnamed electric sports car being developed by Hybrid Technologies.

(Credit: Hybrid Technologies via Popular Mechanics.)

The gas-battery hybrid will get the equivalent of 220 miles per gallon while the all-electric will get 150 mpg to 180 mpg. A drivable prototype is set to hit the streets in September.

The idea is to make the X Prize entrant something that will result in a mass-produced electric car, the company told Popular Mechanics.

“We’re looking for this car basically to end up mainstream–not just built for a one-and-done,” project development engineer Ron Cerven told the magazine. “The X Prize car is going to be the purchasable–obviously a higher-end car, but there might be something else from us in the X Prize.”

Hybrid Technologies doesn’t get nearly as much attention as Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive, which are both preparing hybrid-electric sports cars.

But Hybrid Technologies has ambitious plans to make a range of vehicles that run on lithium-based batteries, including scooters, bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, and cars.

Most efforts to “green” transportation focus on car technology, but roads can also be revamped to reduce carbon emissions. A national effort to improve millions of miles of highways and streets seeks to make asphalt more eco-friendly and less expensive.

The $5 million Asphalt Research Consortium aims to increase the use of recycled materials and improve energy efficiency of asphalt, which makes up more than 90 percent of U.S. roads.

Sand and other binder materials are being explored to make asphalt at the Modified Asphalt Research Center (MARC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

(Credit: Jeff Miller/University of Wisconsin-Madison)

“It has been a challenge to get the industry to look at this seriously just because our pavements have been performing relatively well and there have not been many complaints about failures,” said Hussain Bahia, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

He’s leading the research project, which includes five institutions and is backed by the Federal Highway Administration. Increasing costs of energy and materials are driving up interest.

Until recently, asphalt has been relatively cheap to make in the United States. But the price of paving and repairing roads is rising along with that of gasoline. Asphalt costs of $568 per ton have risen from $315 last May, according to the California Department of Transportation.

Asphalt is a byproduct of the process of refining crude oil for fuel and lubricants. To prepare the gooey substance for application on roadways, Americans and Europeans may heat asphalt up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, creating hefty emissions of greenhouse gases.

Less-wealthy nations including South Africa and India have many years of headway in using so-called cold or warm mixes of asphalt, which require less heat and energy.

South Africans shave asphalt into smaller bits and mix it in water and soap-like surfactants, which don’t harden until after being laid on the road.

Bahia is interested in exploring modified, cold mix asphalts that might use plastics to achieve a longer-lasting, quieter, and safer end result.

And cold mixes also can use more recycled materials. Asphalt is the most frequently recycled material in the nation, according to the industry. Still, recycled asphalt contains only about about 15 percent reused materials, which Bahia wants to help expand.

“My best hope is to get the paving industry to recognize that they can save tremendous amounts of energy and impact on the environment by using different ideas in building our roads,” Bahia said.

Porous asphalt, used on Italian toll roads, is also considered more eco-friendly because it allows rainwater to seep into the ground and reduces noise. And it helps to reduce skidding and accidents. Bahia said cold mix, porous asphalt might be a possibility to explore.

In the remaining four years of the U.S. asphalt project, Bahia said he hopes cold mixes from the labs will be good enough for the asphalt industry to test in the field. Down the road, getting approval for any new material from state highway agencies will be another challenge.

Also involved in the project are the Western Research Institute,
Advanced Asphalt Technologies, Texas A&M University, and the University of Nevada at Reno.

The Federal Communications Commission is considering a new plan that would require winners of an upcoming spectrum auction to provide free wireless Internet services.

The FCC could soon vote on a plan to auction off 25 megahertz of spectrum in the 2155MHz band of spectrum. As part of its plan, the commission would require the winner of those licenses to provide some free wireless Internet service.

The FCC sees the plan as a way to provide broadband Internet service to millions of Americans who either can’t afford or don’t want to pay for high speed Internet access. Few details are known about what exactly the FCC is proposing, but word has it that it’s similar to a plan proposed by M2Z Networks in 2006.

Under that plan, the FCC would give the company access to spectrum for free. The company would build the network and fund the service through advertising. As part of the proposal, M2Z planned to give the FCC 5 percent of its gross revenue from the service.

But the FCC didn’t like that proposal, especially the part about giving spectrum away for free. So it’s come up with its own proposal. Instead of giving away free spectrum licenses, it will auction the spectrum to the highest bidder and require the winning bidder to offer service on some its spectrum for free. The FCC will also require that the free service have content filtering in place to ensure that minors are not able to access adult Web sites.

Wireless service providers have traditionally opposed any stipulations imposed on wireless spectrum auctions. And the CTIA, the trade organization representing the industry, has already filed comments with the commission urging it not to put requirements on the spectrum.

“The commission should not require licensees to meet specific conditions, such as pricing plans, minimum data rates or content filtering,” the CTIA wrote in a filing.

While the FCC’s plan might be well-intended, I think it’s unlikely that any company would spend the millions or even billions of dollars necessary to buy the spectrum, especially considering that it will take even more money to build and operate the network.

The advertising supported model sounds good on paper. But so far, it hasn’t been proven to work. In fact, the failed citywide Wi-Fi projects all over the country have already proven that free wireless services don’t work. EarthLink planned to only give some of its service away for free in some cities like San Francisco. But it offered “cheap” broadband in other cities. MetroFi built its whole business model on offering free Wi-Fi supported by advertising revenue.

EarthLink has since cancelled plans to build its San Francisco network and now its dismantling networks in other cities, such as Philadelphia and New Orleans. Meanwhile, MetroFi is also looking for a way out of its citywide Wi-Fi business.

These companies weren’t able to make the free model or even the inexpensive broadband model work, because networks are expensive to build and maintain. And unlike the bidders in this auction, these companies didn’t have to pay for the spectrum they used to build the networks. I can’t imagine many companies willing to make that kind of investment if they’re required to offer even some of their service for free.

For this reason, I think it would be difficult for the FCC to find a bidder willing to take on the stipulations. This is exactly what happened in the most recent 700MHz spectrum auction. The FCC required bidders on the “D Block” of licenses to set aside a portion of that spectrum for public safety use. The only company even interested in the spectrum went out of business before the auction began, because it was unable to secure the necessary funding. In the end, the minimum bid on these licenses was never met, and the FCC is still trying to figure out how to rewrite the rules to attract bidders.

That said, the FCC has had some success in setting rules for new spectrum auctions. In the same 700MHz spectrum auction, the FCC required the winner of the C-Block licenses to build a network using this spectrum that is open to all devices and applications. Verizon Communications ended up paying $4.6 billion for the spectrum.

So in all fairness, the FCC may succeed in this endeavor. But ultimately, the success of this new plan will come down to whether or not the winning bidder will be able to come up with a business model that actually allows companies bidding on this spectrum to make money.

Microsoft has earlier made a bid on Yahoo, but Yahoo has rejected their bid two times. According to Wall Street Journa, Microsoft are now interested in Facebook. The Software giant has already invested 240 million dollars in Facebook but they want more. The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has however had doubts about selling his company to Microsoft. Facebook is one of the most successful companies online ever to exist and they have grown with 240 percent from March 2007 to March 2008. The service had 109 million unique visitors in March. In the same time period Microsoft only had 7 percent of growth.