(CNN) — A $10 million call by Google Inc. for beneficial, world-changing ideas has generated more than 150,000 online submissions.

The deadline for people to submit ideas for the initiative, called Project 10^100, was Monday. Google employees will now sift through the ideas, submitted in 25 languages, and choose 100 semifinalists by January 27. Funding for up to five winning ideas will be awarded in May.

“We’re thrilled by the large array of enthusiastic responses to Project 10^100. That number has exceeded our expectations,” said Bethany Poole, a product marketing manager at Google.

“We’re also very impressed by the variety and ingenuity of the submissions across all categories, ranging from health to energy, education and the environment,” she said.

Google launched the ambitious project September 24 to help celebrate its 10th birthday. In announcing Project 10^100 (pronounced “10 to the 100th”), the Internet giant said to hoped to solicit and bankroll fresh ideas it believes will have broad and beneficial effects on people’s lives.

The project’s Web site (http://www.project10tothe100.com/) suggested that successful ideas address such critical issues as providing food and shelter, building communities, improving health, granting more access to education, sustaining the global ecosystem and promoting clean energy.

As an example, Google cited the invention of the Hippo Water Roller, a barrel-shaped container that holds 24 gallons and can be rolled with little effort like a wheelbarrow, making it easier for African villagers on foot to transport critically needed fresh water to their homes.

Over the past month, the Google project’s Web site received more than 2.5 million unique visitors, and its video was watched more than a million times. Entrants had to briefly describe their idea and answer six questions, including, “If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?”

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written by Andrew

NEW YORK - Plastic used to be the sexy material of the future. Now, it’s the cheap, ugly material of the past.

Just look at the effort Apple Inc. put into getting rid of plastic when designing its new $1,300 MacBook laptops, which went on sale last week. Apple now is machining the upper part of the chassis from a single block of aluminum, shaving it down to perhaps one-tenth of its original mass.

The result is a laptop with the stark elegance of a Modernist skyscraper, all glass and metal. The only things that are still plastic are the keys, the Apple logo on the lid, the bumpers on the bottom and some cladding on the hinge between the bottom and the display.

All that metal looks great, and it feels cool, in both senses of the word, to touch. But is this really what we want out of Apple?

The company is doing better than ever, with 9.5 percent of the U.S. PC market, according to Gartner Inc. Ten years ago, that figure was more like 3 percent. Not to knock Apple hardware, but I think the reason for this rally is mostly the company’s software, which is easy to use and well integrated with the hardware and Apple’s online services.

One of the best ways to get access to Apple’s OS X software has been its cheapest laptop, the MacBook. Chief Executive Steve Jobs has said it’s Apple’s best-selling computer. But at $1,100, it’s been nearly twice as expensive as a Windows laptop with comparable hardware. That’s a hefty premium to pay for good software.

Unfortunately, with the laptops it released last week, Apple chose to make the hardware slicker and more stylish, rather than push the price down. It brought some of the features of its even more expensive MacBook Pro line to the consumer line, rather than bringing the consumer line substantially closer to Windows PCs in price (though the older MacBook, now dubbed the “MacBook White,” got a $100 price cut. At $1,300, the cheapest of the new metal MacBooks is now $200 more expensive than the old plastic one.

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written by Andrew

LONDON, England (CNN) — Work stations with a built-in treadmill and portable meeting rooms are just some of the developments that may become commonplace in the offices of the future.

Workplace technology has changed dramatically in recent years and the offices we work in are finally set to catch up. The advent of laptops, wi-fi and BlackBerries means that high-tech workers are no longer tethered to their desks, and the office of the future will be designed to let workers roam.

Dutch designer Michiel van der Kley has come up with Globus, a stylish spherical “podule” that looks like a piece of art, but is actually a mobile work station. Open it up, take a seat, switch on your laptop and you’re good to go. If you need to see a colleague you can take your laptop with you and talk shop at a ScooterDesk, an ultra-mobile mini work station by Belgian design firm Utilia. See what the offices of tomorrow will look like »

Another Belgian company, Living Tomorrow, predicts that as we become increasingly able to work from home, workplaces will spend more time unoccupied. It says flexibility will be the key to filling unused space, which means that as well as mobile work stations, we’ll be seeing mobile meeting rooms.

The Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics (CBPD) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has built the Robert L. Preger Intelligent Workplace — a functioning workplace that is also a ‘living laboratory’ for researching office design.

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written by Andrew

SAN FRANCISCO - The economy is sputtering, but Google Inc.’s profits are still accelerating at a rate that suggests the Internet search leader can remain a marketing magnet even when advertisers and consumers aren’t in a spending mood.

Google provided the latest evidence of its moneymaking prowess late Thursday with the announcement of a 26 percent increase in third-quarter profits that surpassed analysts’ forecasts.

The performance drew a sigh of relief from investors, who had become convinced that Google will suffer along with just about everyone else as the U.S. economy sinks into what is widely expected to be the deepest recession in a quarter-century.

Google shares surged $36.97, or 10.5 percent, in Thursday’s extending trading after finishing the regular session at $353.02, up $13.85. It marked a dramatic change in sentiment from earlier Thursday as a cascading wave of pessimism pounded Google’s stock price to a three-year low of $309.44.

“People suddenly realized that if there a stock you are going to own through this uncertainty, (Google) is the one,” said Canaccord Adams analyst Colin Gillis.

But not even Google feels immune to the worst financial crisis to grip the world since the U.S. stock market crashed in 1929.

Things are looking grim enough to prompt Google — renowned for its free-spending ways — to hunker down and start scrimping more than it has in the past.

“This may turn out to be the quarter (Google) grew up and proved it can control expenses,” Gillis said.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt also offered some of his most sober commentary yet about the state of the economy. “We’re all sort of in uncharted territory,” Schmidt told analysts during a Thursday conference call.

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written by Andrew

(PopSci.com) — By next fall, NASA plans to launch its biggest Red Planet rover yet, the $1.8-billion, SUV-size Mars Research Laboratory. Even though the MRL will be able to haul five times as much equipment as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are already on Mars, a group of Swedish researchers say that they could accomplish far more if accompanied by a squad of helper ‘bots.

Fredrik Bruhn, the CEO of Ångström Aerospace Corporation, and his colleagues have designed the small inflatable scouts to assist bigger, less mobile rovers in their hunt for signs of microbial life on Mars.

Each foot-wide, 11-pound ball can roll up to 62 miles, snap photos at any angle, and take soil samples, drawing its power from the solar panels on its shell. Unlike wheeled rovers, the rounded scouts have fewer motors to repair, never flip over, and are easier to seal from dust. Plus, they rarely get stuck.

“The beauty of the system is it needs very little energy to go around rocks, so unless you’re landing on a surface that looks like a bed of nails, it should be fine,” Bruhn says.

In 2004, Bruhn helped found Swedish company Rotundus, whose Earth-based GroundBot is now test-patrolling a harbor in Stockholm. By using GroundBot’s pendulum-propulsion mechanism, swapping in a radiation-proof computer, and designing a lightweight, inflatable shell, he thinks he could produce four of the Mars balls for as little as $6 million.

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written by Andrew

NEW YORK (AP) – When David Teater’s 12-year-old son, Joe, was killed in 2004 by a driver who was talking on a cell phone, he tried to cut back on his own habit of driving and talking. It turned out to be very difficult.

“You have to remember to turn the phone off … which you never remember to do. Or you have to ignore a ringing phone, which is incredibly hard,” Teater said. “We’ve been conditioned our entire lives to answer ringing phones.”

Teater became an advocate for curbing what he calls “driving while distracted,” and now, he’s part of a company with a technology that can help.

Aegis Mobility, a Canadian software company, announced Monday that it has developed software called DriveAssistT that will detect whether a cell phone is moving at car speeds. When that happens, the software will alert the cellular network, telling it to hold calls and text messages until the drive is over.

The software doesn’t completely block incoming calls. Callers will hear a message saying the person they’re calling appears to be driving. They can hit a button to leave an emergency voice mail, which is put through immediately.

Several states, including New York and California, have introduced laws against talking on a cell phone while driving, but they still allow the use of hands-free devices like Bluetooth headsets. However, studies have shown that hands-free devices may not help. It appears that it is the distraction of dialing or talking that is dangerous, rather than the act of taking a hand off the wheel.

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written by Andrew

ITHACA, New York (AP) – The thought of a driverless, computer-guided car transporting people where they want to go on demand is a futuristic notion to some.

To Jacob Roberts, podcars — or PRTs, for personal rapid transit — represent an important component in the here-and-now of transportation.

“It’s time we design cities for the human, not for the automobile,” said Roberts, president of Connect Ithaca, a group of planning and building professionals, activists and students committed to making this upstate New York college town the first podcar community in the United States.

“In the podcar … it creates the perfect blend between the privacy and autonomy of the automobile with the public transportation aspect and, of course, it uses clean energy,” Roberts said.

With the oil crisis reaching a zenith and federal lawmakers ready to begin fashioning a new national transportation bill for 2010, Roberts and his colleagues think the future is now for podcars — electric, automated, lightweight vehicles that ride on their own network separate from other traffic.

Unlike mass transit, podcars carry two to 10 passengers, giving travelers the freedom and privacy of their own car while reducing the use of fossil fuels, reducing traffic congestion and freeing up space now monopolized by parking.

At stations located every block or every half-mile, depending on the need, a rider enters a destination on a computerized pad, and a car would take the person nonstop to the location. Stations would have slanted pull-in bays so that some cars could stop for passengers, while others could continue unimpeded on the main course.

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written by Andrew

(CNN) – A U.S. spacecraft beamed hundreds of photos of Mercury back to Earth on Tuesday after a close encounter with the planet closest to the sun.

The images show scientists never-before-seen landscapes on the planet’s surface.

Four of the high-resolution images were made public at 10 a.m. ET Tuesday, posted by NASA on its MESSENGER Web site. Taken during a three-hour span before and after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Mercury, the photos offer detailed new glimpses of the barren planet.

One shows the bright Kuiper crater just south of the center of the planet. Most of the terrain east of Kuiper had never before been photographed.

A close-up of Mercury’s surface, the highest-resolution color image ever taken of the planet, shows a round basin about 83 miles in diameter and named Polygnotus, after a Greek painter.

Another close-up captures a region between the sunlit day side and dark night side of the planet, where shadows are long and prominent. Two long, jagged scarps — visible fault lines — appear to crosscut each other on the planet’s surface. The easternmost scarp also cuts through a crater, meaning it formed after the impact that created the crater.

The MESSENGER spacecraft, launched in 2004, buzzed 124 miles (200 km) above Mercury’s surface Monday at almost 15,000 mph.

It’s the second Mercury flyby for MESSENGER — formally known as the Mercury Surface, Space, Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging craft.

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written by Andrew

NEW YORK - In a move to dramatically cut costs and better compete with Intel Corp., chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said Tuesday it will spin off its factories into a new joint venture with investors in the Persian Gulf state of Abu Dhabi.

The deal should shore up AMD’s finances and let it focus on the design and development of computer chips. The new venture, to be based in the U.S. and called Foundry Co., will absorb AMD’s manufacturing plants, including two in Dresden, Germany.

In conjunction with the spin off, Abu Dhabi’s investment arm, Mubadala Development Co., will invest $314 million to more than double its current stake in AMD to 19.3 percent from 8.1 percent.

Another entity backed by the Persian Gulf state, Advanced Technology Investment Co., will invest $2.1 billion for a stake in Foundry Co., which also will assume about $1.2 billion of AMD’s existing debt. Advanced Technology Investment then plans to contribute between $3.6 billion and $6 billion to Foundry Co. over the next five years to fund the expansion of the company’s chip-making capacity. That plan includes the construction of a new facility in Saratoga County, New York.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD, the world’s No. 2 maker of computer microprocessors, has been saddled with debt and hurt by product delays. Hector Ruiz stepped aside as CEO in July as pressure grew for the company to improve its finances and regain its competitive edge against Intel. AMD lost $1.19 billion in the second quarter, nearly double its losses a year earlier.

AMD’s finances have also been hurt by its 2006 acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI Technologies. As part of that buyout, AMD absorbed divisions that make chips for cell phones and digital television sets. Both were underperforming, and AMD wrote down their value by $876 million.

AMD’s shares have lost nearly 44 percent since the start of the year, compared with about 25 percent for the Dow Jones industrials.

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(CNN) — A truck stop is an assault on the senses, especially on a hot summer day. There’s the smell of diesel, the taste of exhaust fumes and the nerve-jangling, ever-present rumble of truck engines — even when the drivers are asleep.

Typically, truckers idle their engines during warm weather while they’re resting, to keep the air conditioning on and the cabs cool.

Some truckers use devices that cool cabs without idling. Most of these technologies either use batteries, which eventually wear out and have to be replaced, or fuel, which emits pollution. But Webasto, a company that makes trucking equipment, has found an alternative.

“It’s old technology turned new,” said John Thomas, director of commercial vehicles for Webasto Products, North America. “Actually, some people call it ‘high-tech ice.’ ” Watch how the cooling system works »

Webasto calls the system BlueCool. The heart of the system is a 300-pound black box that’s mounted on the truck’s frame rail. As the trucker drives, the system sends refrigerant through a matrix of graphite and a water/glycol mixture inside the box, creating blocks of ice.

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written by Andrew