On the eve of Christmas 2007, quite a few obituaries for incandescent light bulbs were penned. News was slow, time was short and Congress had just outlined a new energy plan that would essentially force these energy-wasting bulbs out by 2012. Now, however, legions of scientists are racing the clock to develop new incandescents that will still meet the upcoming guidelines, with a Deposition Sciences technology paving the way for a post-2012 model from Philips. Without drowning you in technobabble, let's just say that said tech has seen 50 percent efficiency gains in the lab, which is more than enough to please even the most outspoken tree hugger in Washington. In related news, GE has issued two more LED light bulbs: the 7-watt Energy Smart LED PAR20 and 10-watt LED PAR30. Both of 'em are aimed more at commercial customers than at actual homes, but you'll be hard pressed to find a better option for lighting up your makeshift basketball court.

Read - Incandescent bulbs stage comeback
Read - GE Energy Smart bulbs

While the original Sputnik burnt out after only 3 months in orbit, here's an homage that promises to be rather more resilient. IDEA, Japan's answer to you know who, is offering a 30cm tall (11.8-inches) self-sufficient ambient light that pretty much does its own thing. Integrated sensors detect when the light should be on, while inconveniences like power cords and on/off switches are completely done away with. The light's batteries are recharged by the sun at a rate of 2 to 5 hours sunlight for 8 hours operation, while its waterproof design means it can be dumped outside to collect rays during the day and even provide garden lighting at night. It's quirky, to be sure, but the obvious design cues taken from the Russian satellite should make true geeks smile with glee. You can find a gallery of the various color choices courtesy of Engadget Japanese below, and if you're passing by the land of the rising sun later this month you can snap up your very own solar light ball for ¥1575 ($16).

[Via Engadget Japanese]

We've been fans of Sanyo's rechargeable Eneloop batteries since they first entered the market in the lazy NiMH and NiCd days of 2005. We remember this because we, like Eneloops, don't suffer from the memory effect of our predecessors. Ok, ok, that date's in the press release but that doesn't change the fact that Eneloops will maintain their charge over time even when stored, ununsed in a drawer now does it? Anywho, Sanyo just announced its rechargeable Eneloop Lamp that serves to light your home when upright or your path when held like a flashlight -- automatically, just as soon as it passes the 90-degree mark. It also features a healing function that waxes a cool blue light into the tragic abyss of your misery and despair. The internal AAs recharge in about 12-hours when set atop the included induction charger. Fully charged, you can expect between 3- and 45-hours of white light, 12- to 16-hours of the blue stuff, and about 6 hours in flashlight mode. No price was given but it'll be on sale in Japan starting September 11th.

[Via Akihabara News]

Turns out Pixel Qi's CTO Mary Lou Jepsen reads Engadget, or at least the posts relevant to her company and her invention, the 3Qi screen. In addition to a side-by-side comparison of the display against the Kindle and a few other devices, in an interview with techvideoblog, she can be seen going through our most recent post and answering some of our readers' questions, including clearing up what seems to be a pretty big misconception that the screen uses e-ink for being visible in direct sunlight -- "it's standard LCD, just clever design," she explains. In one scene, she demonstrates that even in those very bright situations when the screen looks to go monochrome for visibility, you can still see a hint of color, with the full "Pleasantville" experience entering the more she moves the hardware into the shade. As for reports of the tech adding a $200 premium, she dismisses this as a misquote and infers that it was more of an example price for a laptop that'd be using the technology. There's a lot of fascinating tidbits here, including some talk on the nature of the display and laptop industries. As it stands, mass production begins this Fall, and even though you're seeing that Acer logo on the demo unit, Jepsen says it's just a prototype built into a laptop they bought at Radio Shack and that no manufacturing partners have been confirmed. Make sure the closest star isn't beaming down at your screen and head on after the break for the both videos.

Read - Mary Lou Jepsen answers user comments
Read - Pixel Qi vs Kindle vs Toshiba R600 vs regular LCD tablet

Look, LED light bulbs are fanciful, great for Ma Earth and a fine addition to any home, barber shop or underground fight club. But let's be honest -- even the guy that bikes through blizzards to get to work and wears garb that he grew in his basement isn't apt to shell out $120 a pop to have what's likely the most efficient light bulb American dollars can buy. Enter Chunlei Guo from the University of Rochester, who has helped discover a process which could morph a traditional incandescent light bulb into a beacon of burning light without using nearly as much energy as before. In fact, his usage of the femtosecond laser pulse -- which creates a "unique array of nano- and micro-scale structures on the surface of a regular tungsten filament" -- could enable a bulb to increase output efficiency in order to emit 100-watts worth of light while sucking down less than 60-watts of power. Per usual, there's no telling when this new hotness is likely to hit the commercial realm, but one's thing for sure: we bet GE's paying attention.

[Via Physorg]

Don't take it personally, Blu-ray -- we still love you and all, but there's just something dreamy about baking 1.6TB of information onto a blank piece of optical media we can actually afford. According to a new report, a crew of researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have exploited the properties of a certain gold nano-rod that will theoretically enable them to shove 300 DVDs worth of data onto a single disc. Calling the method "five-dimensional optical recording," the technique "employs nanometer-scale particles of gold as a recording medium," and according to developers, it's primed for commercialization. Essentially, these gurus have figured out how to add a spectral and polarization dimension, giving them the ability to record information "in a range of different color wavelengths on the same physical disc." As for the chances this actually makes it out of the laboratory and into the lives of real humans? Slim, Jim.

[Thanks, Sam]

Philips has always pushed OLED lighting concepts, and it looks like the company's Lumiblade products will be the first to start shipping. The folks at OLED-Info got to play with some pre-production samples, and while they're definitely cool and impossibly slim, there are some notable drawbacks: the rectangular panel has some unfortunate "speckles," and overall they're just not very bright on their own, so you'll need quite a few for an actual lamp. Still, we've no doubt OLED lighting will soon be everywhere, so hit read link for a quick glimpse of the future.

For the longest while, scientists have been flummoxed by the incessant coruscating emitted by individual molecules; no matter their methods, they could never quite seem to overcome a troubling optical quirk known sensibly as "blinking." Thanks to a brilliant crew at the University of Rochester, however, we now understand the basic physics behind the phenomenon, and together with a team from Eastman Kodak, a nanocrystal has been created that can constantly emit light. In theory, the discovery could lead to "dramatically less expensive and more versatile lasers, brighter LED lighting, and biological markers that track how a drug interacts with a cell at a level never before possible." Indeed, one could envision that future displays could be crafted by painting a grid of differently sized nanocrystals onto a flat surface, making even OLED TVs look chubby in comparison. Now, if only we had a good feeling that such a device was destined for a CES in our lifetime...

Trying to circumvent the need to choose between getting a wide-angle shot and zooming in for details, a team of researchers at Princeton led by electric engineer Jason Fleischer have developed a new method to get the best of both worlds, by passing the light through a "nonlinear crystal" that would normally distorts the picture. A computer algorithm then pieces together the data and, as they claim, produces a wide-view image that also manages to capture the finer points otherwise missing when using conventional techniques. The goal is to build "super-resolution" microscopes for better medical diagnostics, but the group also sees uses in the fields of data encryption and lithography / microchip production. Is it too much to ask that our next Canon or Nikon have this a standard feature?

[Via PhysOrg]

Details are scarce on these new speakers from Kenwood, but if you find yourself frequently faced with a lamp-or-noise dilemma, we might've just stumbled upon the solution. The prototype flat speakers, developed by Junji Kido of Yamagata University in Japan, are inexplicably surfaced with white Lumiblade-style OLED lights -- we're not sure what that does for the sound, but we probably won't be trading in our studio monitors in anticipation of this brightly lit conjectured future.

[Via OLED-Info]

Make no mistake, wrapping your mind around the build of an OLED panel is mighty tough to do. Without getting you mired in technobabble, let's just say that indium tin oxide (ITO) has generally been a mainstay in every single OLED that was produced commercially. Now, a team of researchers from AGFA-Gevaert, IMEC, Holst Centre and Philips have prototyped a 12- x 12-centimeter flexible OLED lighting panel that swaps out the ITO for highly-conductive transparent resin electrodes. You see, it's been difficult for OLED builders to secure enough electrical conductivity of ITO in a low-temperature process, and this new methodology is perfectly suited for the coating method (which makes it ripe for printing). The resin itself is being dubbed Orgacon, and tests have shown it to have a 6x improvement over ITO in terms of electrical conductivity. Beyond that, the crews are keeping the secrets safe from the poachers of the world, but here's hoping this amounts to more than just jovial celebration in a far off laboratory.

[Via OLED-Display]

Ah, progress. Right around two years ago, we spotted a LED-filled light bulb that used "just" nine watts and cost a staggering $65. Now, we've got yet another option that sucks down even less power and costs nearly twice as much. C. Crane Company has been working on its so-called GeoBulb for a solid three years now, but at long last the device is shipping to affluent homeowners and headstrong Earth lovers. The bulb can provide as much light as a traditional 60W incandescent with just 7.5W, and it features a 30,000 hour (10 years) lifespan with typical usage. Now, the hard part: choosing between cool, soft and warm white.

[Via Times-Standard]

The holy grail of OLED is upon us. With scientists around the world working to improve efficiency of the short-lived blue OLED in order to better align with lifespans of the green and red counterparts, a team from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has reportedly taken a huge leap in solving the whole thing. These gurus have conjured up new host materials for a blue phosphorescent OLED that's at least 25 percent more efficient than existing blue OLEDs, but regrettably, details beyond that are few and far between. Word on the street has it that PNNL scientists are expected to gather and discuss the findings before heading to a meeting of the American Chemical Society later this spring, and we'll be crossing our fingers that whatever they've found is both a) cheap and b) easily implementable.

[Via OLED-Display]