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 you're replacing your household incandescent light-bulbs with LEDs in a bid to save energy and possibly cash (over the 40,000-hour lifespan) you might want to consider these remote-controlled lamps from Sharp. The DL-L60AV gives you on/off and dimming functions as well as the ability to adjust the light in seven shades of white to warm up or cool down the glow. Best of all, they screw into a standard E26 socket for a one-to-one exchange with your existing ocean warmers. The features of the remote control are still unclear (lighting zone support, range of operation, etc.) but it appears to work with multiple-lamps in parallel which is a nice touch. However, we'd like to see Sharp integrate a Z-Wave or ZigBee chipset so we could link these directly (without special wall-switches) into a tricked-out home automation and power managment system. The DL-series start at ¥3880 (about $40) for simple LED lights before hitting ¥7980 (about $82) for the fully-equipped DL-L60AV and begin shipping July 15th in Japan.

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]

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]

Philips has been hitting us with some out-there lighting concepts lately, but the company's Master LED light bulb is actually already on sale in Europe and is set to brighten up Stateside lives around July. The 40W-equivalent bulbs should run between $50 and $70, and expected lifetime is set at 45,000 hours -- just slightly more than a CFL's 10,000 or a standard bulb's 750 hours. The Master is certainly a damn sight nicer looking than the other mutant LED bulbs we've seen, but we'll see if consumers are ready to jump on another more-expensive-upfront lighting tech so soon after CFLs have hit the mainstream.

[Via Core77]

While the rest of the world goes off to win the hearts of environmentalists (and laypeople, too) with LED light bulbs, Hitachi Lighting and Seiyu are taking the road (way) less traveled. Reportedly, the duo has collaborated in order to pop out a "bulb-shaped fluorescent lamp that can be separated into a lighting circuit unit and an arc tube unit." What this means is that the lighting circuit can be used repeatedly (up to 30,000 hours) while the arc tube simply gets replaced every 10,000 hours. The pair is hoping that the bulbs will take the place of traditional 60-watt incandescents, and considering that these only draw around 13-watts each, it's fairly easy to see how Mother Earth would just love you for making the switch. As for pricing, we're hearing that these will sell for around ¥1,500 ($14) apiece when they launch this October in Japan, so don't plan on recouping your investment in energy savings right away or anything.

There's not much to say about the Motionbulb that can't be extrapolated from the above image and the product's name: it's a CFL bulb with a built-in motion detector capable of, uh ... detecting motion from up to 25 feet. Walk into a room, light goes on; leave the room, light goes off. 'Nuff said. They say the $20 bulb will last five years, which means it should still be around when those inefficient incandescents go the way of our favorite robo-dog in 2012.

Considering that there are quite a few nations out there aiming to ditch incandescent bulbs in the not-too-distant future, it follows logic that we should start making LEDs more suitable for in-home use. Of course, we've already seen a couple of advancements in the area, but scientists at Glasgow University -- along with the Institute of Photonics at the University of Strathclyde -- have reportedly found a way to make traditional LEDs a fair bit brighter. The process, dubbed nano-imprint lithography, involves "making microscopic holes in the surface of LEDs to increase the level of light they give off." Unfortunately, said process is still quite time consuming and expensive, but you can rest assured they're working to make the process quicker, simpler and cheaper for the good of mankind.

[Via FarEastGizmos]

Better late than never, right? Regardless of your feelings on said mantra, the United States of America has finally passed a law barring stores from selling incandescent light bulbs after 2012. 'Course, the EU and Australia have already decided to ditch the inefficient devices in the not-too-distant future, but a new energy bill signed into law this week throws the US into the aforementioned group. Better grab a pack of the current bulbs while you still can -- soon you'll be holding a sliver of history.

[Image courtesy of HD]

Following on from Australia's pledge to phase out the usage of incandescent bulbs, the 27 leaders of the European Union have decided that all member states will have to use energy efficient lighting before 2010. The switchover, which will affect all of the EU's 470 million+ citizens, was developed with the aim of meeting targets to reduce energy usage by 20 percent by 2020 (say that three times fast): to that end, a commission will be accepting proposals for enabling the switchover "for office and street lighting to be adopted by 2008 and on incandescent lamps and other forms of lighting in private households by 2009." No doubt there will be some that attempt to lump this decision into the euroskeptic "straight bananas" category, although the chair of the 27 nation summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, stated that this won't be a case of people being forced to throw out existing energy inefficient bulbs, "but people should start looking at what's in the shops." Hopefully anti-EU political groups will put their views aside this time in order that this switchover goes smoothly, although something tells us lobbyists won't be the biggest concern when it comes to changing bulbs in houses and offices across 27 different countries.

Incandescent is getting a pretty bad name in today's going-green society, but GE wants to salvage the tech with innovation before it's scrapped for the ages in laws that ban its use at home and abroad. GE's new high efficiency incandescent (HEI) lamp doubles the efficiency of today's 15 lumens-per-Watt incandescent bulbs achieving something closer to fluorescents -- which GE claims has the potential of saving supposedly hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide annually, if adopted universally, of course. We doubt it's any coincidence that this announcement was made so shortly after the Australia's law and California's bill against incandescent bulbs, but the message is clear: save power, or Croc Dundee and the Governator will hunt you down and bad things will happen.

[Via Slashdot]