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Inhabitat's Week in Green: WarkaWater Tower, kangaroo-like robot and an energy-generating carousel
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. The world is flooded with electronic devices, which add up to a huge e-waste problem -- but if a team of MIT researchers has its way, the gadgets of the future could be made from living cells. The team is working on hybrid materials made from bacteria that could grow anything from solar cells to smartphones. The German engineering company Festo is known for its biomimetic creations, producing everything from flying seagulls to wind turbines that flap their wings like birds. Now the company has developed an energy-efficient robot that hops around like a kangaroo. In green lighting news, Torafu Architects has created a series of recycled glass pendant lamps that are inspired by droplets of water. And Philips has developed a new LED bulb that looks and feels like an incandescent. And for those travelers who just can't seem to fit everything in their carry-on luggage, we present you with the JakToGo, a new jacket that stores up to 10 kg of goods, freeing up space in your suitcase.
Philips expands iOS-controlled Hue line
Still love it when the lights in your house flash a rainbow of colors every time you're mentioned in a tweet? According to The Verge, Philips has announced two new additions to the Hue line of internet-controlled lighting; the US$89.95 LightStrips and the $79.95 Bloom. LightStrips are flexible, sticky-backed two-meter lengths of small LEDs made for accent lighting and things like frames. The Bloom (seen below, from the German Philips website) is a portable lamp that can be used to highlight an entire wall with its 120-lumen LED bulb. Both lights require the Philips Hue wireless bridge, which is part of the $199.95 starter kit available at Apple Stores and other retail locations. That kit includes the bridge and three controllable LED bulbs. All of the Hue lighting products are energy-efficient and can be controlled through the Hue app or IFTTT recipes to display any of more than 16 million colors in a number of intensity levels. A source for The Verge explained that the new lights are supposed to appear in Apple Stores and on Apple's online store soon, although the publication was not able to get a response from either Apple or Philips.
Koncept's Z-BAR LED lamp: 40,000 hours of industrial grace
More LED goodness for ya, this time in the form of a desk lamp, not a backlit LCD. The Z-Bar won I.D. Magazine's "best of category" award which is pretty sweet considering the category wasn't just lamps, it was furniture. The Z-Bar's 66, long-livin' LEDs pump 100 lumens in pretty much any direction you want thanks to that 47-inch, finger-thin neck loaded with hinges and rotational joints. Sure, 100 lumens doesn't seem like much when compared to an incandescent's 500–800 lumens. The Z-Bar's trick is to focus the light in a 50-degree viewing angle instead of the 360-degrees of waste emitted by standard light bulbs. The lamp can stand alone on its weighted base or clamped to a table edge -- your choice after forking over $130. [Via Inhabitat]
