spaceheater
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Hot Art is a space heater disguised as a painting (a very expensive painting)
To be honest, there's probably nothing wrong with the space heater you already own, but in the grand tradition of Nest and Dyson, all household objects must now look beautiful. Case in point: Hot Art, a space heater disguised as a 24-by-40-inch painting. The heater, or painting, or whatever you want to call it, can be decked out with several hundred pre-selected pieces of art, though you can also use an image of your own, for an extra fee. While it might pass for a canvas from afar, up close you'll see it's a flat surface made of PET, similar to recyclable water bottles. Nothing wrong with that, per se; some people would happily hang posters and reproductions on their walls anyway, so it's not crucial that this thing look like an original.
Water-cooled Aquasar supercomputer does math, heats dorm rooms
Not that we haven't seen this trick pulled before, but there's still something magical about the forthcoming Aquasar. Said supercomputer, which will feature two IBM BladeCenter servers in each rack, should be completed by 2010 and reach a top speed of ten teraflops. Such a number pales in comparison to the likes of IBM's Roadrunner, but it's the energy factor here that makes it a star. If all goes well, this machine will suck down just 10KW of energy, while the average power consumption of a supercomputer in the top 500 list is 257KW. The secret lies in the new approach to chip-level water cooling, which will utilize a "fine network of capillaries" to bring the water dangerously close to the processors without actually frying any silicon. While it's crunching numbers, waste heat will also be channeled throughout the heating system at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, giving students and dorm room crashers a good feel for the usefulness of recycled warmth.
