Stories by: Chris Mellor

A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC).

French startup Seanodes has a product to combine storage on many Linux servers into a single shared pool of storage, making networked storage unnecessary.

Instead of delivering on its data center power-efficiency work, the Green Grid has announced nine more studies and has committed to delivering them by the end of the year. The job of producing usable power-efficiency metrics is proving difficult.

A supposedly zero carbon PC is being developed by U.K. retailer PC World, featuring wood casing for keyboard, screen and mouse. Use of recycled materials and low electricity needs will reduce its carbon footprint to 85 percent of a standard PC.

Memory system designer SST has combined NAND and NOR-like flash memory with RAM to produce a single chip with three memory applications.

The new DDR3 -- Double Data Rate 3 -- standard, gives a big performance improvement and should reduce power compared with to the DDR1 and DDR2 memory schemes, according to the standards group which made it.

Seagate is a launching a pair of 1TB capacity disks with advanced power-saving technology. This could save up to a quarter of the power consumed by normal drives. It has also announced a ruggedized 2.5-inch drive holding 80G bytes. Hitachi was first to market with a 1T byte drive a month or so ago.

Computer cooling supplier OCZ has announced plans to use carbon nanotube technology in its processor heatsink product, HydroJet.

A US engineer has devised a seemingly foolproof and cheap way to encrypt messages using the natural noise caused by electrons flowing along a wire.

Toshiba and Tohoku University researchers have found a read head drive technology that could increase areal density five hundred percent. It could mean a 5TB 3.5-inch drive or a 1TB 2-5-inch drive, both by 2013. The highest areal density of any shipping disk drive product is 178.8Gbit/sq inch. The new technology could push this to 1Tbit/sq inch and beyond.

We all thought that the floppy disk had joined punched cards in the IT graveyard. But Lindy Electronics has used a USB port to resurrect this traditional device.