My mother and I chat a lot about different alternative energy options, mainly because she is lucky enough to live in Hawaii where solar hot water has been mandated for future construction. But one thing that has been ultra controversial on the Big Island has been wind power for the same very obvious reasons that other communities have an issue with it: the size of the turbines needed to harness this source of energy. So, if investing in wind power is likely to make your neighbors upset, why not get your neighbors involved? Heck, while you're at it, why not give them an ownership stake in the project, so they have the potential to make some money on an alternative...

As you probably know, graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms packed in a dense two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. And it recently became very popular recently as a basis for ultra-fast transistors. Now, according to Science News, U.S. researchers are using graphene to image individual hydrogen atoms via a standard transmission electron microscope (TEM) technology. Until now, heavy atoms, such as carbon, could be detected by electron microscopy. But the physicists from Berkeley, California, have shown it's possible to track the smallest atoms, hydrogen ones. But read more...

Gathering in New York brings together the hacker community for sessions on hacking the usual (computer systems) and not so usual (the media, food, and sex).

It's been a week since the iPhone 3G launched and I wanted to run down my top 10 free iPhone applications – so far. So here goes... Image Gallery: Top 10 free iPhone applications.

Android started off being a great idea, from a great company, with lots of support from carriers and manufacturers, and an awesome $10million contest to get developers drooling. With some stiff competition from Apple, and loss of developer morale, I'm afraid of what the future might hold for this platform. The new Apple iPhone 3G is awesome -- but more specifically, the App Store is what might be giving Google a run for its money. The quantity and quality of applications available through the store appear to be fairly healthy, whereas the applications being developed for Android were probably all created by people looking to make some quick cash from the contest -- which may have impacted the quality of...

Here are CNET Reviews' 10 favorite items from the past week, including the iPhone 3G, a portable hard drive from Iomega, and the Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router.

"EcoSearch this" doesn't have quite the same ring as "Google this," but the non-profit is hoping to harness the power of the Google search engine to help raise money for environmental non-profits including the Sierra Club, TreePeople, RainForest Alliance, National Resource Defense Council, Heal the Bay, Healthy Child, Healthy World and the Remedee Foundation. So, you may want to set your search bookmark to EcoSearch.org in order to help out. The company figures that if Google users run just two searches a day against its site, it can raise about $15 million per year per million users. Its goal for this year is to reach that first 1 million mark by the end of December. Worried about being more responsible...

If you read general coverage of Apple's new G3 iPhone you'll soon discover either that it's perfection incarnate or the worst excuse for a cheap handset anyone's ever foisted on an unsuspecting world. Balance is not a feature -of the coverage - and you'd never know, from "journalistic" reports that the thing has both pluses and minuses.

We really tried to get away from talking just about the iPhone in MobileTechRoundup show #140, but when it is the hottest news in the mobile space it is tough. We did talk about some applications, iPhone 3G battery life, and a utility we would like to see on the iPhone. We also talked about the free Opera Mobile 9.5 beta now available for Windows Mobile touch screen devices. Netbooks were also part of the topics with Acer's Aspire One and the MSI Wind mainly discussed.

After well over a year of scrutiny, the proposed merger between the country's two satellite radio providers - XM and Sirius - is finally on the home stretch, set for an approval vote as early as Aug. 1. But wait. This week, one of the FCC commissioners proposed even more conditions - beyond what chairman Kevin Martin has already suggested and what XM/Sirius execs have offered. With Washington politics at play, could the last mile to a vote be delayed even further? From the beginning, XM and Sirius faced an uphill battle to get this merger approved, notably the matter of a no-merging-in-the-future clause that was established when the two companies received their licenses. But through it all, Sirius CEO...