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When 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his crew went to China to record the black market dismantling of electronic waste, or e-waste, the experience was almost as hazardous for the 60 Minutes team as working with the toxic material is for poor Chinese workers.

Jumped by a gang of men overseeing the e-waste operations who tried to take the CBS team’s cameras, Pelley’s crew managed to escape and bring back footage of the hazardous activities. Pelley’s investigation will be broadcast this Sunday, Nov. 9, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

The Chinese attackers were trying to protect a lucrative business of mining the e-waste — junked computers, televisions and other old electronic products — for valuable components, including gold. “They’re afraid of being found out. This is smuggling. This is illegal,” says Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, a group working to stop the dumping of toxic materials in poor countries that certifies ethical e-waste recyclers in the United States. “A lot of people are turning a blind eye here. And if somebody makes enough noise, they’re afraid this is all going to dry up.”

E-waste workers in Guiyu, China, where Pelley’s team videotaped, put up with the dangerous conditions for the $8 a day the job pays. They use caustic chemicals and burn the plastic parts to get at the valuable components, often releasing toxins that they not only inhale, but release into the air, the ground and the water. Potable water must now be trucked into Guiyu and scientists have discovered that the city has the highest levels of cancer-causing dioxins in the world. Pregnancies in Guiyu are six times more likely to result in miscarriages, and seven out of 10 children there have too much lead in their blood.

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Originally posted at Green Tech

Waterproof Mp3 players are niche gadgets, but for the genetic freaks that spend all their hours turning laps in the pool practicing, they may offer welcome relief from the monotony.

Freestyle Audio’s newest MP3 player, the Soundwave, is only the latest of these trying to ride the coattails of the high profile swimming competition from this summer’s Olympics.

The $90 player can handle submersion for up to 10 feet and can also resist shock. Like other waterproof players, it’s low in capacity (2 GB only or about 600 songs), it supports MP3 and WMA file types, and comes with waterproof headphones. It also comes with a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts 18 hours, according to the manufacturer.

But the biggest barrier these players face is to convince people they are more than crappy, low-capacity toys with barely passable audio recognition in submersion — only a few have managed to clear that low bar. Others have complained that it’s difficult to keep the earbuds in due to the water pressure.

SwiMP3 is one of the quality players that pro swimmers prefer lately, as it conducts vibrations through the cheekbones (like Bluetooth sets), and according to the New York Times, probably has the best clear audio of them all. Other good players out there are the Speedo Aquabeat player (expensive at about $150 for 1 GB), and NU Tech’s Dolphin (1GB, $135).

If there are any swimmers out there, what do you think?  Are you willing to pay $150 just for the privilege to listen to some tunes below the surface? How much would you pay for a waterproof, super-rugged iPod if Apple made one? (The flimsy, heavy plastic cases available now don’t count). Let us know in the comments.

I’m going to have to visit Japan one day to try to understand why the country produces so many cool, mildly useless gadgets such as the Rain Wipe.  Made by ANNON, the device (video above) removes rainwater from umbrellas by absorbing the water with a cloth. Then, pressure moves the water to a tray toward the bottom. Each tray only needs to be replaced after the device wipes 3,000 umbrellas dry.

The company is marketing the Rain Wipe for stores to display at their entrances. No details on price or release date yet, but ANNON claims the device is environmentally friendly and will save consumers money, as it eliminates the need to use plastic umbrella bags, which cost 2 to 9 yen ($0.02 to $0.10) a piece.

DigInfoTV (Thanks, Katharine!)

Newsweek’s Budget Travel weblog discusses the limitations of most drip coffee makers, then highlights how to brew a better pot despite those limitations. For example, the post claims that your drip coffee maker probably never reaches the perfect brewing temperature. The solution:

Do a “trial run” of your coffee maker—without coffee—to heat up the machine. Pour the heated water back into the device and brew your coffee as usual. While you won’t get the water to a perfect level of hotness, you will get it pretty darned close.

The post covers a few more smart hacks for accomplishing a better cup when your brewer isn’t ideal, so if a good cup of coffee is what keeps you going on a long day, these tips could save you the cost of a trip to your coffee shop but still provide you with a good cup. Photo by emdot.

Another day, another spectacular tower in Dubai: The Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower, a curvy building “inspired by the geometrical order of a snowflake and the aerodynamics of a Formula 1″, will not only appear in Dubai but in six other cities around the world. According to the architects—who worked in Beijing’s Water Cube—the design will allow for an easy construction process and an efficient use of energy, all while making the building change its look through the day.

The building features an iconic silhouette and a facade characterised by vertical slots with private balconies. A series of reflective fins generates a vertical dynamic and gives the building a constantly changing appearance. The fins track the sun, control the solar shading and dissolve the rationality of the plan into a continuously evolving building volume. The facade’s continuous surface enables curvature with a lot of repetition and the potential for standardisation in the building process. State-of-theart engineering and innovative materials will be used to achieve a fully sustainable performance.

[Deezeen]

DARPA is pumping money into developing a submersible aircraft: a vehicle that can fly in the air and dive straight into the water, becoming a submarine. Badass!

The DARPA Submersible Aircraft research project is focused on making a submersible aircraft, not, as they not, a flying submarine. There’s a difference! This would be a plane first, designed to spend most of its time in the air, spending only short periods underwater.

The challenge is balancing the needs of an airplane (low weight) with a submarine (high weight). Here are the major requirements of the craft:

* Flight: The minimal required airborne tactical radius of the sub-plane is 1000 nautical miles (nm). The minimum surface tactical radius is 100 nautical miles. The minimum subsurface tactical range is 12 nautical miles. Note that the ranges quoted are one-way ranges. The platform would need to be able to fly to a location, insert and extract personnel without refueling and this would require the total operational range to be 1000 nm airborne, 200 nm surface, 24 nm under water.
* Loiter: The platform should be capable of loitering in a sea-state five, in theater between inserting and extracting personnel for up to 3 days (72 hours). The craft does not need to be submerged during loitering operations; it can operate at the surface.
* Payload: The platform should be capable of transporting 8 operators, as well as all of their equipment, with a total cargo weight of 2000 pounds.
* Depth: The operating depth of the platform will be constrained by balancing the need to reduce depth in order to minimize structural loads and snorkel complexity with the need to increase depth in order to minimize any potential signatures that could be generated by perturbing the free surface. The effect that the submerged platform will have on the free surface is exponentially proportional to the depth, therefore the platform should be able to operate at a relatively shallow depth and only have the snorkel affect the free surface.
* Speed: The speed of the platform in each mode of operation must allow the system to complete a tactical transit (1000 nm airborne,100 nm surface ,12 nm sub-surface) trip in less than 8 hours. This 8 hour time must include any time required by the platform to reconfigure between modes of operation.

If successful, it’ll certainly be a feat of engineering. We’ll see what they manage to come up with. [NetworkWorld]

You’re standing around the water cooler chatting with your co-workers, and someone makes a racist (sexist, homophobic, or otherwise stereotype-based) joke. What do you do? Call him or her out on it and risk your work relationship? Don’t say a thing (and imply that it’s ok)? Over at the Brazen Careerist blog, race and culture consultant Carmen Van Kerckhove says:

My recommendation? Play dumb. Put on a bewildered expression, act as if you don’t understand the joke, and ask your co-worker to explain it to you. He will not be able to explain why the joke is funny without evoking a racist stereotype. You can then question the veracity of this stereotype, thus pointing out the racism of the joke, without being confrontational and without humiliating your co-worker. Racist jokes rely on an unspoken, shared knowledge of racist stereotypes. Without the stereotypes, there is no humor.

Everyone’s been in this uncomfortable situation before. How have you dealt with it? Tell us your advice in the comments, then hit the link below to see the rest of Van Kerckhove’s beyond-diversity-training tips on race at work.

When I see images of Bruce Munro’s Field of Light installation, whatever glumness I might have felt during the day disappears, and that Beatle-esque Lenny Kravitz song of a similar name starts playing in my head. If I had the chance to check out Munro’s light installation, coming to Project Eden in Cornwall, England on November 1, I would totally wander through the fields—slowly, slowly through the fields, in fact—touching the acrylic globes that float at the ends of 6,000 fiberoptically united tubes.

The tubes’ intensity and color are controlled by an external projector; they’re in sync but don’t actually contain any electricity. (Sorry, Tesla.) In the Cornwall exhibition, they will be installed on a huge 1,200-square-meter grass-covered roof using 24,000 meters of fiber. It is of course “best viewed in hours of darkness.” Munro has actually set up Field of Light shows on a number of occasions in the past, each successive installation growing in some way. His next all-new project is “a massive illuminated maze synchronized with choral music” named (what else?) Water Towers. That will be on display next March in Frome, Somerset, so yes, again again with the England. You lucky Limeys had better send pictures! [Dezeen]

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

We’ve seen dynamic contrast ratios on HDTVs climb as high as 2,000,000:1, but an in-house design from the famed Carl Zeiss blows that right out of the water. The powerdomeVELVET planetarium projector was obviously not designed with home cinema in mind, though the specifications are no less impressive. We’ve got a 2,500,000:1 contrast ratio, DLP / BrilliantColor technologies, a 1,200p native resolution and a DVI input. Not like you’re actually considering one for your own domed theater, but it’ll be available for a small fortune in Q1 2009.

[Via DVICE]

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