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Every so often we come
across a utility that looks like it could turn out to become a must-have
classic. 
Why, you might ask is one
of the world’s top camera makers going to all of the trouble of producing a
digital camera that only shoots in black and white? You might also be curious
as to how it can be that the Leica M Monochrom costs a touch over six grand,
which would be a pretty penny for a top-end colour camera. Well, the Leica name
and legendary build quality probably accounts for a fair whack of the price. The
camera’s 18 megapixel sensor and top grade lens doesn’t come cheap either but
the key to this camera’s market is the target audience, which is likely to be
well heeled professionals and artists, keen to explore the currently trendy world
of black and white photography. There’s no denying the special quality of black
and white prints, that colour film and image sensors just cannot capture and
until now the only way to get the real thing has been to use photographic film.
Now there’s an alternative, and we wouldn’t mind betting that before long
others will be jumping aboard this potentially lucrative bandwagon.
Several promising new
battery technologies may (or may not) provide the long awaited solution to
powering our gadgets and vehicles, without relying on rare and expensive
materials. First up hails from the Tokyo University of Science where Shinichi
Komaba has developed a battery using the abundant element Sodium. Its used in the
manufacture of electrodes, together with other common materials, including Iron
Oxide and Manganese Oxide. The energy density said to be in the same ballpark
as Lithium Ion, which basically means that cells can store roughly the same
amount of power for a given weight of battery, but inevitably there is a
problem. Prototype cells have demonstrated a very rapid aging effect and the
capacity of the battery decreases significantly after just 30 charge cycles.
Contender number two comes from chemist Christopher Johnson working at the
Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. His battery brew uses layers of Vanadium
Pentoxide in a Sodium cell’s positive electrode. This concoction apparently improves
both energy density and cell life, which is increased to 200 charge cycles. Clearly
there’s still plenty of work to be don but if only by sheer weight of numbers,
one day one of these battery technologies will make it out of the lab.
You would be forgiven for
thinking that there wasn’t much left in the way of new developments for glass, a
material that has been around in one form or another, for more than 3500 years,
but needless to say you would be wrong. The white coats over at MIT been
tinkering with something called surface nanotextures and come up with a new
glass that produces virtually no reflections, and as an added bonus it’s
self-cleaning and resistant to fogging. Already the possible applications are
lining up, everything from smartphone and tablet PC screens, optical
instruments and car windscreens, not to mention windows. The solar panel industry
is also very interested because panels can lose as much as 40 percent
efficiency in six months due to a build up of crud and dirt. The basic trick is
to start with regular glass, coat it with a photo-resistive chemical and expose
it to light, though a grid pattern which results in the surface being covered
in microscopic cones; you can read more and see a video on the