Toyota Devises Shrub To Purify & Cool Air

Oh so cool! I would love to see these sorts of things all over the place. Much better than those darn orange trees (rever try to eat the fruit from those! Yuck!).

Toyota said recently that it has developed a new species of the Cherry Sage shrub family that effectively absorbs harmful substances in the air. The new species, called Kirsch Pink, will be sold for 380 yen per pot through Toyota Roof Garden Co, a Toyota Motor subsidiary, from March next year. While Cherry Sage plants are known to absorb nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and other harmful substances in the air, the new species does so 1.3 times more effectively, Toyota says.

Toyota Devises Shrub To Purify & Cool Air

The Soft Phone

total touch screen phone

Forget touch typing with this baby. Mitsubishi and NTT DoCoMo are working together to create a phone with no keys, just touch screens. The idea is that new features can be added to the phones at any time. The menus can also be modified by the users to reduce the over all complexity of the system. Sounds like an idea that has come none too soon. Still in its experimental phase for now but when it hits it should be very popular.

[via Gizmodo]
You heard of touch screens now check out touch keys

Ramen In Space

I remember seeing the famous Israeli milk ad that was filmed on board of the MIR space station when I was at an airport in Japan. Talk about surreal! A little while ago I posted an article about the instant noodles that were made especially for the Japanese astronaut on board the space shuttle Discovery. Now there looks like there will be yet another out of this world noodle dish avaliable for us Earthbound consumers.

Starting next month, Nissin Food Products will shoot a promotional spot on the International Space Station for Cup Noodle, featuring a sales pitch by a hungry Russian cosmonaut.
The commercial will air in Japan in November as part of Nissin’s “Cup Noodle No Border” campaign,.
Space Films will send a high-def camera to the space station aboard a Russian rocket launch Oct. 1 and direct the filming from Russia’s Mission Control Center outside Moscow.
If you’re looking for extraterrestrial publicity, the agency will be leaving the camera at the space station in the hope of shooting more advertisements.

Ramen noodles shoots ad in space

SharpUX-MF40CL “Miracle” Series

Talk about all your eggs in one basket!

-USB or network connectivity
-Printer
-Fax
-Copier
-Scanner
-PDF creation
-Scan to emai
-Document feeder
-Cordless phone base station
-Memory card slot
-PictBridge
-Synchronizing with a mobile phone

It might only work in Japan (I think the landline phone standards are a bit different there) but still, it would be an amazing chunk of technology to have in your home office.

Sharp’s kitchen sink