Remember those annoying and environmentally incorrect Styrofoam peanuts that would messily tumble out of gadget-packed boxes? It was only a matter of time before packing material got less annoying as well as more sustainable. And while you won’t find packaging made from actual peanuts, what would you say to mushroom roots? That’s one of the key ingredients behind EcoCradle.

Well, mushroom root is the layperson’s term – it’s fungal mycelium, actually, that’s allowed to grow for about 5-10 days among agricultural waste products like rice hulls and cotton gin trash. The end result, according to Ecocradle inventors Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre is “all-natural, rigid material…with similar material properties and cost as synthetic foams like expanded polystyrene,” better known as our old friend Styrofoam.

Like many inventions, EcoCradle came about somewhat serendipitously. Bayer and McIntyre were “fascinated by mushrooms growing on wood chips, and observing how the fungal mycelium strongly bonded the wood chips together” and figured if the fungus could be that durable, it could be put to other uses. EcoCradle is not only durable, but it’s pliable and totally biodegradable. It’s also completely safe and even edible, say the makers, though they note that ”it’s non-nutritious and doesn’t taste good.”

Check out the embedded video to hear more about this noble idea.

Image source: Ecovative Design LLC

The tech media seldom get more excited than when the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) comes to town, and that was certainly the case this year when Oh Gizmo helped lead the charge, no pun intended, with news of the RCA Airnergy WiFi Hotspot Power Harvester.

Simply put, it’s a free energy game changer. The battery, about the size of a shoe brush, harvests WiFi signals from the air and converts them to DC power. A USB cable attached to the top of the battery can them be plugged into your power-needy smart phone – BlackBerry users appear to be the target demo here.  According to the rep Oh Gizmo interviewed at CES, as your phone is charging, the tethered battery starts recharging itself with WiFi signals even as it’s draining. How well and how fast it works depends on how close you are to WiFi signals, says the rep.

While detractors including Slashdot are skeptical about the harvester’s effectiveness, gadget hounds may find one aspect of the product hard to resist: the projected price point. Oh Gizmo reports that “the USB charger will be available this summer for $40, and a [smaller, OEM-sized] battery with the WiFi harvesting technology will be available soon after.”

RCA isn’t the only manufacturer to attach itself to cool green products, of course. The iGo family of chargers is certainly worth a look, especially if you’d like the luxury of leaving some of your gadgets’ device chargers at home. And if you enjoy the news and buzz that comes from shows like CES, bear in mind that the Greener Gadgets Conference hits New York City’s McGraw-Hill Conference Center at the end of this month.

Image and video source: Oh Gizmo

Even if you’re not a fan of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (but if you’re not, ask yourself why) you may know of one of its characters, a highly-capable but emotionally-challenged android named Data.

Thinking about it, the name Data was quite appropriate. He was clinical about everything. And that’s precisely why we like data, lowercase “d,” in real life. Data doesn’t get rattled by office politics, the reason Google approves projects based on data and not the emotions and whims of coworkers. If you were unfamiliar with Google’s data-driven culture before, it probably makes more sense to you now why they’re pushing endless productivity apps to help us record, organize, and analyze our own data.

What’s the point of basing our lives on data? Well, the same as it always was: You either want to save time, money, and energy, or help someone else do the same. And the recording process has a name: lifelogging, and while Rubel didn’t coin the term he’s on to something when he says that “if you dedicate yourself to using data wisely to plan and measure you will succeed no matter what your goals are.” The most basic form of lifelogging is keeping a personal diary, perhaps the oldest and still the best way to keep track of your life, whether you plan to write your autobiography or one day subject the world to your grooming tips, ala Bob Packwood.

Rubel helps single out one of the more selfless lifeloggers – dad Allen Fawcett, who tracked his son’s sleep patterns for a year and recorded them in the graph shown in the time-lapse video embedded above. The blue shows when his boy was sleeping, the yellow when he was awake. Over time, the yellow awake blocks solidify into predictable blocks, as you’ll see. How did this graph help Fawcett? It didn’t, per se, but the data gives other new parents hope that sleep patterns can even out. And if data can give you hope, that’s a pretty good reason to record it.