In the race to implement new energy sources, farms have an advantage: lots of manure. A large chicken farm north of Beijing is taking advantage of this fact by using its chicken manure to generate power and heat. And this isn’t just a small-time farm—the 3 million chickens on the farm produce 220 tons of manure and 170 tons of wastewater each day.

The project is expected to provide 14,600 megawatt hours of electricity a year and help reduce electricity shortages in the region. The biogas is taking the place of coal-fired power, and the project is also helping to control dust levels and reduce odors.

The plant will feature an anaerobic digester to treat waste material, which will produce biogas that will then power 2 GE Jenbacher gas engines. Heat generated from the process will be used in the waste fermentation process and to warm the farm in the winter.

While any facility containing 3 million chickens probably doesn’t treat its animal residents very well, at least this one sets an example for other farms looking to become more self-sufficient—and energy self-sufficiency should always be welcome in a growing country like China, cleantechnica.com reports.

GE Energy China estimates the project will save the farm more than $1.2 million a year in electricity costs. GE’s Jenbacher gas engines can be powered a number of ways, with natural gas, coal mine gas or alternative fuels like biogas from waste and landfills.

Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc (you cannot burn data on it) which claims to store 400GB of data. The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc. If this was announced few months back then people will think its totally un-practical to have so much space and data on a single disk but today I see such disk will be of great use for providing high definition content. More people are buying high definition LCD TV’s and these people will experience a great video quality as there will be no need to compress videos and even longer videos will fit on single disk. Still this disk will not be for a mass market as not everyone is equipped well to play such high definition movie at home.

Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo, the two search engine giants (and rivals) to index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the Adobe, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions of flash content which was till now of no relevance to search engines. But now since the Flash content is exposed, it is not yet cleared by Adobe how their technology will show content of flash to the search engines. Any how people have got more reasons now to go for full flash websites and flash developer delight as well.

AMD has aimed this time to put all the benefits of console gaming in PC. Although PC gaming has a very committed to fan-base but it is impossible to not see the many benefits that console gaming offers: faster loads, better compatibility and more games that fully utilize the hardware to name a few. AMD just launched a new initiative called AMD GAME! that attempts to bring some of these benefits to PC games as well. AMD will be certifying hardware for two different levels of PC gaming standards, testing compatibility with a host of current and future PC titles as well as offering up AMD GAME! ready components or pre-built systems from partners. AMD GAME! will come in two flavors, AMD GAME! and AMG GAME! Ultra. Let’s see if this can bring up the lost image of AMD after launch of Phenom.

A new superconducting material fabricated by a Canadian-German team has been fabricated out of a silicon-hydrogen compound and does not require cooling. Instead of super-cooling the material, as is necessary for conventional superconductors, the new material is instead super-compressed. The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature.

The new family of superconductors are based on a hydrogen compound called “silane,” which is the silicon analog of methane combining a single silicon atom with four hydrogen atoms to form a molecular hydride.

Tse’s team is currently using the Canadian Light Source synchrotron to characterize the high pressure structures of silane and other hydrides as potential superconducting materials for industrial applications as well as a storage mechanism for hydrogen fuel cells.

Until now only black and white images were possible by existing electron microscope to view atoms but now Cornell’s Duffield Hall has acquired a new electron microscope that will enable scientists to see individual atoms in color for the very first time. The new microscope uses a technology called aberration-correction which is more intense and allows for faster imaging speed. So now one can also see how atoms are bonded to one another in a crystal, because the bonding creates small shifts in the energy signatures.