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Door hout extreem dun te maken, is het voldoende transparant om een ledlampje er doorheen te laten schijnen.

Hout en een lichtbron gaan niet samen, zou je zeggen. Maar doordat ledlampjes veel minder warm worden dan de traditionele gloeilampen ('t zit al een beetje in de naam), hoeven we niet meer bang te zijn dat papier of hout zo in de fik vliegt. Ryosuke Fukusada maakte zelfs een lamp in de vorm van een gloeilamp met daarin een ledlampje, de Wooden Light Bulb.

LG's 55 inch oled-tv is flinterdun en overtreft huidige tv's met onder meer prachtige kleuren. Maar hij is peperduur.

LG showde deze week in Monaco de dunste 55 inch oled-tv. Het scherm van de EM9600 is maar 4 mm dik. Het prototype was al in januari in Las Vegas gepresenteerd, maar nu is het model af en bijna klaar voor de verkoop. Het is een van van de meest opvallende tv's van dit jaar dankzij de oled-techniek, de opvolger van de huidige lcd- en led-tv's. Bij Oled is er geen achtergrondverlichting nodig, waardoor de schermen dunner, lichter en energiezuiniger kunnen zijn. Ook betekent oled een betere beeldkwaliteit.

News updates all day from your Fast Company editors.

In the week after its IPO, it's now being reported by The Register that close to 50,000 Facebook users have commented negatively in regard to Facebook's planned changes to its privacy policy stating that they do not address their concerns, and include a demand that Facebook change open sharing to an "opt-in" system instead of an "opt-out" one. The changes Facebook is proposing come themselves from earlier demands by the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner last year. According to Facebook's own charter, if more than 7,000 users form an organized campaign they can force a user vote on the matter...and this is the target of the new campaign. Before IPO CEO Mark Zuckerberg remarked to staff that Facebook's mission was to "make the world more open and connected," in line with his push to force Facebook users to share more data.

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Most people stopped thinking about Keystone XL, the tar sands pipeline, after months of political sniping led the Obama administration to nix the project. But Congress hasn't forgotten about it: Republicans and Democrats have been quietly fighting over whether to shoehorn a measure approving the pipeline into a transportation bill. Meanwhile, environmental groups, oil lobbyists, and independent analysts have been working to predict the consequences that would result if it was built. Their efforts have produced two new reports providing two new—but conflicting—reasons to oppose the project.

In some parts of the United States, building Keystone XL could drive gas prices up, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council in a report confirming other economists' conclusions. This may seem counterintuitive: Proponents of the pipeline (and oil drilling in general) have argued that Keystone XL will help increase oil production in Canada, which will mean lower gas prices in the long term. 

But even without Keystone XL, Canada already ships more than a million barrels of oil to the United States every day, much of which ends up at refineries in the Midwest to be turned into gasoline. Right now, Canadian oil companies are sending so much oil to the Midwest that they end up selling to these refineries at a discount—$20 to $40 less per barrel than they could get if they had access to international markets. These discounts are passed onto drivers, who pay less for gas in the Midwest than on the coasts, where crude oil is more expensive. 

Keystone XL would create an express route for Canadian oil to the Gulf Coast, where it would be broken down, processed, and sent off to distant shores, bypassing the Midwest altogether. This is currently big business for the United States: Last year, the country exported more dollars worth of petroleum products—gas, diesel, and jet fuel—than of any other product. But Keystone would allow Canadian oil companies to fetch higher prices than American ones do. And the discounts that U.S. consumers have benefited from will disappear.

For the communities that could be affected by this shift, a hike in gas prices will hurt, especially after politicians promised that Keystone XL would cause the opposite effect. There's a problem with complaining about gas prices going up, though: the price for gas is low only because Americans are consuming so much carbon-intense oil.

Climate scientist James Hansen has called Keystone XL “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” If burnt, the oil that Canadian companies are digging up could dramatically increase the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. And even though the oil won’t come out of the ground all at once, any barrel of tar sands oil will have a greater carbon impact than a barrel of conventional oil.

Plenty of analysts from both sides of the Keystone XL fight have tried to quantify the carbon effects of using tar sands oil, and a new report from the Congressional Research Service provides an overview of the results. The researchers conclude that oil from tar sands is between 14 and 20 percent more greenhouse-gas intensive than conventional oil. In real terms, that means that building the Keystone XL pipeline would add as much greenhouse gas to the United States' carbon footprint as an extra 4 million more cars out on the road each year. 

Proponents of the pipeline argue that if the U.S. isn’t sending that carbon into the atmosphere, some other country will, as soon as Canada finds a way to ship tar sands oil across the Pacific Ocean. Absent an international agreement to draw down carbon emissions, some country will find it profitable to buy, process and burn Canada’s new product. It’s true that stopping Keystone XL won’t keep all of Canada’s tar sands oil in the ground. But it will slow the process of distributing it around the world. In the interim, the price of clean energy should drop even further, vehicles should become more fuel-efficient, and paying for barrels of dirty oil should seem less like a good deal. 

Photo via (cc) Flickr user ARLIS Reference

Since President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage a couple of weeks ago, there's been a noticeable shift in black Americans' opinion on gay marriage. A new Washington Post-ABC survey found that 59 percent of black people now say they support same-sex marriage—an 18 point jump since Obama's announcement. Fifty-three percent of Americans now believe that same-sex marriage should be legalized; that represents a seismic shift since 2006, when just 39 percent of those polled thought it should be legalized.

The Washington Post warned of a "relatively small sample size," but numbers elsewhere are echoing the pattern: A recent Public Policy poll showed that 57 percent of Maryland voters approve of the new gay marriage law, with 55 percent of African Americans planning to vote for the law and only 36 percent now opposed. Those numbers have reversed from just a few months ago, when 56 percent of black voters saying they would vote against the new law and only 39 percent planning to uphold it.

Perhaps more important than the numbers, influential black celebrities like Will Smith and Jay-Z, along with political leaders like Jesse Jackson, Corey Booker, and Rep. John Lewis, have come out in favor of same-sex marriage. So has the NAACP. Obama's not getting much love from the black churches, but he seems to have persuaded, or at least emboldened, a large portion of the black community to support gay rights.

If Mitt Romney's malleable positions over the past year are any indication, politicians often defer to voters' steadfast beliefs instead of trying to sway them. In Obama's case, though, he's smart to get ahead of voters when it comes to civil rights. It's been very difficult for a president, and Obama in particular, to enact piecemeal legislative change with a stagnant, highly partisan Congress. Even when he scores a victory, like the Affordable Care Act, his triumph gets mired in the details. His power lies in his status as a figurehead, and in his ability to act decisively on emotional issues. If he's not preempting voters and encouraging forward-thinking change, is he really living up to the promise of his campaign—and the office of the president?

Coming out in favor of gay marriage isn't as risky a proposition as, say, declaring support for the civil rights movement was in the 1960s. Gay marriage is widely accepted as an inevitability. The issue is becoming politically safer and safer. Even some black pastors who oppose Obama's statement are encouraging their communities to re-elect him.

So if gay marriage is now relatively politically "safe," what's today's risky issue that would really benefit from the president taking a stance? America's changing demographics and, in turn, our need for immigration reform. It's no coincidence that Obama has so far avoided tackling the issue, other than speaking out against Arizona's draconian enforcement law, SB1070. But even though it's more politically complicated, Obama would put himself on the right side of history a lot faster than he did with gay rights—and he'd hopefully influence a few xenophobes along the way.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user jamesomalley.