Periodically, we’ll try to pull some of the highlights from the articles we’ve retweeted and post them in something we’re calling Green Shorts. Welcome to the first edition of Green Shorts.

Animal Protein & Diabetes
Researchers from Harvard University found that some low-carb dieters were more likely to have type 2 diabetes. Men following a low-carb diet high in animal protein and fat were 75 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who ate moderately, and men eating low-carb while eating vegetable protein and fat were not at a higher risk. Read more at vegnews.com.

Floating Wind and Wave Power
A new Oregon company, Floating Power Inc, is announcing plans to build a floating power plant that generates electricity from both waves and wind. Read more at Sustainable Business Oregon.

Renault Twizy
Renault’s tiny electric two seater (one behind the other) was put to the test by UK based Autocar – you can see the video review of this fun little electric city car.

Kindle vs Books
Treehugger is reporting on a posting at TerraPass about the break-even point, from a carbon footprint perspective, of the Kindle reader. In the case of the post’s author, her break-even point was at around 3 years of use and she classified herself as an above average reader (in terms of number of books, not ability). The twist is that she uses her library to borrow most of the books she reads, or buys used ones (both good ways of sharing the carbon footprint of the physical book between more people).

Eco-Datacenter
Close to our hearts here at Vertography since our servers are running in a 100% solar powered data center, BendBroadband, in Oregon, has opened its own eco-friendly data center. Green features include solar panels, porous cement pavement and a special Kyoto cooling system that uses the outside air to cool the servers 80% of the time. Read more at KTVZ.

Unlike your home computer, the servers running in the cloud need to be online 24/7, and running at full speed. You don’t want to have to wait for somebody to boot the server every time you try to access you favourite web site!

With all those racks of computers running at full power all the time, extracting heat and keeping the servers at safe temperatures is one of the biggest problems a data centre faces. Typical data centres run redundant HVAC systems. In the same way that a server that fails needs a backup that can take over transparently, the cooling system in the building needs to have a backup. All that cooling takes energy.

Liquid Cooling
Liquid cooling systems for home PCs, typically aimed at the hard core gaming community, have been around for a while. They are typically replacement heat sinks for the CPU, and sometimes the graphics card, that have cooled water pumped through them. Not ideal for use in a large data centre environment with thousands of rack mounted PCs.

A new idea though changes the cooling fluid to a non-conductive mineral oil, and completely submerge the rack in it. The efficiency of the liquid at removing heat from the systems is much better than cooled air over the fins of a heat sink. Green Revolution Cooling claims their GreenDEF™ based system can save over 90% on cooling energy usage, and 50% on total energy usage (cooler running servers are also more efficient).

Better still, it is much easier to recover the heat energy from a liquid like mineral oil than it is with a conventional air cooling system. So that energy you want out of the data centre’s computer rooms can be used to keep the operator’s control room and any office spaces comfortable when it gets cold outside.

Downsides?
The most obvious problem with submerging your rack, or even individual slices, in mineral oil has to be the added complexity of making any changes to the hardware, or replacing it when it fails. Hopefully, for the operators at least, the more even cooling will help extend the life of the components enough that replacements are rare.

ourLivez will also be giving away some free copies of iNewz Green for Earth Day – follow them on Twitter and watch for promo codes to be released throughout the day.

Amazon Green, a new store from Amazon, focuses on listing environmentally friendly products. Included already are eco-friendly cleaning products, EnergyStar approved lighting products and office electronics.

Currently, they’re also asking customers for their Green 3 products: the three green products that they wish everybody had. The current top three are reusable shopping bags and a couple of different CFL bulbs (fourth is a push reel lawn mower).

Unlike developed nations, many of the places where this technology was designed to be deployed lack electricity, so the Green Wi-Fi project designed a self-contained unit consisting of a solar panel, charge controller and battery for power, and a modified Linksys WRT54GL wireless router with a high gain external omni-directional antenna for the internet access part. These boxes form the nodes of a self-healing mesh network. Connect one or more of them to the internet somehow (often via a cellular modem) and you can share that connection across the entire mesh. Since the boxes need no external power, they can be placed on rooftops anywhere to build up the mesh.

Got Wi-Fi, Now What?
Having a solar powered Wi-Fi mesh alone doesn’t get you much, so what else is needed to make this useful? Well, the most obvious thing that is needed next is computers, and the OLPC project’s XO laptop makes a perfect device for use with the mesh Wi-Fi network. The team at Green Wi-Fi have also developed solar charging solutions for these little laptops, allowing a school to have a collection of them which can be charged using a panel mounted on the roof of the school building.

Bruce Baikie, Green Wi-Fi’s CEO, just returned from a trip to Senegal along with a group of high school volunteers from San Francisco, where they delivered 25 OLPC laptops to the village school, and installed a 60W solar charging station for them too. The US high school students also trained the village’s teachers how to use and maintain the new laptops, as well as helping to repair school rooms, desks, the village health clinic, bathrooms, roofs, and anything else they could help with. Later this year Bruce will be returning to install a Wi-Fi mesh (they currently have just a single network connection provided by a very power-hungry, and somewhat unreliable, CDMA modem).

Photos from Senegal

[Senegal photos with thanks from Bruce Baikie @ Green Wi-Fi.]

The search results are from Yahoo, so you know you’ll be getting high quality results still, but you’ll also be helping the environment. According to their site, they’ll be able to remove 1 ton of CO2 for every 1000 searches performed, and the whole thing is audited by KPMG.

That’s a really simple way that everybody can help make a difference. And all you need to do is change that little search box in the top right corner of your browser to use ecocho.com instead of your current search engine.