Lynne Kiesling
Both overall energy use and data center/server farm energy use are pressing energy policy issues, and one of the reasons is the waste heat generated by computer chips. This Boing Boing article describes a new technique for creating cooler computer chips by building in something called a Peltier cooler:
North Carolina’s Nextreme has announced a chip with its own built-in Peltier cooler — a cooling system that uses electricity to move heat from one side of a surface to the other. These are historically very expensive to use — bulky and energy hungry — but many overclockers swear by them to keep their PCs running cool. Nextreme proposes to use this to make self-cooling chips that spot-cool different places on a chip, shunting exhaust heat towards fans or vents.
How cool is that?