The $12 Desktop project: The same University that created the One Laptop Per Child XO notebook is working on PCs loosely based on Apple II machines. The creators want to build something for developing nations. The Boston Herald says that a $12 computer already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and programs.

Derek Lomas, a member of the team and an American graduate student who stumbled across the computers in Bangalore while on an internship last summer, hit on the idea of upgrading the devices' 1980s-era technology. He and others at the MIT symposium hope to soup up the systems with rudimentary Web access and more.

The Warcart: MIT student Zack Anderson created Warcarting.

"To understand the Warcart requires one understand a bit of history first. Wardriving, that is, driving with a laptop computer and tracking WiFi access points, first became popular around 2001. Within a short time span, people invented warwalking, and millions flocked to walk the streets with a laptop and WiFi card in hand. Then the craze really took off when someone flew a Cessna airplane with a laptop and became the first warflyer. Within no time at all, the press and every tech blog on the internet was covering the latest war-something. There was warrocketing, warballooning, warbiking, and warboating. There were talks and seminars. News stories and blog posts. Television reports and radio shows. All about the latest in WiFi tracking. It soon became apparent to the larger community that most of these methods are highly elitist. Here are car-driving, personal-plane-owning, leisure-hot-air-ballooning, yachting aficionados armed with laptop computers. What the world needed was a low-cost, yet powerful alternative."

Warcarting from Zack A on Vimeo.

MIT Scientists Unlock Nirvana of Solar Power Storage: Just one hour of sunlight that hits the earth is enough to provide humankind power for one whole year. The problem, other than low solar panel efficiency and costly silicon components, is that solar storage is usually both inefficient and expensive. But MIT professor Daniel Nocera believes he and his colleagues have found the "nirvana" of energy that people have been looking for for years. We're not talking about a lithium-ion battery for solar energy storage here, but another energy source--hydrogen.