The University of Technology Sydney Tower in Australia, an old slat-stack from the '60s, has the dubious honor of being that city's "ugliest building" — a fact that isn't very well hidden on the university's own website. In an effort to showcase both the beautifying and beneficial effect of sustainable design, the architects at Australian-based LAVA have proposed the "Tower Skin," a photo-voltaic sack that would update the ol' UTS clunker with today's greener standards.

The Tower Skin would, besides collecting solar energy, collect rainwater, improve the amount of natural light that gets into the building and use convective energy to help with ventilation. Oh, and it also lights up at night and looks downright purty.

It's all conceptual, though it's an interesting study on how we could improve existing buildings from the outside-in, rather than having to tear them down or rip their guts out. Check out more of LAVA's Tower Skin in the gallery below. (Or, if you happen to be reading this from Australia, you can also see the Skin in person at Sydney's Object Gallery until 28 March, 2010.)

Architecture and Design, via Inhabitat

Gallery: Sydney's 'ugliest building' gets a high-tech bag over its head (5 images)   view full gallery

We heard rumblings about it yesterday, and today it has a name: Google Buzz. It'll be built into Gmail and Google maps, and it's like a location-aware version of Twitter. When you Buzz about something, Google's figured out how to attach a place name to that, and then shows your location on a map along with whatever it is you wrote.

Hey, this could be fun. Although it's not completely original — we've seen location-based tweets before — the fact that it will be integrated into the main mobile Google.com search page, maps for Android, Windows Mobile and S60, as well as a new buzz.Google.com site for Android and iPhone, will give it extra oomph. Look for it to roll out all over Google-land in the next few days. Check out the video for details.

Via Google

There are plenty of 3D LCD TVs, but now Panasonic rolls out a breed of 3D that's more rare: a plasma display. The company announced Viera VT in two different sizes today, a 50-incher retailing for $4,800, and a 54-inch for $5,900. Just put on your 3D active shutter glasses (included with the TVs), and you're set to step into the immersive world of 3D, or so they say.

We've seen Panasonic plasma 3D TVs, and they looked drop-dead gorgeous — colorful, contrasty (like 5 zillion-to-1), and downright crispy. However, we're not sure we're willing to spend $4,800 for a 50-inch 3D HDTV with very little programming available for it yet. Our enthusiasm for 3D undoubtedly has its limits. And really, Panasonic: $1,100 for four more diagonal inches? No ship date is announced yet.

Via Geeky Gadgets

Want to expand the storage of your iPhone? Well, ZoomIt is a small add-on SD card reader that works with its own app to let you load photos and other data right onto your phone for easy transport.

There's a catch, of course. Only photos can be transferred from the app to your iPhone's photo library. That means you can't expand your storage for music, videos or apps using SD cards. So sure, you can drag data onto your phone, but you can't do anything with it unless it's a photo. But if you want to quickly dump photos you take on the field onto your phone for easy storage and viewing, this might just be worth the $60 price tag.

ZoomIt via Gadget Lab

For some people (read: Wall Street bankers struggling to spend their multimillion-dollar bonuses.), camping in a 45-foot luxury RV is too dreary to contemplate. Fortunately for them and gas refineries everywhere, a pair of German design students have created the Mehrzeller travel trailer. Its luxurious interior is surpassed only by an exterior fit for a Tokyo art museum.

Gallery: Mehrzeller, the camper that wants to be an art museum (8 images)   view full gallery

Let's take a fascinating video tour of the International Space Station (ISS), where we float in microgravity from the Soyuz on one end all the way to the Space Shuttle on the other. As you can see, it really is a series of tubes, and my, hasn't this thing gotten huge?

We especially like the sign that reads, "Speed Limit 17,500 mph." The number of astronauts on board while this video was shot was remarkable, where it looked like a large, congenial and social group (in fact, there are 11 astronauts in space right now, five on the ISS and six aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor). We were thinking life on the space station was more solitary and lonely than this. Now we really want to go into space.

As soon as that Cupola with its expansive picture window is added in the next few days, the space station will be well on its way toward its completion by 2011. The latest estimates have it in operation until at least 2015, and maybe even to 2020. We're finding it hard to believe that eventually all this spectacular technology will have to "deorbit" (crash into the Earth or burn up in its atmosphere).

Via CrunchGear

Apple's pro photo software Aperture has never really caught on like some of its more popular software. Maybe it was the price, at $200, or maybe it just didn't deliver an experience that couldn't be better replicated elsewhere. But Apple's not ready to give up on it yet.

The new version of Aperture has just hit the Apple store, and it brings along with it the Faces and Places features that iPhoto users have been enjoying for some time now. Faces auto-detects who is in each photo, letting you automatically sort pictures by who's in them. Places uses geotagging to place your photos on a map based on where you took them.

Will these features be enough to get you to drop $200 on photo importing and organization software?

Via Apple

Sure, I love me some e-reading, but the one big downside is that books have too many darn words! Lucky for me a company called FT Press has my back: it's boiling down professional and self-help books into "Elements" and "Shorts." The former hovers somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 words and sells for $2, while Shorts are a little longer at $3 for around 5,000 words.

So, why take existing books and truncate them? Timothy C. Moore, publisher of the FT Press, told The New York Times that it was "a good idea to be able to provide people with shorter, more expedient, more time-sensitive" versions of books.

FT Press's approach eats into publisher profits, as it's unlikely that someone would spring for the full book after getting the best bits. The authors of the original work, however, are entitled to royalties from the online sales.

So what's next? Who knows: maybe in the future people will buy their favorite chapters just as you would a song instead of an album.

The New York Times, via GeekSugar

While the early money is that the first mass commercialization of robots will hit the sex industry, serving booze to wayward humans is running a close second. The Heineken Bot, developed by tinkerers at the UK's Middlesex University, is something like a cross between R2D2 and your favorite local suds pourer, only without the inane chit chat.

Using sensors mounted on its top portion, the bot can detect when your beer mug is topped off with just a wave of the hand, and can roll over to your side of the bar due to a preprogrammed area map. You can see video of the Heineken Bot in action here.

Via GizmoWatch

Found in our mailbox the other day: The Oxo Good Grips Cord Catch. While we certainly love shiny electronic toys that do lots of different things, here's a product that's beautiful for its simplicity. The Catch has just one job — saving that charging cable from falling behind your desk. And it does it with style, sporting a nicely curved design and a silver finish. It stays in place via the rubberized bottom and sheer heft (the half-ounce spec on Oxo's product page is incorrect — it actually weighs closer to five).

After using the catch to hold our iPhone charging cable for a few days, we've given it a permanent place on our desk. We do have this suggested upgrade: The Catch's cable guide should have some kind of "flaps" to prevent cords from easily popping out of it. But even with that quibble, the $7 Catch has paid for itself with time saved in cancelled expeditions behind our gadget stack in search of fallen cords.

Gallery: Oxo Good Grips Cord Catch does exactly one thing (6 images)   view full gallery

The last shuttle to be launched at night rose off its launch pad before dawn this morning, atop a torrent of fire that seemed as bright as the sun. On board Endeavor (STS-130) is Cupola, a relatively huge bay window to be attached to the International Space Station (ISS) that will give astronauts the most magnificent view ever seen from space (short of taking a spacewalk). Expect great pictures from this 1.6-ton behemoth — it's 9.7 feet wide and 5 feet long with seven windows all around, including a 31.5-inch circular window, the largest ever flown into space.

Also along for the ride is Tranquility, whose technical name is the unassuming "Node 3." That module will have six "birthing locations" (or in plain terms, places to plug in more modules), three of which aren't scheduled to be used, and one will be where Cupola will be connected. Tranquility will also contain the most advanced life-support systems ever flown in space, recycling wastewater and generating oxygen.

Via Space.com

Gallery: Shuttle's final night launch lifts largest window ever into orbit (6 images)   view full gallery

Do you require a bit of motivation to get out of bed in the morning? Well, there are few people more motivating than Darth Vader, right?

With this Darth Vader alarm clock, a shadow Vader will appear when the alarm goes off, reminding you to get out of bed or the forces of the Dark Side will overtake you. It also features a snooze button, just in case you feel the power of The Force deep inside you.

StarWars.com via Geek Alerts

Cinematographers got sick of lugging around bulky and anvil-heavy recording gear, so they designed the "extremely portable" Cinedeck, a hotshot digital video recorder that's 8 inches wide and weighs 4 pounds. It digitally records HD footage from any camera that outputs HDMI or HDSDI onto its off-the-shelf solid-state drives.

Besides functioning as a digital recorder and high-rez playback unit, this versatile box's on-board Intel Core2 Extreme quad qx9300 processor powers a fast Windows PC inside, letting you hook up a mouse, keyboard and a larger monitor to edit together your shots using whichever Windows editing software you prefer.

Shipping next month is the first Cinedeck/Extreme model, capable of handling resolutions up to 1080p. Later this year, the company will roll out versions for 3D shooting, higher-rez 2K film work, and even a model that handles footage from those sweet 1080p-shooting digital SLR cameras. Pricing starts at $7995, so you can see it's intended for pro use on film shoots.

Here's the press release with more details:

Gallery: Portable Cinedeck lets filmmakers record and edit high-rez footage (6 images)   view full gallery

Talking animals took a back seat to high technology this year during the commercial breaks of Super Bowl XLIV. After a slow start full of desperate beer lovers and lethal corn chips, the tech started flowing in abundance. By the time those old codgers called The Who took to the stage at halftime, we knew this was going to be a good year for tech-related Super Bowl commercials. Here are our top seven favorites: