Think that $130 NPX-9000 Firefox tablet or the OLPC $75 touch screen laptop are as cheap as it gets? Think again. The brains at MIT are sure of themselves that they can create a computer for a mere $12.  With a price tag like that, it’d only take a few hours of panhandling outside of a McDonalds to accumulate the money for your brand new PC.  No details on the rig’s component parts except for it starting out as an old Apple II. How or when it’ll become a twelve dollar functioning computer is beyond me.

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In an attempt to turn everyday household windows into solar panels, two MIT researchers have created “organic solar concentrators” out of dyed glass that could potentially increase traditional solar panel efficiency by 50%. Imagine fulfilling all your electrical needs with the help of your typical household glass windows.

I sure hope you haven’t desecrated your roof with inefficient solar paneling for no better reason than to impress your neighbors. In comparison to expensive solar paneling, these dyed windows will give you more bang for your buck. Which means you’ll have more money to burn on things like that stretch Hummer you’ve always wanted. Can I stop paying my electrical bill yet?

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Seems the brains up in Massachusetts have done it again. MIT has taken an ordinary household object and transformed it into the coolest experimental toy on the planet. Case in point are Quickies, which are essentially Post-It Notes that feed the written information on them back to a computer. The computer then interprets the text or image drawn on the note and adds a digitized version to the proper location. So if you write down a TODO note, it’ll automatically get added to iCal, Google Calender, etc.

The above video does more justice than words can. You don’t even need audio, so view it when your boss is busy in the can.

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When Facebook announced that they would be rolling out their new Facebook Chat service, all that was said was that it would be rolled out very gradually to the public. What we didn’t know is that the social networking service was systematically rolling out the new service to their favorite group of Ivy Leaguer’s first.

The first people who were gifted with the new service were members from the Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT networks within Facebook, who were all among the first communities to give Facebook a following. We guess allowing those users to get first dibs is there way at giving back to the community. By the way, I’m still banned from requesting new friends, thanks to the “You might know these people” feature, and me, adding 5 people in successive fashion. Come on, Facebook! — Andrew Dobrow

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