I recently saw the ThinkPad W700, and, well, it’s almost scary. Packing a brilliant 17-inch screen, the beast spreads across a desk like a beached whale. But amazingly, it weighs just 8.4 pounds—about 4 pounds lighter than I would have expected.

Remember when the iPod came out and you realized you could carry all your songs in your pocket? Sony aims to do the same thing for pictures with its new T700 digital camera. Along with a memory card slot, the T700 has four gigabytes of onboard memory—enough to store about 1,000 of its 10-megapixel photos.

Imagine a '57 Chevy cruising through the air, and you get an idea of what single-engine, propeller-driven airplanes do to the environment. The average private plane, such as the popular two-seat Cessna 172, is 30 years old. It carries a four-cylinder piston engine designed in the 1940s that burns leaded gasoline, has no catalytic converter, and gets as little as 12 miles per gallon. “It’s fair to say that small aircraft are gross polluters,” says Mark Moore, an engineer who has led personal-aircraft projects for NASA.

Years in the making, Will Wright’s Spore peeks out today with the release of the Creature Creator. The free download is a toolkit for designing the life forms that will inhabit the Spore universe when the full game launches on September 7.

While the MacBook Air showed how slim a laptop could be, the Voodoo Envy ($2,100; voodoopc.com) demonstrates how much can fit in that space. Using the same compact CPU as the Air, the carbon-fiber-clad Envy measures just 0.7 inch thick—a tad thinner than the Mac at its thickest point. And it packs in more features, including a slot for high-speed cellular data cards, two USB ports, and an HDMI port for attaching to a high-def TV.

Although high-def camcorders shoot incredible detail, they are a far cry from Hollywood gear. But the Red Scarlet, due out later this year, will capture five-megapixel video frames, picking up more than twice the detail of high-def camcorders and rivaling the eight-megapixel flicks that A-list directors are starting to shoot.

Its hard enough getting digital TV from an antenna in your house. Forget about in a car. But Samsung and LG aim to change that. In a scary reminiscence of Blu-ray vs. HD DVD, the two companies had been developing similar but incompatible standards (called AVS-B and MPH) for digital TV that can be delivered on the road.

The small airplane is too dirty for an environmentally threatened world. Thats not the view from eco-activists, but from some of the leading lights in general aviation—the category encompassing small planes such as Cessnas flown by citizen pilots. At some point, some environmental group is going to figure out that small aircraft fly leaded fuel, said Mark Moore, NASAs personal air vehicle program manager, to a meeting of engineers, aviation advocates and a billionaire corporate titan with his own private jet. Their goal, however, is not to bury private aviation, but to remake it as the greenest form of personal transit.

Soon youll be able to ditch your game pad and Wiimote. A new camera system for computers and consoles will track your movements in three dimensions—essentially turning your body into the game controller. For example, play Rock Band by waving your hands at imaginary drums, or dodge punches in a fighting game.

Silicon Valley is mostly a world of practical technology—applying principles from pure science to create handy gadgets. But today, Hewlett Packard announced a new electrical component born of theoretical physics. The device, a nanoscale component called a "memristor," requires no power to retain data, which it can store more densely than a hard drive and access about as fast as a computers RAM memory—potentially allowing it to replace both components in the future.

If technology were a religion, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center would be one of the holiest shrines on any pilgrimage. So much of our modern computer world was invented at this freewheeling innovation lab (and largely given away). Prefer your mouse and point-and-click graphical interface to a UNIX-style command line? Thanks PARC. Think laser prints look better than dot-matrix scrawl? Thanks again.

Some say the glory days have passed. PARC today is a more-focused operation that has to turn quick profits (no more open funding from its owner Xerox). But its still a well-staffed corporate research lab in an era with ever-fewer of those creatures. On Monday, its staff opened the doors to the press to show off the latest gizmos.

Hmmm...What's this? Looks like a Web-based remote control for your TV. We happened upon this randomly today, and it raises lots of interesting questions. The URL sonyathome.com brings up a Web page that sure looks like it belongs to Pioneer Electronics -- what with the big "Pioneer" badge in the corner and an email function that sends a message from "elite@pioneer.com" ("Elite" is Pioneer's premium brand of A/V gear).

Is Pioneer developing software for Sony? Is Pioneer merging with Sony? Seems unlikely, since Pioneer just formally announced a joint venture to get plasma panels from Panasonic, and already have a deal to get LCDs from Sharp. But then again, Sony also gets LCDs from Sharp. Hmmm.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/hardware/CPU_Vs_Graphics_Card';
OK, they are not the most objective source, but graphics processor manufacturer nVidia does make a pretty convincing argument for spending more money on a computers graphics card and less on the main processor—in certain conditions.