CHIBA, Japan -- It won't blow up and it charges rapidly. Conceivably, you could have a an electric car that charges in a few minutes. Those are the some of the reasons that Toshiba says the Scib battery will become popular in electric vehicles in the coming years. Scib (which stands for super-charge ion battery) is a lithium-titanate battery – similar to the ones being put together by tiny Altair Nanotechnologies – that can be used in a wide variety of applications. Conventional lithium-ion batteries have a lithium-cobalt cathode. (In batteries, charged lithium particles move from the cathode to the anode and back again). Unfortunately, lithium-cobalt batteries can break down and cause a "thermal runaway reaction" or explosion. Lithium-cobalt batteries also degrade over time: The more they get used, the less power they can hold. If you want to buy an electric car today, battery replacement is an issue you have to consider. Developing new batteries remains to be one of the big challenges in electronics. Batteries roughly improve 6 percent a year in performance. Silicon chips improve by around 60 percent a year. The key part to remember with Scib is that this is Toshiba, one of the major supplier of components to the electronic world. The cafeteria at corporate headquarters probably employs 35 times more people that Altair has in total. NEC and Nissan are also working on batteries for electric cars. This is good news for electric and plug-in car fans: when large mass manufacturers begin to show strong and positive interests in new technologies, the odds of that technology making it to market increase dramatically. But it is also bad news for startups that have been touting novel batteries for the last few years. Pretend you are a manager at a car company. Who are you going to buy batteries from? Scib doesn't have the same energy density as a lithium-cobalt battery, but it's got a lot of other things going for it. For instance, you can drive a nail through it without it blowing up. A single cell (that blue thing pictured) also recharges in five minutes, compared to 30 minutes for a standard high-quality lithium-cobalt battery. Thus, an electric bike with 15 Scib cells in it can be recharged rapidly. In lab tests, Toshiba says that Scib cells only lose about 10 percent of their capacity to hold energy after 3,000 charge-discharge cycles, which is quite low. You could theoretically charge a plug-in hybrid or an electric car in five minutes, but because any car using these would have hundreds of cells, you'd need a really powerful charger. Still, a car with a Scib-based battery pack would likely charge more rapidly than a car with a conventional pack even at a regular charging station. Toshiba came out with Scibs for notebooks and the battery packs for electric bikes this year. Next, it will aim for scooters.

CHIBA, Japan -- Hitachi has been taking off weight.

The Japanese conglomerate – a company in energy circles mostly known for its work in nuclear – has been conducting an experiment with a software application that delivers health advice and dieting tips.

In a trial with its own employees, Hitachi employees lost a collective 5.1 kilograms (11,200 pounds), said Etsuhiko Shoyama, chairman of the company in a keynote speech at Ceatec, a large technology convention taking place outside of Tokyo this week. (It is similar to CES, but in a foreign language. Panasonic discussed its green home strategy here.) On average, the application works on about 67 percent of the people who try it and testers have typically been losing around 5 percent of their body weight in 90 days.

As a follow up, Hitachi is testing another technology called Life Microscope, a wristband that monitors vital signs such as heart rate and sleeping time and downloads it to a computer. If you’ve been getting up slightly later, Life Microscope will confirm it.

The idea is that all things are interconnected. If software and hardware like this can make people healthier, it starts to erode the demand for more expensive healthcare down the road. Is it green technology? A lot of investors insert the health and lifestyle category under the clean- and greentech umbrella because it fits in with the concept of sustainability. The customer base also overlaps quite a bit.

Other interesting technologies at Hitachi: Geomation. The application crunches satellite data to determine the optimum time to harvest wheat and rice. In tests on the island of Hokkaido, farmers saw carbon dioxide output during harvesting reduced by 30 percent.

The company also has two datacenter technologies – Harmonious Green and Cool Center 50 – that aim to reduce CO2 emissions and power consumption by 40 percent to 50 percent, respectively. The two technologies revolve around ways to centralize datacenters.

By 2025 Hitachi wants to reduce its carbon output by 100 million tons annually from current levels.

CHIBA, Japan -- The VentureOne from Venture Vehicles isn’t alone.

Japan’s Phiaro has concocted a three-wheeled, two-seater car that tilts like a motorcycle, which is pretty similar to the VentureOne. In fact, the two cars are based around the same technology initially devised by a company in the Netherlands. Teruhiko Iwasaki, president of the company, showed the Eternity off during a presentation at Ceatec, a technology trade show taking place this week outside of Tokyo.

Venture Vehicles is much further along: It has raised capital from Ngen Partners and plans to come out with cars in 2010. Phiaro has designed a prototype and is now hunting for manufacturing partners, Teruhiko said.

The idea behind these cars is to open up the category for urban commuter cars, smaller vehicles that can fit in tight parking spaces and won’t see much time on the freeway. Because they have three wheels, these cars are classified as motorcycles, which means the process to make them street legal in most countries is shorter and easier. The cars also tilt like motorcycles, which makes them more fun to drive than regular cars. The smaller size of the autos means they should sell for a lot less than a standard car: Venture will try to bring out its vehicles for around $25,000.

The downside? There haven’t been a lot of successful three-wheelers out there since the demise of sidecar. Myers Motors and Zap have been plugging away at it for years with their own three-wheelers, but they haven’t got much past the novelty stage.

The prototypes from both Venture and Phiaro also right now run on gas motors. The versions that will be released to the public will be plug-in hybrids or all-electric cars. Right now, though, batteries are somewhat expensive. Venture, in fact, decided earlier this year to start with a plug-in hybrids and move to batteries later because of the expense of batteries.