LED lights continue their march to take over the 12 billion a year lighting market. This article talks about some of the progress as well as the science behind it. I particularly liked this:

An incandescent light bulb is just a big resistor. It gets hot enough to glow white, converting about 5 percent of electrical energy to light and wasting the rest. "It's a heater that happens to give off a little visible light by accident," jokes M. George Craford, an IEEE Fellow and chief technical officer of Lumileds.

Sad but true: all over the world, at any given instant, tens of gigawatts of electricity are doing nothing but producing unwanted heat.

A co-worker once determined that people heating a house with electricity might as well leave their lights on, more heat.

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