Famed phone leaker @evleaks is at it again, this time with a few more shots of BlackBerry's forthcoming Venice handset. Venice is a slider phone that sports a large touchscreen display and runs Android instead of Blackberry's proprietary BB10 operating system. It slides up to reveal a physical QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode, giving owners of the device the best of both worlds, or so BlackBerry hopes. The Canadian outfit has been struggling for the past several years, and is hoping Venice will change that. The company built a reputation that was based in part on excellent hardware keyboards, and though the mobile market has moved to touchscreens, there are still many users who prefer the feel of a physical plank. Venice will give users a choice between the two input methods. Venice has been "confirmed" to launch in November on all four national U.S. wireless carriers -- Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint.

As one who loves BlackBerry hardware but not the software, I'm excited about the potential of a proper QWERTY phone with Android apps. Because these are leaks, the details are still up in the air. Nonetheless, it's looking more and more likely that BlackBerry will be launching an Android phone sometime this year. It's also becoming increasingly clear that the device will probably be a slider, and that it will possibly run Google Play services.

Energy efficiency investments are widely popular because they are believed to deliver a double win: saving consumers money by reducing the amount of energy they use, while cutting climate-forcing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants harmful to human health. But a new study by a team of economists finds residential energy efficiency investments may not deliver on all that they promise. Through a randomized controlled trial of more than 30,000 households in Michigan - where one-quarter of the households were encouraged to make residential energy efficiency investments and received assistance - the economists find that the costs to deploy the efficiency upgrades were about double the energy savings.

While the researchers found that the upgrades did reduce the households' energy consumption by about 10 to 20 percent each month that only translated into $2,400 in savings over the lifetime of the upgrades - half of what was originally spent to make the upgrades, and less than half of projected energy savings. "In actuality, the energy efficiency investments we evaluated delivered significantly lower savings than the models predict." Further, some say that the broader societal benefits - savings as a result of reductions in pollution from energy production- justify the investments. But the findings did not support this. The cost per ton of CO2 avoided in the sample amounted to $329, significantly larger than the $38 per ton that the federal government estimates as the social cost of carbon.