Not so hot on the heels of the Philips L-Prize bulb comes this funky piece of hardware from General Electric, which knows a thing (or two) about electricity. It's a 27 watt LED bulb that produces as much (or more) light as a 100 watt incandescent bulb, and the coolest feature is how it keeps itself, uh, cool: silent puffs of high-velocity air.

Philips was the only entry in the Department of Energy's L Prize for designing a super-efficient light bulb, so I guess it's not really surprising that the company managed to win. But, Philips did manage to meet the DoE's stringent efficient criteria with its new bulb, and the result of their efforts is officially going to be on sale as of this Sunday.

Want to fool your friends? Screw one of these light bulbs into a lamp, connect your iPhone to the dock, hit play and watch everyone try and figure out where the music is coming from.

Philips certainly has some crazy ideas about how we're going to live in the future, and one of them involves using huge wall-mounted vats of bioluminescent bacteria to provide soft green light at night.