I do find a bit of irony in this: Intel has discovered that it can reduce energy by storing its servers in oil to keep them cool. Well, OK, not that kind of oil. But still... Via Wired, a company called Green Revolution Cooling, based in Austin, Tex., has developed a cooling system called CarnotJet. Although the name sounds like an inkjet printer that prints on meat, it actually uses a sealed box of mineral oil as a cooling system for PCs and servers. (The rub, of course, is to seal up the fans and hard drives so the oil can’t get into the system the way, say, coffee can cause no end of trouble should it bucket into a laptop keyboard.) Anyway, the system is quite efficient:

In its tests, Green Revolution’s CarnotJet cooling system used a lot less energy than their air-cooled counterparts, Dr. Mike Patterson, a power and thermal engineer with Intel, tells Wired. Intel found that oil-cooled systems only needed another 2 or 3 percent of their power for cooling. That’s far less than your typical server, which has a 50 or 60 percent overhead. The world’s most efficient data centers — those run by Google or Facebook, for example — can get that number down to 10 or 20 percent.

Intel had been experimenting with the oil-cooled servers for a year and reported no damage to the hardware. Not that there isn’t a drawback:

If you need to pop open an oil-cooled server to change a part, it can get a little messy.

But I bet the technicians have the softest skin.