Honda’s solar hydrogen station
Honda began operation of a next generation solar hydrogen station prototype at the Los Angeles Center of Honda R&D America. Designed as a single, integrated unit to fit in the user’s garage, Honda’s next generation Solar Hydrogen Station reduces the size of the system, while producing enough hydrogen (0.5kg) via an 8-hour [...]

Tobacco plants used to grow solar cells
Researchers at UC Berkeley have hacked tobacco plants to grow synthetic photovoltaic cells which can then be extracted and sprayed onto any substrate to create solar cells.
 

Elastic water
Think Silly Putty, and you’ll probably have a very good idea what the brains at Japan’s Tokyo University have created. The new material, called Elastic Water, retains its Flubber-like consistency by mixing a few grams of clay and organic matter to H20, essentially binding the whole into a jelly-like putty.

The Ecorium Project, South Korea’s planned nature reserve, is a stunner. The 33,000 sq. meter park includes a wetland reserve and  a wild plant area. The structure will comprise a series of connected domes, each of which contains its own greenhouse.

Sponsored by the National Ecological Institute of South Korea and designed by Samoo, the Ecorium Project [...]

Norway is blowing away other countries in wind power.
Norway already boasts the world’s first floating wind turbine, and is apparently the windiest coastline in Europe, making it perfect for even more turbines. Or a turbine city, like On Office’s proposal which shows a stunning vision of the future.The Turbine City concept from the architectural firm [...]

Chinese designer Daizi Zheng has created a conceptual mobile phone for Finnish brand Nokia that could be powered by sugary drinks.  Zheng proposes that the phone could run on a battery that uses enzymes to generate electricity from carbohydrates. (Pics)
 

LED-Powered Climate Dress
Who says fashion can’t have an impact on our environmental awareness?  The LED-Powered Climate Dress monitors pollution and displays a health warning based on local air quality.  (Pics)
 

Good news, everyone! The target date for Toyota’s Prius plug-in hybrid (PHEV) is slightly less out of reach than the 2012 window we heard prior: according to Autoblog, it’s now set for late 2011 and the price is deemed “affordable.” Back to the present, as a tease to the world at large, the company’s planning [...]

Competition will range from community groups, to corporate teams, to int’l teams
On Tuesday evening the Longmont City Council gave the green light to DaVinci Quest CEO Karl Dakin to proceed with the 2010 Smarter, Safer, Greener House Competition where teams from around the world will compete to retrofit existing homes to maximum efficiency. DaVinci Quest [...]

Honolulu, Hawaii
Frigid seawater pumped in from the ocean’s depths will soon help cool more than half of the buildings in Honolulu’s downtown. Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning LLC, which is undertaking the $240 million project, expects its technology to cut the Hawaiian city’s air conditioning electricity usage by up to 75 percent while slashing carbon emissions [...]

Current Cart
“Your consumption is production” is the premise behind a new concept called Current Cart by Kitae Pak & Inyong Jung that would turn shopping carts into electricity-generating mobile units. Their hope is that shoppers can power the stores in which they shop by the very act of wandering around the store and shopping.
 

Earth Centre
The Windside Wind Turbine is a vertical wind turbine based on sailing engineering principles. The turbine rotor is rotated by two spiral-formed vanes. First tests were made in Southern Finland in both inland and marine environments. Laboratory wind tunnel tests were also made. For over twenty years Windside have continued to research, test and [...]

Architecture could help us tackle climate change, if we start to design our buildings with ‘living’ materials, according to Dr Rachel Armstrong, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture.
 

SkyPark
The Italian SkySpark plane is totally electric, eerily quiet and has just broken the world record for emission free flight speed, humming through the air at 250 km/h using some Lithium Polymer batteries and a 75–kW engine. The team’s goal is to build a plane which will fly for over 500 kms at an average speed of 300 [...]

Make a goat happy. Let ‘em eat your lawn!

Forget gas-guzzlin’, smoke-belchin’ lawnmowers. The eco-friendly way to mow grass and get rid of unwanted vegetation is to … rent some goats!
The city of Andover, Massachusetts has some unwanted guests: invasive species like the European buckthorn tree and the strangling bittersweet vine from Asia are shouldering out [...]

Plowing tractor exhaust into the field, eliminating fertilizer costs
A wheat farmer in Australia has eliminated adding fertilizer to his crop by the simple process of injecting the cooled diesel exhaust of his modified tractor into the ground when the wheat is being sown. In doing so he eliminates releasing carbon into the atmosphere and at [...]

Featured Invention at the Colorado Inventor Showcase 2009
Seamount Solar is a product that augments a clean-powered hydrogen-transmitted energy system by making ultra-pure water, in quantity, from saline or polluted water evaporated and collected by solar power and condensed by the cooler non-potable source.  Hydrogen and oxygen produced by electrolysis burns to power the flow of clean vapor [...]

KITE POWER!

The Italian firm KiteGen Research is developing a generator that harnesses the wind through kites. As a kite flies into the air, it unspools a cord that cranks the turbine. Carina Storrs writes in Popular Science:
The company developed a prototype that flies 200-square-foot kites to altitudes of 2,600 feet, where wind streams are four [...]

Featured Invention at the Colorado Inventor Showcase 2009
Environmentally-friendly mobile power generation has arrived. SolaRover™ Mobile Solar Power Systems provide pure, consistent electricity for all types of commercial, industrial and emergency applications — wherever and whenever needed. Categorically clean, absolutely silent and far more economical than comparable diesel generators over the long term, SolaRover systems offer [...]

Taichung Convention Center
Taiwan’s new Taichung Convention Center will be covered in solar-powered skin that naturally ventilates the structure reducing energy consumption. (Pics)
 

Researchers from Kitasato University in Tokyo have been awarded this year’s Ig Nobel Biology Prize for demonstrating a method to reduce kitchen waste by more than 90% by using bacteria derived from Giant Panda excrement.  Professor Fumiaki Taguchi, who shares the prize with fellow researchers Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei (both from the Kitasato University [...]

Boston architects Howeler + Yoon and Los Angeles digital designers Squared Design Lab have designed a conceptual structure for Boston, where an unfinished building would be covered in modular pods growing algae for biofuel.  The pods would be continuously rearranged by robotic arms (powered by the micro-algae produced) to ensure the optimum growing conditions for [...]

Lightning Packs is a company that is developing backpacks that generate electricity with the motion of their users. As the user walks, the spring-mounted backback bounces slightly, turning a gear on a generator. It is the brainchild of Lawrence C. Rome of the University of Pennsylvania, who hopes to market his idea to the U.S. [...]

Scientists are engineering Rhodococcus bacteria to boost production of lipids, which can be converted into biodiesel.
While most attempts to engineer biofuel-producing microbes have focused on well-known organisms such as yeasts and E. coli, scientists also hope to co-opt the unique metabolic functions of some of the microbial world’s less-studied creatures. Anthony Sinskey and his team [...]

Bozen, Denmark’s E-Move Charging Station is the work of that country’s entrepreneur, Valentin Runggaldier, and — while those renders make it look like a flight of fancy — it’s actually real and going through a series of tests. (Pics)