When I first read about Solar Roadways —super-tough solar panels with built-in LED signs designed to turn roads into power plants—I thought that they were never going to happen. Well, here’s a prototype. [ Solar Roadways via GadgetReview ] More

Form, meet function. The 42-story Strata Building —also known by its much cooler nickname, ” The Razor “—will get 8% of its energy from three wind turbines built into its façade. Hope no one builds a 43-story building next door. More

Tonight at 2am, remember to set your clock an hour forward. Look forward to both more sunlight at the end of the day and unfortunately, an earlier rise to work. Wikipedia explains why: More

Earlier this week, IBM researchers announced a discovery that could lead to plastics made from plants instead of petroleum. The new plastics will be more energy efficient, more versatile, and infinitely recyclable (until we move to our space colony). More

Johnny Cash can’t have known about carbon nanotubes when he sang about rings of fire, but MIT scientists have shown how they can create electrical current—about 100 times as much energy per unit of weight as lithium-ion batteries. The new experiments involved nanotubes, or submicroscopic structures just a few billionths of a meter in diameter, that can conduct both electricity and heat. Engineers coated the nanotubes with reactive fuel that produces heat by decomposing, and then ignited it with laser beams or high-voltage sparks. That set off a fast-moving heat wave that traveled through the nanotube’s hollow cylinder 10,000 times faster than in the reactive fuel itself, and reached a temperature of 4,940 degrees F (3,000 Kelvin).

It was only a matter of time before some compulsive texter found a way to get text messaging and driving together again. Called the Road Train , it’s mean to save fuel, but we know it’s true purpose, don’t we? [ BBC ] The Road Train is based on drafting, that age-old technique that NASCAR drivers use to make passing easier and that those suicidal Mythbusters proved was legit when they coasted 10 feet behind a big rig at constant velocity. In this case, however, the system is automated. Cars opt in and opt out at the driver’s convenience, forming a moving, amorphous “train” of vehicles that maintain constant speed and distance form one another thanks to software

Point : As my fellow Jalopnik readers would agree, the thought of an au-to-MO-bile running on some coffee beans is equally laughable and insulting. Counterpoint : As my fellow coffee drinkers would agree, this is an utter disgrace to our holy bean. Countercounterpoint : Carpuccino? Really? A while ago we read that coffee-based biofuels were feasible

Bourne Energy’s BPP-2 puts a 30-pound, 500-watt generating hydroelectric plant on your back. That’s like being able to walk around with 60 solar panels. And when civilization finally collapses, I’ll be dragging mine to an as yet undisclosed location. You can use the Backpack Power Plant in any stream deeper than four feet. It also operates silently, with no heat or exhaust emissions, and can be “bottom-mounted” for total invisibility: all good things for hiding from the roving hordes of the post-apocalyptic dystopia. The set-up is pretty straightforward as well: To install the civilian BPP, you would dig two trenches on opposite sides of a river and insert a lightweight anchor into each

Well, that didn’t take long. Already analysts are crawling out of the woodwork to put the seemingly miraculous Bloom Box fuel cell in its place as yet another energy saving technology that won’t perform as advertised. This week it was IDC Energy Insights analyst Sam Jaffe, who said that while the fuel cell developed by Bloom Energy CEO K.R Sridhar and his team was definitely “not bogus,” it just doesn’t differentiate itself well enough from already available fuel cell technologies—especially as it pertains to price. And the device’s supposedly unique “fuel-switching” ability? Not unique at all, Jaffe claimed on his Energy Insight blog, in a post titled “Four Things Bloom Energy Forgot to Tell the World”: “Any high-temperature fuel cell should be able to do that. The fact that it’s solid oxide and it’s primarily ceramic opens up the possibility of making it much more cheaply, but every start-up in the energy field has an expensive product that they claim one day will be cheap.

It’ll be at least a decade before the Bloom Box solves our energy crisis . In the meantime, you’re gonna have to turn off your gadgets. This concept uses ambient light to gently remind you which are still sucking power. The design bears the creatively-sequenced name Saving Energy Multitap, and it’s intended as a replacement for your power strip. Instead of letting plugged-in gadgets’ extra juice go to waste, the Multitap uses it to power a panel of four ambient lights