Category: Green Tech

Designer du jour Yves Béhar loves electric cars, as we saw when he unveiled a concept for a hackable vehicle at the Greener Gadgets conference back in February. In addition, his company fuseproject helped develop the drool-inducing Mission Motors electric motorcycle, the fastest vehicle of its kind on the market. Now Béhar has teamed with GE to unveil a new design for an electric ...

Gardening is usually backbreaking work. Planting, weeding and harvesting require physical exertion and near constant squatting or bending over. Thanks to the strangely named Wunda Products, there may be hope for the chronically lazy who also dream of having their own homegrown produce. The Wunda Weeder consists of a simple metal frame with a platform for a face-down, reclining person, a headrest ...

Surely to become the vehicle of choice for environmentally-minded celebrities and athletes, an electric Range Rover with a whopping 200-mile range will become available in the U.K. later this year. According to the Telegraph, the E-Range, which was developed by Liberty Electric Cars, is the world's first totally electric SUV. The vehicle tops out at 110 mph, thanks to six Lithium Polymer ...

Some of the Switched team take to two wheels for the daily commute, and, although the streets of New York are hardly the safest place to be biking, we're usually more concerned about bike theft than we are swerving taxi drivers. Most of us use the low-tech approach of riding a cheap-o road bike, and lugging around a heavy chain to lock it up, but we're now considering the Halo bike lock concept. ...

The Solar Impulse is one of the most ambitious projects we've ever seen. The ultimate goal is to fly a solar-powered plane around the world, relying for power solely on the rays of the sun. That might still be a ways off, but the Impulse took to the sky Wednesday morning with an intermediary goal: to survive 24 hours aloft in the night sky (read: often with no sun) without plummeting to the ...

The Directly Downwind Faster Than the Wind (DDWFTTW) debate provides one of the most entertaining geek arguments of all time, and that's a hardy feat, given the glut of endless discussions about preeminent sci-fi franchises, video game violence and Internet addiction. A (brilliant) kill-joy, Rick Cavallaro, may have just rendered the debate obsolete, though, as his wind-powered car recently ...

After three years, thousands of dollars, and a run-in with the law, Dutch designer Allert Jacobs has built one of the most fuel-efficient motorcycles on the planet. According to Popular Science, Jacobs designed a fiberglass shell for his Honda Innova 125i bike that allows it to get more than 200 miles-per-gallon. To master this aerodynamic design, Jacobs first built a small-scale model of the ...

Not content to rule the PC market, Intel is trying to shoehorn its chips into everything it can find. The latest target of the chip giant is the automobile, which it hopes to make truly "smart" by way of processors, sensors and wireless transmitters. At the company's latest Research Day event, it showed off an electric vehicle equipped with cameras and sensors that stop just short of turning it ...

Despite the twin facts that most everything closes at 7 p.m. and no one who lives there is ever, ever happy, Paris, for some reason, is still known as the 'City of Lights.' [Ed. Note: We feel like we have to say this every time Amar tackles Paris. He lives there. He is grumpy.] Yet, when all the bars close at midnight, and everyone goes home to the warm bed of someone other than their wife, one ...

Environmentalism has a new face, and his name is J Brave. Instead of penning an ode to his gas-guzzling Escalade or Hummer, Brave, you see, decided to wax poetic about the luxuries of "Dippin' in My Tesla." Much to our delight, "helpin' the planet" while "feelin' real sporty" in your electric car is, apparently, well within the Code of Thug Life. The song itself is awesomely awful (dare we even ...

We've already told you that the world's largest airship, called the Bullet 580, will depart on its maiden voyage later this year. Now, according to Inhabitat, the world's first solar-powered blimp is set to take flight over the English Channel as early as next week. The helium-filled Nephelios, which measures 72-feet long and 18-feet wide, is covered with a strip of semi-flexible solar cells. ...

A certain segment of the population is currently in love with two forms of transportation: bicycles and anything electric. That demographic, then, will be happy to meet their next enviro-crush: Stephen Britt and his Fast Forward electric bike pedals. According to Britt, the slightly lazy cyclist need do nothing more than replace his old Saucony-platforms with these suckers, and grin as he pumps ...

By now, everybody knows there's a massive e-waste problem on the horizon, though some U.K. researchers claim to have found a way to cut down on e-waste and fight bacterial infections at the same time. According to a press release from the University of York, researchers melted LCD TVs and extracted a substance that could be used to destroy some bacteria. Since this team estimated that about 2.5 ...

Have you ever wondered exactly how "healthy" a light bulb is for your energy bill? If so, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is here to help. According to an FTC press release, every light bulb manufactured after the halfway-point of 2011 will feature a "Lighting Facts" label on its packaging. This label, which is a clear nod to the Nutrition Facts label on food products, will provide information ...

We've gone on a wild goose chase in Iraq, we've spent countless hours worrying about Iran and North Korea, and, all this time, a rogue nuclear genius has been lurking in our own Brooklyn backyard. Mark Suppes, a 32-year-old New Yorker and Web developer for Gucci, recently became the 38th amateur physicist to build a reactor capable of conducting nuclear fusion. According to the Daily News, ...