Technology

Playgreen: a Wiki for Being Green

- Adam Clare

Wikis are dandy things that have been used to make entire encyclopdeias. Well now you can join a group of people that are trying to create a great online resource of how to be green, it’s called Playgreen.

You can learn how to become more environmentally friendly and you can help others learn what you know by writing your own entries or contributing to others.

Their bottom line:

‘We’ are smarter than ‘me’. The central premise of this assumption is that large groups of people (‘We’) can, and should, make a fantastic resource site to foster responsible consumption habits in our daily life, economy, industries.

Spin-Powered Office Towers

- Adam Clare

EcoGeek has the lowdown on a high-rise design that supposedly can power itself and up to ten other office buildings. The tower is designed to have spinning floors and will act like a giant windmill, don’t worry all the essentials like elevators are in a central non-rotating concrete core. A neat idea, but one that I do question.

The video shows the spinning in action:

It’s snot good news

- sohorobin

No really. This is not more bad news. I saw this one on the BBC. Robot noses improved by coating them in a mucous.

“The team believe the enhanced electronic nose could be on sale in two years .”

OK it’s snot really good news – cause it’s not bads news.

Whistler Buses Go Hydro

- Fono

The government of BC (the Canadian province, not the era) is planning to outfit mountain city Whistler with a whole scad of hydro-powered buses. Diesel vehicles are the current norm, but the new buses will run entirely on fuel cells, which produce no harmful emissions.

Small numbers of fuel-cell- powered buses have been used in demonstration projects in cities in Europe and the United States over the past decade.

But the Whistler project, which is forecast to have 20 of the city’s 30 or so buses running on hydrogen power, will be the largest fuel-cell-powered fleet in the world and the first project to make such vehicles the backbone of a public transit system.

Highways Have Potential for Wind Energy Generation

- Adam Clare 3 Comments

highway Over at Inhabitat, there are two posts on using wind created by traffic on highways to generate electricity. A student proposes horizontally placed wind generators over highways, much like road signs are placed now (pictured).

A proposal coming from New Jersey has the generators built into the highway that powers a light rail system. Awesome!

The design, a runner-up in the 2006 Metropolis Mag Next Generation Design Competition proposed the integration of wind-turbines into the highway barriers that divide the traffic. These turbines would generate power from the wind created by the vehicles that drive past them in opposite directions. Originally conceived as a single row of vertical-axis rotary turbines, it has now been redesigned to include two rows, one stacked on top of each other, with the end power being used to power a light rail system.

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