Tornadoes tear through northern Oklahoma
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Supercell storms plowed across northern Oklahoma state Saturday spawning several tornadoes that crushed structures and sent debris flying miles away, US media reported.
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Goodbye Sweaty Sheets: Hello Japanese Bed Cooler
I don’t care how many fans I point directly at my bed during the summer, the space between my butt and the mattress always reaches temperatures that make comfortable sleep entirely impossible. So, either I get a lame, inefficient AC window unit. Or I sweat my way through the brief, though surprisingly hot, Montana summers. [...]
Novel Barrel Turbine Wins $34,000 Grant
Graeme Attey, already a little bit famous as the inventor of a two-wheeled, wind-powered "dirt surfer," has just taken his inventing skills to a new (and more useful) level. This roof-top wind turbine is small, cheap, quiet and sits at the peak of the roof-line in order to capture wind at it’s maximum speed.
Mr. Attey [...]
Floating Off-Shore Wind Rig Based on Oil Rig Technology
What are the three biggest problems with wind power? Anybody, anybody, Bueller?
1. Bird Kill, 2. NIMBYism and 3 Dead bugs gumming up the works. Now, I’m not saying that these are always legitimate concerns, but migration corridors should be avoided and some people just really don’t like the way wind turbines look. These are [...]
Fat Spaniel Monitors Your Solar
Once you have your solar photovoltaic panels in place on your rooftop,
how do you know how well they are performing? Maybe you’re lucky and
you have net metering where you are, so you can sort of guess at it
because your electrical bills are lower than they were. But it would be
useful if you could [...]
Advanced Plasma Lamps made from Aluminum Foil?
When Gary Eden needed some raw materials for his new ultra-efficient, ultra-light, millimeter-thin plasma lamp, he went to the grocery store. The lamp is mostly aluminum foil.
Granted the lamp is not 100% aluminum, but part of the project was to try and make it as cheap and simple to create as possible, hence the run [...]
Small is Beautiful: Houses
Our friends over at Inhabitat
took the opposite tack from our recent piece about the top 10 green skyscrapers
and produced an article about the Top 5
Tiny Prefab Houses.
These include such standouts as the Microcompact Home (pictured) and the
Tiny Tumbleweed House. In addition to all the other wonderful features
they offer, these are especially green because of [...]
Level 38 Eco-Tricycle of Maiming
It’s not gonna get you anywhere very fast, but if you’re lucky, it could get you out of some tight scrapes in the post-apocalyptic Australian Outback. In any case this home-made, wind-powered tricycle is ridiculously cool, I’m just not sure why.
It’s not a practical design or anything, but I just feel like it’s necessary to [...]
Tires to Diesel
Plastic is made from oil, unfortunately, it’s hard to make oil from plastic. Or, at least, it used to be. Global Resources Corporation has created a special kind of microwave that zaps plastic at very specific wavelengths in order to release the hydrocarbons.
As an example, put a tire into the GRC Hawk-10, and the [...]
Cardboard Ferrari Gets Green
Ferrari is showing off it’s green with a new concept, high performance vehicle, the Ferrari FFX Millechili. Yes, it’s a hybrid, and uses it’s electric drive train not just to boost power but also to increase efficiency. But we’ve seen hybrids. What’s really exciting about the FFX is that its made of lightweight materials including [...]