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If you are not comfortable starting from scratch, then have a look at this kit, by the 'Go-Solar' Company. Reasonably priced especially when you consider the savings on your electrical bill. Five hours of sun per day and a 20 watt solar panel will give you 100 watt-hours of energy. To store more electricity simply purchase a larger battery.
But in many countries, bikes represent a modern innovation that can play a more important role. Cycling is faster than walking. It is certainly cheaper and more eco-friendly than driving. And new designs offer the chance to maximize the utility factor. WorldBike has developed an extension, called Big Boda, that transforms a basic bike into a passenger and cargo carrier.
My definition of the space elevator: What, like in the Jetsons? Wikipedia's ( www.wikipedia.com ) definition of the space elevator: A space elevator is a proposed structure designed to transport material from a planet's surface into space. Many different types of space elevators have been suggested. They all share the goal of replacing rocket propulsion with the traversal of a fixed structure via a mechanism not unlike an elevator in order to move material into or beyond orbit. Space elevators have also sometimes been referred to as beanstalks, spacebridges, space lifts, space ladders or orbital towers.
Check out this news piece from CNN.
The vehicles are driven by robotic motors in each wheel, eliminating the need for any combustion engine, or even a transmission. This frees up a lot of space, so that the interior of the car is big enough for two, yet the exterior is about one quarter of the size of a regular sedan. Everything on board is controlled by a computer, and the car starts with the push of a button. The wheels have 360 degrees of rotation, which eliminates the need for U-turns, 3-point turns, or parallel parking!
Sources:
Source: Louis Buckley, Sex change wipes out invasive species. News @ Nature.com, July 26, 2007. Photo: The invasive cane toad, introduced in Australia to control cane beetles, is an example of biological control gone wrong.
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Most of us cannot feasibly afford to install a full solar power system into our homes. 
Producing ethanol from the cellulose in plant material may end up being be a part of the solution to humanity's energy woes, but right now the process is expensive, slow and inefficient. Now researchers at 
Summer is here. People are cleaning up their bikes to hit the roads. Using a bicycle for transportation becomes much more appealing when the breezes are balmy and the sun is shining. Only the committed few choose to brave winter rain and snow. Typically, in many developed countries, we have a rather laissez-faire attitude about bikes - they are more for pleasure than work.
Vampire electronics suck! Literally! These are electronics that use energy even when seemingly turned off or idle. CNN recently did a video report about these electronics and found that even some washing machines, when you turn them off, still suck energy. Many homes have up to 50 vampire devises. For example, a turned on DVD player uses 11.32 watts, and when it's turned off it still uses about 6 watts of energy. A home computer uses around 60 watts in standby.
Students at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have designed an urban transportation innovation that will work a lot like luggage carts at the airport: stackable, electric, two-person “City Cars” that can fold up to take up less space. Calling them “cars” is slightly misleading, however, since they don’t have an engine and are intended not as a replacement for conventional cars, but rather as a completely new type of vehicle. 
Your baby will use one ton of diapers as a child. Did you know that in Southern Ontario you can recycle your baby's old diapers? With a subscription and the provided waterproof storage container, smallplanet will pick them up from your driveway and recycle them for you. After your diapers are picked up, the Knowwaste process sanitizes the diapers and separates them into wood pulp and plastic that can then go through the normal recycling process. This process, will help keep soiled diapers out of our landfills, which will also be more environmentally friendly and cost effective.
Biological control of invasive species is notoriously fraught with risk: It's hard to know in advance if the biocontrol agent will stay nice and well-behaved, or become an even worse menace than the species you're trying to eradicate. A researcher in Florida thinks he's figured out how to get around that problem, by turning the invasive species into its own biocontrol agent using "Trojan" animals. By exposing males of many fish and amphibians to female hormones, scientists can create female animals with male chromosomes. When they mate with normal males, their offspring will be exclusively male, and over time, the population will become extinct. This isn't the first time the idea of manipulating sex ratios has been discussed, but it's the first time someone's thought of a way to do it without genetic engineering.
Huge lakes covering hundreds of square miles are hiding beneath half a mile of Antarctic ice, but their undulations cause such dramatic changes at the surface that they can be detected from space. Laser pulses sent from NASA's ICESat provided the evidence of the lakes, which are continuously draining and filling, and which scientists say are not caused by global warming. If all of Antarctica's ice were to melt, sea levels could rise by 23 feet, so detailed models of the behavior of Antartica's ice sheets are crucial to understanding the impacts of climate change. Currently those models don't take into account the subglacial lakes, which help speed the journey of glacial ice to the sea. Scientists hope that the new understanding of how the lakes work will help improve computer models that predict how the Antarctic glaciers will respond to climate change.