Instead of buying a sugar-powered battery pack from Sony, you could make your own sugar battery at home. Here is an instructional video on how to charge your iPod (something everyone seems to want to do, these days) using some sort of sports drink (as long as it has electrolytes in it) and a white onion. Poke a hole in the onion to let more liquid in. Soak the onion in about 2 cups of the sports drink, until at least one cup has been absorbed by the vegetable. Who knew onions were capable of absorbing so much fluid? Once this step is done, dry the onion off and stick your USB cord into its side. What effect this has ...

It’s kind of refreshing to think of organic food as the healthy alternative as well as the environmentally friendly one. Although the environmental benefits are many and obvious, in Japan there is a market for organic products because of their health benefits to the people who use them, in spite of the fact that the global green movement hasn’t quite yet caught on. There is, however, Bio Fach, an annual expo that travels the world and hits Nuremburg, Baltimore, Shanghai and Sao Paulo as well as Tokyo. Here you can find organic and natural cosmetics, clothing, and even ...

At last, the clothing that allows us to enjoy the great outdoors in comfort and style is being made with the Earth in mind. It only seems natural that these companies should make eco-friendly products, but apparently it took some time and thought to come up with the idea. High-tech performance fabrics such as Gore-Tex are made with PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene, better known as Teflon), like that used in non-stick pans, which is toxic to the environment and likely carcinogenic to human beings. However, many companies are starting to behave better. Patagonia makes ...

An airplane cruises over New York City at 5000 feet, armed with a camera that captures photographs with amazing resolution— it records images that are equivalent to those of twelve satellites working in tandem. This is the kind of money and effort that Microsoft is putting into their program, Virtual Earth. Virtual Earth is like Google Earth: a series of satellite photos of the Earth’s surface translated into user-friendly 3D models. You can scan the globe and zoom in close enough to see the street, or even ...

Sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and hydrogen fluoride (HF) are potential hazards to humans, animals, and agriculture. There are no regulations, fines, or enough planet advocates that can control these and other harmful gases like hydrogen chloride (HCI) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) from being released from the source in the video. A secondary gas, hydrochloric acid, can't be controlled either, it can come from that same source. These gases can't be controlled because their source is a volcanic eruptions. An erupting volcano ...

A do-it-yourself propeller-driven tricycle? Ok, so I might not rush out and buy one, but I’d sure like a test drive. Damon Vander Lind, an MIT student, created his own propeller (from foam that he designed), based on a wind turbine that he built for a friend. The blades are foam coated in fibreglass, with LED lights that create light circles when you’re riding the trike at night. The nicest part, he says, is the soothing quietness of the ride. You can’t hear it coming. He’s had mixed reactions driving it down the street, from security officers who get angry, to people ...

Masdar. A carbon- and waste-free city, in the middle of the desert of the emirate of Abu Dhabi. Now, it hasn’t been built yet, but the plans sound almost too good to be true. Finally, someone has decided to take a leap and use all of the technologies that are currently available to live sustainably, not just individually but as an entire city. The plan is for construction to start in January of 2008 and, tentatively, to finish in 2009. The first part of the development to be built will be—you guessed it—a nest of solar panels which, together with wind turbines and geothermal energy , ...

A friend of mine recently moved to Vancouver, and she and I have decided that we are going to invest in an old Volkswagen van, convert it to run on vegetable oil, and take it on tours through the mountains with a scooter in tow. How hard is it to convert an engine to straight vegetable oil (SVO)? Friends of ours switched over the diesel engine (of, coincidentally, a Volkswagen van) in a day or two. You just need a heater—the viscosity won’t be right otherwise—and a filter for the vegetable oil. Golden Fuel Systems is an American company that specializes in just such engine ...

Parents, breathe a sigh of relief: you will no longer have to train your children not to write on the walls! With an utterly mind-boggling and not-yet-available technology from Philips, they can draw, scribble, or write as much as they please and you won’t have to clean up afterwards. Drag & Draw comes with a bucket lined with LEDs, a “magic wand,” a paintbrush, and an eraser. Using the paintbrush to “stir” the bucket of LEDs, you can choose any colour from the spectrum to paint with. Point the brush at any wall, and somehow the bucket acts as a projector to make it look as though ...

They’re pushing a new development at Sony: batteries that run on sugar. In this video you can see that all it takes is a few millilitres of a glucose-rich sports drink, and the cell starts generating power— up to 50 megawatts! Four cells attached in sequence can power an MP3 player. The cell uses a glucose-digesting enzyme to produce electrons, which then run through a circuit to power whatever device you’ve chosen to hook it up to. The cell itself even looks like a sugar cube! Toshiba has also started to make laptops that run on methanol-based batteries, although they have not yet been released to the ...