Hasta La Gadget!

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

A flying saucer is set to land in Silicon Valley! This week, the Cupertino City Council gave a big thumbs-up to Apple’s new $5 billion headquarters. The circular building is designed by Foster + Partners, and it looks like a futuristic wonderland for tech workers. Lego bricks are mighty popular in the design world, but can you imagine an entire house that snaps together? That’s the basic idea behind Eric Schimelpfening’s WikiHouse, which can be customized to fit a user’s needs and created using a 3D printer. In other green architecture news, starchitect Zaha Hadid shared images of her proposed Qatar World Cup stadium, which will use passive design to cool itself. Architect Sou Fujimoto released plans for a complex in Doha that uses the mist from interior waterfalls to provide relief from the region’s intense heat. The world-famous Swedish Ice Hotel is one structure that doesn’t need to worry about keeping cool. Quite the contrary: Swedish law requires that the owners of the structure, which is made from ice, install fire alarms to comply with national building regulations.

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Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

Tesla has been on a tear this year, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the Silicon Valley-based electric car maker is using up the world’s supply of lithium-ion batteries, spurring manufacturers to ramp up global production. In other green transportation news, Smart has unveiled the Fourjoy electric concept car in advance of the Frankfurt Motor Show. Barcelona launched the world’s first public electric scooter-sharing scheme, which promises to help users save money and decrease fuel consumption. In Buffalo, a man built himself a 16-foot geodesic houseboat in just a few weeks for less than $2,000. And if you want to have your mind blown, check out the photos from this year’s Bloemencorso Zundert flower parade in the Netherlands, which features floats made from thousands of flowers.

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Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wowed the tech and business worlds this week when he unveiled plans for a 700MPH solar-powered Hyperloop train that could catapult people from San Francisco to LA in just over half an hour. Although the plan is highly conceptual, nothing associated with Musk can be written off as fantasy these days. The news somehow managed to overshadow all other futuristic transportation stories, like Martin Aircraft’s unveiling of a “practical” jetpack that can travel at speeds of up to 60MPH and reach an altitude of 8,000 feet. Meanwhile, German designer Andreas Blazunaj unveiled a sleek hybrid concept vehicle that looks more like a spaceship than a car. An Australian high school student designed a solar-powered car that could be used to transport pregnant Zimbabwean women to hospitals. And the team behind the Bloodhound Supersonic Car announced that it will use a 3D-printed nose cone in its attempt break the 1,000MPH speed record in summer 2015.

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Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

It’s difficult to think about winter in the middle of a very hot summer, but if you live in Norway, winter never seems too far off. There, engineers have come up with a creative solution for the lack of winter sunlight by setting up a cluster of large mirrors to direct natural light toward the town of Rjukan, which sits in a valley. In the US, scientists are developing new techniques to harvest the power of the sun, as a team of researchers from the University of Maryland has developed a long-lasting battery that’s made from wood. 3D printers are capable of amazing feats, but a new study finds they release a high amount of ultrafine particles into the air, which can be harmful if inhaled. Star Wars fans will be saddened to learn that migrating dunes in Tunisia are threatening to destroy one of the most famous filming locations captured in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. And in the week’s most inexplicable example of environmental destruction, the US military dropped four bombs on the Great Barrier Reef as part of a training exercise.

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Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

This week aviation fans witnessed a world’s first as AeroVelo’s human-powered helicopter won the elusive $250,000 Sikorsky Prize by hovering 10 feet off the ground for more than 60 seconds. The Solar Impulse sun-powered airplane also broke boundaries by completing the first sun-powered trip from coast to coast — and Inhabitat was on the scene at New York’s JFK Airport to meet it. In other green transportation news, ABB recently announced plans to build the world’s largest nationwide network of EV fast-charging stations in the Netherlands. NASA’s autonomous solar-powered polar rover, the GROVER, completed initial sub-zero field tests in Greenland, proving that it can withstand 30 MPH winds and temperatures of -22 F. Roads are an integral part of our carbon-heavy automotive transportation system — but a new type of smog-eating pavement could actually combat emissions and clean the air. And Inhabitat took a look at the world’s most beautiful urban street, a gorgeous tree-lined oasis in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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