Hasta La Gadget!

It looks like President Obama isn’t the only world leader to switch to solar power. Mohamed Nasheed, president of the island nation of Maldives, recently had 48 donated solar panels installed on the roof of his home in the nation’s capital. And not only that, he donned a hard hat and helped set everything up himself.

The solar set-up was designed by Sungevity, and the panels themselves are made by LG. It’s expected to save around $300,000 worth of electricity bills and 195 tons of carbon dioxide emissions over its lifespan. As a small island nation, Maldives is particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change.

“Solar power helps combat climate change, reduces our dependency on imported oil and most importantly cuts our electricity costs,” President Nasheed said in a statement. “The Maldives stands at the front line of climate change and we don”t have the luxury of time to sit and wait for the rest of the world to act. We are getting to work to start the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.”

Via the New York Times.

The current crop of electric cars is great and all, but there’s really nothing better than a DeLorean. So to join the two the staff at Wired Italy has decided to convert the car–made famous as a time machine in the Back to the Future films–into an electric vehicle and then taking it on a road trip from Milan to Rome.

The team is actually still at work on the project, and is expected to finish up in about a week’s time.

“We made a calculation of what the car needs to travel properly–how many batteries, what kind of engine–and then we made plastic mockups of the parts,” Wired Italy‘s features editor Massimiliano Ferramondo said. “We started to consider where they could squeeze and how they could get in the car and if putting the pieces in that place was proper for the balance and performance of the car.”

The plan is to make it to the Italian capital in time for the Rome Film Festival. And along the way, Universal Pictures will be sponsoring screenings of the iconic film in the various places the electric DeLorean stops. But it looks like this road trip may just be the beginning for the car.

“Probably, it will go back on the street hopefully and will be the first one of a bigger project,” Ferramondo said. “The reason we have the website is that we want to reuse this and we hope that it will become a real race and maybe have ten of our readers who have made the most bizarre electric cars to join us.”

The New York Times describes it as something out of a horror film. It’s sludge. Red, caustic, toxic sludge, and it’s terrorizing Hungary. It’s killing plants and livestock, eating into homes, and has already claimed the lives of at least four Hungarians and sent 100 more to area hospitals.

And now it’s heading for the river.

The sludge seems to have originated in a toxic reservoir containing the industrial byproducts of a factory, the Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company, which converts the ore bauxite into aluminum. Hungarian officials have yet to release an official analysis of the sludge’s chemical contents.

The sludge is now on its way to the Raba River. The Raba empties into the Danube. According to The Times, the stuff has already done a number on smaller rivers, but if a significant amount of the material hits the Raba, it may become “a broad international environmental disaster.”

The level of the reservoir may have been raised due to rainfall, according to authorities. The reservoir in question is only one of several in the area, however. It’s the result of decades worth of toxic build up.

The European Commission, which is looking into the current crisis, awarded the company a permit back in 2006. it had not recorded any accidents or violations from the company.

There are a lot of buses driving around urban areas, but sadly not much green. The solution? Start growing gardens on the roofs of buses, of course.

Dubbed Bus Roots, the project was created as a thesis aimed at “reconnecting urban communities with nature in a practical and playful way.” Since many urban centers have very little actual free space that can be used to grow gardens, utilizing the space available on the tops of buses could be a potential alternative. The creator of Bus Roots also sees the project as having more than just an aesthetic effect, with other benefits including the mitigation of urban heat island effect, acoustical and thermal insulation, and storm water reduction.

Via Inhabitat.

Though the Copenhagen Wheel managed to snag the US Dyson design award, it was Australia that came out on top in the international awards. The overall winner was the Longreach Buoyancy Deployment System, a device that can shoot buoyancy aids up to 150 meters in order to reach drowning victims. The aids themselves are made from hydrophobic foam, which expands in water.

Thanks to the hydrophobic technology, the aids are actually very small, making them easy to store on any size boat. The device also comes packed with Para-Flares to help make night time rescues a little easier. The runner-up for the international award was also a design aimed to helped people stranded at sea: the SeaKettle, a portable raft that’s able to provide passengers both shelter and drinking water while they wait for rescue.

Via Gizmodo.