Hasta La Gadget!

Google Maps has already made taking the bus a little easier, and now its looking to do something similar for driving electric cars. You can now use Maps to search for nearby EV charging stations.

All you need to do is search using the term “ev charging station” in addition to the area you’re in, which will bring up a list of any nearby stations. Google says it’s been adding information over the past few months, but, as always, will continue to update to make the service as accurate as possible.

“We’d like to continue adding more charging stations to Google Maps,” Google’s Cynthia Yeung wrote on the official blog, “so we’re excited that our friends over at the the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working to make more data available.”

The company is also reaching out to car manufacturers, as well as charging station manufacturers and installers to help with the updates.

In an attempt to find cheaper materials for water purifiers a group of scientists decided to experiment with banana peels. And it turns out, the peels performed better than most other materials.

The study showed that minced banana peels could be used to remove metals and other harmful materials from water, and were especially adept at removing both copper and lead from river water. They’re also reusable, as a purifier made from diced banana peels can be used up to 11 times and still remain effective.

Given their low cost and abundant nature, this makes banana peels a very attractive, low-cost, low-maintenance way to clean-up drinking water.

Via ScienceDaily

There are solar power plants and wind turbine farms, but hydrogen is much more difficult to create in large doses, because of the sheer amount of energy required to produce it. But what if you created a hydrogen plant powered by lightning?

That’s the idea behind the menacing Hydra, a skyscraper concept dreamed up for the eVolo 2011 skyscraper competition. The idea is that the twisted structure would harvest energy from bolts of lightning and then store them in several gigantic batteries. it would be made from grapheme, which is highly conductive and 200 times stronger than steel.

The lightning energy would then be used to power the process of electrolysis, which would create the hydrogen. And, because it’d be creating hydrogen, the only real by-product of the Hydra tower would be harmless clean water.

Via Inhabitat

We all know that the lack of charging stations for electric vehicles makes owning a Chevy Volt or a Nissan Leaf a risky proposition. But there’s an app for that.

The new, free PlugShare iOS app from developer Xatori Inc. lets users search for available charging stations in their area. It features a database of both public stations, as well as personal stations for those who are willing to share their home charger.

Using the familiar map view you can view any stations registered with PlugShare, and then get an address and directions to help you reach it. And since you don’t need an EV to check out the app, it’s a great way to view the potential charging situation before you decide to purchase a shiny new electric car.

You can download PlugShare here.

Ford may be jumping into the electric vehicle market with an EV Focus set to be released towards the end of the year, but it seems as though the company is still skeptical about the future of electric cars. At least if you go by the comments of executive chairman Bill Ford.

“We’ve made a big bet on electric, and I think it has a really interesting future,” Henry Ford said at the recent Eco:nomics conference. “But the pace of which it develops, I think anybody that tells you [what that is], is lying. You just throw a dart.”

The main issue, according to Ford, is the lack of infrastructure, especially in North America, where charging stations are hard to come by. But the company will still be looking into various types of alternative vehicles, in spite of the skepticism, which includes biofuel and hydrogen.

Via PlugInCars.com