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.

Most of the world still runs on fossil fuels, but renewable energy is making big gains. Not only are renewables better for the environment, but they’re also becoming just as cost-effective as their dirtier counterparts. A new study finds that wind farms are less expensive than new coal-fired plants, and they cost about the same as new natural gas plants. Speaking of energy costs, Inhabitat shared a new infographic this week that shows how much it would cost for the entire world to switch over to renewable energy. In other energy news, the world’s largest solar thermal energy plant opened in California’s Mojave Desert. Once it’s operational, the plant will produce enough energy to power 140,000 homes. The largest photovoltaic plant in the world is set to be built in India, and it will produce 10 times as much energy as the next-largest solar plant in the country. And in another exciting development, a team of German and French scientists produced the world’s most efficient solar cell, which boats an efficiency of 44.7 percent.

Filed under: Misc, Transportation, Science

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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.

When it comes to public transportation, taking the bus is the least sexy option. Buses are slow; they make frequent stops; and because they share the road with cars, they get stuck in traffic. But a new proposal for a giant lane-straddling bus would eliminate traffic congestion by letting cars pass right through the middle of it. The futuristic bus is just one of several stories about innovations in green transportation on Inhabitat this week. Mercedes-Benz just completed the first cross-country trip for a self-driving car with its S500 Intelligent Drive research vehicle, and BMW unveiled the official production model of its 2015 i8 plug-in hybrid sports car at the Frankfurt Motor Show. In other green car news, Nissan announced that it is in the final stages of developing its second electric vehicle — the e-NV200 compact van. In an effort to make flat tires a thing of the past, Korean manufacturer Hankook has produced a puncture-proof, airless tire that is made from 95 percent recyclable materials. And in more good news for green cars, August was the best month ever for US sales of electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and conventional hybrids.

Filed under: Misc, Science

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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.

As if the Hyperloop and Tesla weren’t enough to keep him busy, real-life Tony Stark Elon Musk revealed this week that he felt the futuristic hologram UI from Iron Man could be built and that he might just be the one to do it. Over in Denmark, Inhabitat was on the scene covering the 2013 INDEX: Awards honoring groundbreaking inventions that make life better. Get the scoop on all of the winners — from a life-saving smart highway that wirelessly charges cars to a birth simulator that could save millions of babies a year to Copenhagen’s comprehensive Climate Adaption Plan to reduce flooding.

But Copenhagen wasn’t the only city that had rising tides on the mind as the world reflected on the eight-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. While catastrophic flooding may have seemed like an isolated incident at that time, the threat of future storms is now matter-of-fact and ideas on how to protect against them, like this dam that uses the power of floodwater itself to inflate, have been popping up left and right.

Filed under: Misc, Science

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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.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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