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.

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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Affordable is a relative term, but in the world of rocket science Japan’s recently launched Epsilon qualifies as such. Costing just $37-million (albeit not directly comparable, NASA claims a typical launch costs around $450-million) to send off, Jaxa — Japan’s space agency — rightly considers it a steal. Epsilon launched from the south-west of the country at 2pm local time. Its mission? To deploy a telescope that Jaxa advises will observe our neighboring planets from its position in Earth’s orbit. The cost efficiency is being put down to the rocket’s artificial intelligence, something that slashes the man-power needed from 150 to 8. Let’s just hope the thriftiness wasn’t just to fund that other recent launch.

Filed under: Science

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Via: BBC

Source: Jaxa

It’s nearly impossible for us to imagine how the Earth might look to someone who’s only ever seen it from a local’s vantage point. But thanks to the Library of Congress, we don’t have to imagine—newly posted images of 19th century drawings show us exactly what humans thought the Earth looked like far before we could ever have known for sure. The Smithsonian compiled a few of them, and some of our favorites lie below. You can see the rest over at The Library of Congress here. [Library of Congress via The Smithsonian]

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While exciting in some ways—homecoming, yay!—the trip home from the International Space Station is a scary enough journey even when everything goes right. Now imagine doing it with no height sensors to tell you how far from the ground you are and when to brace for impact. That’s exactly what happened earlier week.

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Saturn’s never looked more majestic than in this beautiful high-resolution image captured recently by Cassini.

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