eco tech

Without any sort of approval from my girlfriend, I bought a 1984 diesel Mercedes-Benz through eBay. Two years later, the vehicle has provided me with nearly 10,000 miles of service on waste vegetable oil (WVO). The fuel may technically be free, but it has not come without a price. Here's how I converted my car, affectionately known as "Chance," to a veggie-oil roadster, and some of the hard-learned lessons I picked up along the way.

We here at PopSci enjoy our green dreams for future buildings as much as any other geek. So imagine the excitement when Beijing-based MAD Ltd. unveiled its solar eco-skin design for the Taichung Convention Center in Taiwan.

The landmark building design aims to meld future tech with natural shapes that evoke mountains dotted with crater-like openings. We can only hope that a recovering post-apocalyptic landscape would look so pleasing.

According to a new report from the prestigious London School of Economics, birth control is a less expensive way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than most green energy strategies.

The Sahara, as well as other deserts around the world, is growing, in a process called desertification that ends up displacing people and crops. The situation has become drastic in a number of sub-Saharan countries. One suggestion from architect Magnus Larsson at the recent TED Global conference suggests constructing a massive wall, 3,700 miles long -- built from the sand itself. The trick would be to use bacterial labor to build it.

A team at Harvard decided to reinvestigate the potential for windpower around the globe, and found their new results to be significantly different than previous studies. According to the new study, we're capable of someday producing 40 times more power via wind than we currently consume overall.

Click Here for last month's entry - Stage #1: Build the Box

Stage #2: Solar Water Boiler

Trees are great absorbers of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and inhibitors of climate change -- that's why treehuggers hug them so much. But leave it to humanity to engineer a better tree. A synthetic tree, currently being tested as a prototype, ensnares carbon about 1,000 times faster than a real tree.

A single prop for a wind turbine has been caught in the wild by Dogmantra, a friend of the Boing Boing Gadgets blog.

The water toilet is truly one of the greatest miracles of modern life, a frothy disappearing act; now you see it… now you don’t. But washing human waste away requires huge sewage treatment infrastructures in cities, and extensive home septic systems for rural dwellers. Compost toilets, though in their essence as old as human civilization, have evolved to a point of technological sophistication whereby they tackle the minutiae of composting details to create optimal conditions for recycling human waste.

Take a look at the compost toilet tech out there for the non-flushers among us.

Researchers can figure out who was the Flava Flav of ancient Mesoamerica by checking out skeletons' teeth. Dentists who lived up to 2500 years ago (who actually sound like they might be more talented than many tooth jockeys I've ever gone to) used to do an early version of grills -- drilling into teeth and implanting gems like jade. Be sure to check out the picture of a skull decorated in this way.

Also in today's links: baby flamingos never see the light of day, an EPA manhunt gets underway and more.

"Absolutely." That's what Barack Obama told Barbara Walters last November when asked if he would make the White House more environmentally friendly. Of course, he wouldn't be the first.

The next frontier in traditional solar panels is concentrators - devices, usually lenses, that concentrate solar power onto the most expensive part of a solar panel - the silicon. Skyline Solar's "solar trough" design concentrates sunlight without using expensive lenses or complicated robotic armatures for tracking the sun as it crosses the sky.

PopSci is celebrating Earth Day in all kinds of green ways! Check out our gallery to see what we're doing for the planet today, and to discover the science behind our decisions.

Poo is powerful stuff. That’s cow poo to be exact, though scientists say other animals' waste could also be used as an environmentally friendly energy source. 121 facilities in the U.S. are already turning their manure into electricity, and a report from the university of Texas says that the total potential across the country from existing cows could potentially serve 3% of our national energy use. And, a new bill was recently proposed asking for tax incentives for even more biogas production. This poo power stuff is really catching on.

If you're still finding it hard to visualize the transition from cow pies to flickering light bulbs, we delve into the poo-power basics here in graphic exposition.

Dear EarthTalk: What are some of the leading proposed technological fixes for staving off global warming, and how feasible are they? -- James Harris, Columbus, Ohio

While most of the world fixates on how to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere, scientists and engineers around the world are busy working on various "geo-engineering" technologies -- many of which are highly theoretical -- to mitigate global warming and its effects. Many scientists oppose using new technology to fix problems created by old technology, but others view it as a quick and relatively inexpensive way to solve humankind's most vexing environmental problem.