New York City startup HEVO Power aims to make charging an electric car as easy as finding a parking place. The company, collaborating with New York University,plans to roll out a pilot project that turns manhole covers near Washington Square Park into wireless charging stations for electric vehicles by early next year.

Just in case those little solar-powered garden lights are not cool enough for you: The George Washington University has installed a 100-square-foot stretch of walkway that's covered entirely in solar panels. In a year, the solar sidewalk should make about 470 kilowatt-hours of electricity, according to numbers from Onyx Solar, the walkway's maker. That electricity will power the 450 LED lights inside the panels that will light the walk at night.

If your car is a diesel, it will run. Liquid hydrogen, the fuel that powered the space shuttle's main engines, could work, says Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But keeping hydrogen liquid requires maintaining it at a temperature below about -432°F. Storing it in a garage would be tricky, as would keeping it from freezing the engine.

A cathedral in Saskatoon, Saskatechewan recently installed stained glass windows embedded with solar panels that will connect to the local electrical grid. "Lux Gloria" is one of several large-scale glass installations created by Toronto-based artist Sarah Hall. The collection is designed to blend the aesthetics of hand-painted, colored glass with the Earth-saving functionality of solar panels.

BMW isn't entirely new to electric vehicles, or EVs; the company has been testing an electric Mini Cooper for awhile now, and we actually wrote about the i3 two years back, when it seemed like just a concept. But now the i3 is officially seeing a release, and it's the first BMW that was designed from the ground up to be an electric car. The benefits are pretty obvious: it's the lightest EV out there, with one of the quickest charging times and excellent performance. And it looks pretty weird, just like an electric vehicle should.

Some people have spent their whole working lives researching fusion and then retired feeling bitter at what they see as a wasted career. But that hasn't stopped new recruits joining the effort every year: optimistic young graduates keen to get to grips with a complicated scientific problem that has real implications for the world. Their numbers have been increasing in recent years, perhaps motivated by two factors: there is a new machine under construction, a huge global effort that may finally show that fusion can be a net producer of energy; and the need for fusion has never been greater, considering the twin threats of dwindling oil supplies and climate change.