eco-friendly

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.

In what could very well become the auto industry’s greatest comeback story, a trio of German companies is hoping to introduce a revamped version of the pride of DDR auto engineering: the Soviet-era Trabant.

According to the prototype the three companies plan to unveil at this year's Frankfurt Motor Show, the Trabant nT (as in Neu Trabant!) will be powered by an all-electric drive train, sport solar panels on the roof for juicing the AC and have a range of up to 150 miles.

It looks like the father of modern physics had more up his sleeve than the theory of relativity. Long after he changed the landscape of modern physics, Albert Einstein and his former student Leo Szilard patented a refrigerator that had no moving parts and used only pressurized gases for cooling. It got overshadowed 20 years later, in the 1950s, when more efficient, if environmentally-damaging, freon-compressors for refrigerators became available.

Staying green may be a priority for most people, but offices rarely share that concern. If you find yourself buried daily in an avalanche of paper, printers, and chemical-laden supplies, fear not—help is here. Below, five Web services to green even the reddest of workplaces.

Last summer, more than 1,000 environmentalists in the U.K. staged a weeklong protest in a "Climate Camp" at Heathrow Airport, where about 70 people were arrested. Their immediate purpose was to block a planned expansion of Heathrow, but the protests highlighted a growing complaint in Europe—that the ride to global-warming catastrophe is being fueled not only by coal-fired power plants and SUVs, but also by the ever-rising number of commercial jets. Now governments are starting to listen.