biofuel

Carbon nanotubes have improved existing technologies in fields ranging from electrical circuitry to architecture to materials science. So is it any surprise that when researchers in Arkansas applied the miraculous microscopic structures to tomato seeds, the plants grew faster, stronger, and more plentifully?

Common sense says that burning a plant you regrow every year is better for the atmosphere than spewing out carbon dioxide that’s been buried underground for eons. But the truth behind biofuels and petroleum often seems to defy common sense. Neither ethanol nor gasoline bubbles out of the ground ready to put in your tank. So to figure out which one does less environmental harm, you have to calculate all the energy that goes into making it.

In José Saramago’s novel Blindness, when an epidemic of sightlessness sweeps the city, among the foulest signs of civic breakdown is its inability to handle its own excrement. Human waste piles where it lands, left to the elements and not modern plumbing. To newly minted industrial designer Virginia Gardiner, we might as well be blind to our own waste. Her plumbing-free toilet project, the Gardiner CH4, makes us personally responsible for our intimate product—and makes it useful.

If you were wondering, Timbuktu isn't some mythical city with a skyline of emerald buildings housing a race of unicorn-men. It's a real place, situated in the west African country of Mali, a city historians cite as an intellectual and spiritual center of the 15th and 16th centuries. It's also some 3,700 miles from London. Keep that in mind when you consider a scheme to cover those miles in a car that looks like an Everglades airboat designed by Luigi Colani.

Move over, switchgrass. There's a new miracle crop on the horizon. Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign indicates that a perennial grass named Miscanthus x giganteus can produce about two and a half times more ethanol per acre than either corn or switchgrass.

Biologists at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University have a strange fascination with pond scum. But the fascination may prove more useful than anyone could have imagined.

From converting your lawn mower to solar power to brewing your own biofuel, there are plenty of steps the more industrious green citizen can take beyond recycling and CF bulbs. Get started below.

Were still in the honeymoon period with new fuel technologies like biodiesel. Theyre clean. Renewable. No more oil-covered seabirds in the news! I can drink out of the tailpipe of my hydrogen fuelcell car! Weve been so taken with their promise that weve neglected to think much about their inevitable downside: these fuels are manufactured, and unfettered manufacturing can be dirty.

As the Saab logo on the hood attests, this is not a Mini Cooper from the future. It's the Swedish automaker's latest concept car—a next-gen compact that runs on a 1.4 liter, E85-capable turbocharged engine paired with an electric hybrid system. It draws on Saabs earlier Aero-X and 9X concepts, and follows on the heels of the Saab 9-4X BioPower crossover concept unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show in January.

On Monday, telecom entrepreneur and X-Prize Foundation trustee Anousheh Ansari became the worlds first female space tourist when she launched into orbit aboard a Soyuz TMA spacecraft headed for the International Space Station. Shes also one of just four private citizens of both sexes ever to hitch a ride to the cosmos. Why the small number? Well, the price is prohibitive, of course, but bucks alone wont get you a ticket—theres a waiting list to clear, health requirements to meet, and six months of training to ace before youre allowed to hang out at ISS with the cool kids from NASA. Ansari cleared all the hurdles, saying she hopes her journey will inspire girls—especially those from her native Iran—to study science.

So far, Space Adventures, the group that launched Ansari and fellow space rookies Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth and Gregory Olsen, is the only tourism company sending random rich folks into orbit, but plans are underway to have Richard Bransons much-ballyhooed venture, Virgin Galactic, up and running by 2007. Ansari is reported to have paid about $20 million for her journey to the Space Station (twice the amount of the 2004 purse for the Ansari X-Prize Cup), but Virgin Galactic will offer flights for the low, low price of 100,000 (about $188,000).  The cost difference is probably due to the fact that the space-station trip is a 10-day affair, while Virgins flights will last just three hours.

If Bransons plan runs according to schedule, Ansari wont be the only female tourist in space for long. A host of other would-be rocket divas including Angelina Jolie and Sigourney Weaver have sent down payments to Virgin for the opportunity to leave Earths atmosphere. Just one caveat, ladies: a couple months back, Virgin Galactic representative Will Whitehorn said that breast implants "might well explode" if subjected to the G-forces of takeoff.  Mythbusters supposedly debunked that rumor, but no one has tested it yet in actual space. What I want to know is, which enhanced celeb is gonna be first to find out what happens? Whaddya say Pam Anderson—you're the adventurous type. Want to step up and set a space record?    —Megan Miller