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.

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.