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ARTICLE: Simon Dale can build a 500 sq ft home in under 4 months, with £3000, using only locally sourced materials, a chainsaw, a hammer and a 1 inch chisel. So can you. This, to me, is the epitome of green building.

Article: Coming to a shoreline near you? Undulating ’sea snakes’ primed to power coast of Portugal.

Article: Over the next five years Waste Management Inc., the largest garbage hauler and landfill operator in North America, will spend roughly US $400 million to convert landfill gas to electricity. Instead of allowing the gas to burn off, Waste Management will use the methane to fuel onsite engines or turbines to generate electricity, which are typically generated by fossil fuels.

ARTICLE: According to The Center for American Progress, we’ve got a lot more to not look forward to if we continue to go about our days unaware. And if you are not alarmed by the thought of a world without Guacamole, then I would argue that your senses have been dulled beyond repair.

ARTICLE: Laser no.1 promises to turn radioactive material into less radioactive isotopes by knocking out a neutron via transmutation. So far, iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years) has successfully been transmutated into iodine-128 (half life: 25 minutes.)

ARTICLE: In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the Office of Technology Assessment was eliminated for the sake of budget cuts, but the cost in terms of damage to the quality of scientific debate on policy has been incalculable.

ARTICLE: Even though it sounds like NanoLogix is more interested in producing hydrogen, their fermentation process sounds like it could be utilized or piggie-backed to produce butanol as well. A commercially viable system of producing both hydrogen gas and butanol from bacteria and biomass would massacre any ethanol system on the market.

Article: University of Hawai’i scientist Pengcheng “Patrick” Fu managed to engineer a strain of freshwater cyanobacteria that feed on carbon dioxide and emit ethanol as waste in the presence of sunlight. To get the carbon dioxide it needs, the system can pull the gas out of the emissions of power plants or other carbon dioxide producers.

Article: I’ve been cultivating a growing love affair with algae ever since I began searching for superior biofuels feedstocks. Emboldened by figures stating properly engineered algal systems could produce between 2000-20,000 gallons of biodiesel-worthy vegetable oil per acre (an acre of soy yields 40-60 gallons), algae stands as the great green hope of the appropriate biofuels revolution.

Article: Ausra aims to offer an emission-free replacement to coal-fired electricity in the United States (California, Texas, Florida), China and other suitable geographies. Rather than using solar PV, the company uses its own low-cost solar concentrating technology to create steam from water that generates electricity after it passes through high-efficiency turbines.