Green Tech

Apple plans to build a solar farm to power a new data center in Reno, Nev., in keeping with the company's goal of having its data centers run by renewable energy.

The company has signed a deal with Nevada utility NV Energy to build a solar farm on 167 acres in northern Nevada that will be capable of producing 18 to 20 megawatts of power, Apple announced Monday. The new solar farm will provide the energy to operate a $1 billion data center for Apple's cloud computing services that will be located east of Sparks.

When completed, the … Read more

Ann Makosinski is a 15-year-old with a flashlight obsession. She won a bronze award for a piezoelectric flashlight at the Canada-Wide Science Fair last year. This year, her battery-free Hollow Flashlight has taken her all the way to the top-15 finalists of the Google Science Fair.

Makosinski was inspired by the idea that the human body is like a walking 100-watt lightbulb with untapped thermal energy potential. She decided to build a flashlight powered only by the warmth of a hand.

The basis for the Hollow Flashlight is Peltier tiles, tiles that produce electricity when one side is heated and the other side cooled.… Read more

A Tesla fan is asking the White House for help. He wants the federal government to stop states from requiring that cars be sold only by third-party dealers.

In a White House petition he created, the fan asks the Obama administration to "allow Tesla Motors to sell directly to consumers in all 50 states." He believes that states shouldn't be allowed to stop the electric car company from selling autos directly to customers.

"The state legislators are trying to unfairly protect automobile dealers in their states from competition," the fan writes in the petition. "… Read more

Izhar Gafni has created a bicycle out of $9 worth of cardboard that feels sturdy, rides well, and looks pretty nifty. A lot of people have wanted to know when they can get one of their own.

A new Indiegogo campaign aims to launch the unusual bike to the world.

The bike may be made of cardboard, but it can hold up to 400 pounds and is both fire and water resistant. It uses recycled cardboard, plastic, and rubber.… Read more

One of the first things I did when I visited London a few years ago was to go on a Sherlock Holmes walking tour. I'm not the only avid reader compelled to seek out the real-life settings found in books. This desire is what has brought about Placing Literature, an interactive site dedicated to plotting scenes from books onto real-world maps. It's like a heady mixture of a database, Google Maps, and the efforts of a bunch of literature geeks.

Placing Literature started with a conversation between co-founders Andrew Bardin Williams (an author) and his sister-in-law Kathleen Colin Williams (a geographer). "I use a lot of real-world locations in my novels. We decided there was this great intersection between geography and literature that hadn't been explored before," says Andrew Bardin Williams.… Read more

One hundred years ago, car makers could have devised different fuel types and filling techniques for their internal-combustion cars, and drivers would have had to visit a Ford station, a Dodge Station, a Chevy station, or whatever the make of their car, to fill the tank. Fortunately, gasoline and filling standards prevailed.

In a publicity stunt last night, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk began pushing electric cars on the nonstandard path that gasoline cars didn't take.

At Tesla's design studio in Los Angeles, Musk showed a video of a Tesla employee filling the tank of an Audi, while … Read more

Which is faster: changing a battery in Tesla's Model S sports sedan or filling up a car's gas tank?

The electric automaker put that question to the test in a Fast Pack Swap Event captured on video Thursday.

Posted on Vimeo, the video revs up with Tesla CEO Elon Musk touting that owners of the Model S will face two choices when their car's battery is almost depleted. At a Tesla station, they can either have the battery recharged for free or have it swapped out for another battery. The choice, according to Musk, is whether you … Read more

LE BOURGET, France -- Sure, there are electric vehicles on the road now. But aviation company AgustaWestland thinks they may have a place in the air, too.

At the Paris Air Show here, the Finmeccanica subsidiary showed off an exotic tiltrotor aircraft called Project Zero that's powered by lithium batteries. It flies, but project manager Jianye Zhang wouldn't say how far or how fast.

The single-passenger aircraft looks like a flying wing, but it's got two propellers built into the surface of the wing. For takeoff, the propellers push air downward to thrust the aircraft up like … Read more

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised a swappable-battery demo at a company event on June 20 event.

In a Tuesday tweet, Musk said the Tesla event, which will take place at 8 p.m. PT Thursday at the company's design studio in Hawthorne, Calif., will include a "live pack swap demo."

Rumors have been swirling for months that Musk's Tesla was working on a technology that would allow drivers with batteries running low to get out of one of its electric cars and swap the battery for one that's ostensibly full. That would allow for … Read more