Electricity might not grow on trees, but it is freely available in the air — provided you know how to catch it. Such is the contention presented by Dr. Francesco Galembeck of Brazil's University of Campinas at the 240th annual American Chemical Society shindig. He and his crew have shown how tiny particles of silica and aluminum phosphate become electrically charged when water vapor is passed over them. This aims to prove two things: firstly, that airborne water droplets do carry an electr……

For full content    click here

Getting stuck in traffic sucks, but thanks to a couple of Kiwis you might soon be feeling a little better about yourself while muttering about the brake-happy commuter ahead of you. An invention called Powertread by Justin Robertson and Brett Kemp looks to do something positive with the unending shuffling of queued cars. It's literally a series of tubes filled with water that, when run over, force their contents through a turbine to generate electricity. One car driving over one of the thin……

For full content    click here

Belkin's just made four new Conserve products available for pre-order. The Conserve Insight tracks your actual devices' electrical usage and tells you how much they cost you on a yearly basis. It also calculates CO2 emissions produced by usage of a given device on either a monthly or yearly basis. The Conserve Smart AV is a greener power strip with five regular outlets and one green outlet for your television, which can auto-detect the power state of your teevee and turn off your periph……

For full content    click here

The Detroit News is reporting that Tesla has closed on a $465 million low-cost loans from the Energy Department to work on its next electric vehicle, the Model S sedan.The funds will apparently be used by the company to build manufacturing plants in California. The loan, which closed on Monday and was approved back in June, will come from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which has about $25 billion to dole out to automakers manufacturing energy efficient vehicles. The Mode……

For full content    click here

Oh, brother — you had to see this coming, didn't you? Soon after details of the California Energy Commission's proposed TV efficiency standards leaked out, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has fired back a shocking press release in order to sound the alarm and get people in opposition. Acco……

For full content    click here

SolarBotanic is a company which researches and specializes in an emerging tech dubbed biomimicry — which seeks to mimic nature, and use nature-inspired methods to solve human problems. SolarBotanic is focusing on energy production, and, to that end, they’ve developed what they call Energy Harvesti……

For full content    click here

The New York Times is reporting Google will announce a free web service tomorrow called PowerMeter that’ll let users track energy consumption in their homes or business, provided there’s a means to upload the data. That part of the equation’s gonna be up to other companies to create compatible de……

For full content    click here

The Greener Gadgets Conference is coming up in a few weeks here, so we thought we’d bring you some highlights of the design competition it’s sponsoring. First up, Recompute is a fully sustainable design for a desktop computer — meaning that it makes use of low-impact manufacturing, uses fully recy……

For full content    click here

The brainchild of designer Sang-Kyun Park, LightDrops is an umbrella that uses the piezoelectric effect of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) to transform falling rain into electricity, which is then used to light LEDs installed on the umbrella's underside. The heavier the rain falls (and the harder it hits ……

For full content    click here

Just imagine — yapping for hours on end to your dream lover could actually leave your cellphone with more juice than what it started with. This completely bizarre scenario could theoretically become a reality according to new research from a professor at Texas A&M University, and it's all thanks to t……

For full content    click here