Designs for the Riversimple urban car, capable of a 50mph top speed and a 240 mile range, will be freely available online in a bid to help grow the hydrogen market. A new hydrogen-powered car, whose designs will be “open source” and posted for free use on the web, was unveiled today in London. The [...]

One of the controllable causes of global warming is carbon dioxide (CO2) emission from burning fossil fuels. This process is precisely what enables most cars to function by means of combustion engines. In recent years, some companies in the automobile sector have brought out models that combine a standard combustion engine with an electric one. [...]

The sky might literally be the limit for wind power — rotors spinning miles high could help supply electricity worldwide. “There is a huge amount of energy available in high-altitude winds,” said researcher Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, Calif. “These winds blow much more strongly and steadily than [...]

Offering a view of the garden and an adjacent field, it looks like any other window. But this window offers an additional feature: it also produces electricity. The facades of the house, too, harness solar energy to supply the occupants with electrical power. This is what the domestic power supply of the future could look [...]

In the Greek legend of Dionysius’ ear, Dionysius made a cave shaped like an ellipse in order to hear the words whispered by a prisoner in one of the foci of the cave. Some science museums today feature a similar exhibit, where two people at opposite ends of a room can whisper into giant ellipses [...]

Homeowners this fall will be able to buy a wind turbine at hardware stores that tackles the small wind industry’s bete noire: slow wind. WindTronics, based in Muskegon, Mich., has developed a wind turbine sized for individual homes that it says can operate at speeds as low as 2 miles an hour. It will be [...]

A transparent thin film barrier used to protect flat panel TVs from moisture could become the basis for flexible solar panels that would be installed on roofs like shingles. The flexible rooftop solar panels – called building-integrated photovoltaics, or BIPVs – could replace today’s boxy solar panels that are made with rigid glass or silicon [...]

Sunflowers track the sun as it moves from east to west. But people usually have to convert sunlight into electricity or heat to put its power to use. Now, a team of University of Florida chemists is the latest to report a new mechanism to transform light straight into motion – albeit at a very, [...]

Solar electricity has a bright future: It is renewable and available in unlimited quantities, and it does not produce any gases detrimental to the climate. Its only drawback right now is the price: the electric power currently being produced by solar cells in northern Europe must be subsidised if it is to compete against the [...]

British researchers hope to cut airline fuel bills by placing hundreds of thousands of tiny holes in the surface of a plane’s wing to reduce mid-flight drag. A team of British researchers reckon they have hit on a way of cutting airline fuel bills by up to a fifth by harnessing the same principle that [...]