Friday, March 29, 2024

Inhabitat’s Week in Green: Facebook drones and giant slides

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Inhabitat's Week in Green

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

Tesla’s Model S got a lot of press when Elon Musk unveiled a “Ludicrous” upgrade that goes from 0-60 in 2.8 seconds — but a new car built by a team of German students can go even faster than that. The electric vehicle can accelerate from 0-62MPH in a blistering 1.779 seconds, and it’s currently awaiting confirmation for a Guinness World Record. In other news, Facebook just unveiled a solar-powered airplane that will beam the internet to remote locations. The Aquila has the wingspan of a Boeing 737, yet it weighs less than 1,100 pounds. This week, Inhabitat reporter Marc Carter spotted Chrysler’s camouflaged new Town & Country minivan on the streets of LA — and it looks like it’s going to be a plug-in EV. Google’s Street View cars show us towns and cities throughout the world — and now they’re getting equipped with pollution sensors to monitor the air we breathe. And if you’re planning a road trip this summer, we’ve got two amazing mobile dwellings for you to check out: a stylish wood cabin on wheels and an old-school bus that’s been retrofitted into a remarkable little home.

As the 2016 presidential race heats up, candidates are beginning to announce their environmental platforms. Hillary Clinton revealed plans to boost US solar power by 700 percent, but we still think Bernie Sanders may be our best defense against climate change. In other news, a new report shows that large-scale solar is nearly as cheap as other fuels in the world’s three biggest markets, and a gadget called the SunPort allows you to power any device in your home with energy from the sun. It was also a big week for wind power as the United States’ first offshore wind farm finally broke ground off the coast of Rhode Island.

Rotterdam, Netherlands, is building the largest electric vacuum cleaner in the world — but it’s not for tidying up your living room. The 23-foot-tall Smog Free Tower will suck pollution out of the sky and turn it into jewelry. In other architecture and design news, Spatial Design wants to combat homelessness by installing hanging pod homes on the sides of existing buildings. San Francisco has a public urination problem — and the city plans to address it by coating buildings in liquid-repellent paint that bounces pee back on offenders. In London, Anish Kapoor’s twisting Orbit Tower is being transformed into the world’s longest and tallest tunnel slide. French architect Jacques Rougerie envisioned a giant self-sustaining city that looks like an enormous manta ray. And Israeli fashion student Danit Peleg debuted an amazing line of 3D-printed clothing that shows just how far the technology has come.

Filed under:
Household, Transportation, Internet, Facebook

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Tags: climate change, Drones, eco-friendly, EV, facebook, Green, Solar, Tesla, Wind

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