More info here: evocotivedesign.com

They also make a rigid board insulation product for home building.

Of course this is still in the early stages, and it will take years to set up a project to see if this is commercially viable and practical, but it’s stil very exciting.  Especially if we could feed the fungus with stuff we don’t want anymore, like garbage.

Hear the full story here on NPR.

If you’re not sure who to vote for, I’d recommend Barack Obama.  Especially if you think renewable enrgy is important.

Read the article here.

When I buy office products, I always try to buy paper products that have the highest recycled content I can find. Initially, I couldn’t find anything that had recycled paper in it at all, but over the years recycled paper products have become more and more available, and in steadily higher percentages of recycled content. The problem is that they are usually more expensive, and sometimes way more expensive.

On a recent trip to Staples for office paper, not only did I find 100% recycled paper (100%!), but it was actually cheaper than the other stuff. That is so great. I honestly never thought I would see this happen. Sometimes you have to look at the little things in order to see progress, but I would say that this is actually huge.

Read the fascinating  article here.

The engine will be more efficient as the difference in temperature between the heat source and the heat sink goes up, reaching 60% at about a 600-degree-to-room-temperature differential. Achieving such a temperature is no problem for parabolic mirror solar thermal collectors, which can easily reach 800 degrees.

Johnson is hoping that a variation of his heat engine could generate electricity from the heat of an internal combustion engine or even from human body heat! Sounds like The Matrix could come true!

Nanolsolar Inc. has been talking big lately about making a leap in solar panel technology that will drop the cost to under $1 a watt. The current standard for solar panels has been hovering around $4 a watt (wholesale cost) for a while.

Well, on December 18th Nanosolar announced their first shipment of solar panels that are profitably produced at $.99 a watt. Batch 1 went to a solar electricity utility in Germany and residential panels won’t be available for at least 12 months.

The big jump down in price was due to their new no-silicon method of printing a copper-indium-gallium-diselenide nanoparticle ink onto a metallic film substrate with inkjet technology. And, fortunately for us, this new type of panel will maintain the current 15%-20% standard of efficiency found in crystalline silicon panels!

Because of their ease of production and short-circuiting the current silicon shortage, I think this announcement will herald in the age of a flood of cheap solar power for everyone. And with the advent of new batteries for home energy storage like the nanosilicon wire lithium-ion cell (technical paper for the true geek here) in development now, the power grid may just become one more way to date films and old photos.

DARPA, the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,  sponsored a rally in November of 2007 offering a $2 million prize to the company or individual who could navigate an urban setting the fastest with a driverless vehicle.  There were a lot of SUV’s in the race (you need a lot of room for all the sensors and hardware, apparently) and one monster truck.

The winning vehicle, coming in at a blistering average speed of 14 mph, was outfitted and programmed by a Carnegie Mellon Team.  It took more than a dozen lasers, radars and cameras to make the AI truck capable of following the rules of the road, parallel park and avoid obstacles, and over 500,000 lines of code to process the information.

Unbelievably, the race had only one collision:  a 10 mph bump between two vehicles.  I wonder how that compares to human-driver accident rates?

I know we’re all waiting for the day we can don our jet packs and wingsuits for the morning commute, but this AI car idea is a pretty good concept for diverting our attention until then.