Intelligently thought out and laid out architectural plans are the new “in” thing these days. Designed by architects at C.F. Moller, the Dragen Children’s House sets new standards as it has been designed especially for the kids. Everything that has gone in the making of this building are Nordic Swan’ eco-labeled, and the final output has been certified passive-house, in other words using a minimum of energy. Firstly, the design allots a lot more space for the kids to move and run around. The ‘Dragon Children’s House’ has small niches uniformly distributed throughout to suit the children’s development for their learning and growing. The highly insulated construction consumes less than 20 percent of the energy used for a standard building. highly insulated construction will consume less than 20 percent of the energy used for a standard building. Everything sounds good, but my question is why just a pedagogical construction, and not all buildings in future? [WorldArchitectureNews]

Sharp and Origin have joined forces to create the ‘Ballarat Solar Park’ which is basically a huge park that will channelize the solar energy in an intelligent way. The Ballarat Solar Park includes tracking panels which are a unique innovation designed to follow the sun in order to capture the maximum amount of sunlight to generate more renewable energy than the standard solar fixed installations. The Park has a series of educational panels to help people visiting the area to learn about solar, renewable energy, how it works and its benefits. The park, which produces enough renewable energy to power about 150 homes, opened on Saturday November 28. In the past too, we have seen almost similar moves being taken where the entire parking lot generated power for its functioning from the sun- the Solasis Parking Lot. [Gizmodo]

Climate Change, global warming is our immediate concern and future predictions are very grim. Designers are already gearing up by coming up with futuristic designs. Urban Concept Vehicle is one such design and it is designed for urban poor of the third world in 2030. Designer Nicholàs Chacana has envisioned massive relocation, scarcity of drinking and food. So this vehicle is fitted with water purification system which can recycle water from any resource such as lakes and ponds and makes it fit for drinking. The vehicle is also fitted with hydroponic modules which will help people grow their own food in nutrient dissolved water.

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‘Freegans’ have become talk of the town in Bristol and elsewhere. They are people who promote alternate living strategies such as not being part of the capitalist and consumer oriented society. In a nutshell they shun the money oriented world and promote sustainable living by recycling wasted food and discarded household items. For instance, Freegan Mark Boyle managed to live an entire year without cash by surviving on food foraged from different supermarkets, shops etc. Their philosophy of recycling makes sense, because in market oriented economy production is in bulk and there is much wastage.

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Wooden floors are high on maintenance and need to be replaced occasionally. If you are looking for more viable options, then let Boston-based Company EcoModern Design show you how to make the flooring of your house both classy and sustainable at the same time. Their new product EcoLux flooring comes in gold, silver, copper-leafed, imitation gold leaf, Forest Stewardship Council-certified hardwood, bamboo, or engineered maple. This flooring is made with metal gilding using a 2,000-year-old technique which was originally used to restore paintings.

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Dallas is going green in a total planned way. Recently a competition was held to redesign a rundown block in downtown Dallas and among all the architects, designers who submitted their plans, Forwarding Dallas, a Portuguese based architectural firm was picked as a winner. Their design is high both on eco-sustainability and aesthetics. The residential blocks have a typical hill-side structure which will be used to grow plants and it incorporates renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines to supply power. There are plans in place for rain-water harvesting as well. So this community housing will be sustainable and green all the way.

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UK’s largest data centre will be coming up in Dumfries and Galloway and according to the plans announced renewable energy sources will power the new facility. Once again integrated alternative energy plans are being mulled which include localized gas production and even tapping of heat energy that will be generated by hi-tech IT equipment. Keysource, which designs and builds data centre have already announced their plans.

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Designer Flavio Adriani calls his new creation a tribute to Countach Lamborghini by Marcello Gandhi since the design is inspired by it and is essentially a redesigned electric version of the car. This redesigned version looks extremely elegant and luxurious, so it is kind of reassuring for luxury brand fans that ‘green’ version of cars and accessories will definitely not be drab and boring. The concept design is awesome because it integrates all solar panel, wind turbine and batteries. Integrating alternate energy sources seems to be the best way ahead to convert the world into greener one.

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Until now, alternative sources of energy like wind and solar energy that is available in abundance has been well exploited as efficient sources of electricity. But since wind and sun are highly unpredictable forces of nature, there is a high probability that these may not be used to their fullest advantage. As a result, MIT professor Donald Sadoway - he has developed the first ever pure liquid battery, that can store this power for later use. To keep the battery in liquid form, it's kept under constant high temperature of around 700 degrees Celsius. Its layers are made of liquid metal alloys that are very cheap and available in plenty, thus making it a cheap storage technology.

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So many of us want to do so much for the environment, but how many of us actually end up doing something for it? David Murray has been one such man from Texas who has built his very own electric car right in his garage. No, it’s not a hybrid, but a complete electric car. All he did was spent $750 to buy 1993 Eagle Talon form a junkyard and then another $4000 in converting it in to a plug-in electric car. Powered by only a small electric motor, with no emissions David has successfully managed to make the car hit 55mph. The total costs for charging it is just 7$ for it go about 300-miles. Isn’t that amazing? Now only if we have more such enthusiast who would really like to get down to doing something as impactful, will the environment benefit sooner.

[Techeblog]

With countries committing themselves to cut down carbon emission and even setting up time bound targets and goals the onus now really shifts to heavy industry and business houses to take necessary steps to cut down emission drastically. Recent ‘Brand Emission’ studies in UK by a team of researchers show that there are very few brands and industries which have got down to cutting down emissions. Dell, BMW and Tesco are the new ‘Brand Emission Leaders’ but they are only handful few. Among 600 biggest brands of UK only 121 companies have set achievable targets to meet UK’s emission reduction goals by 2020.

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Right from power plants to cars to cell phones much of coveted energy tapped from burning fossil fuels gets wasted as heat energy that is released from them all. MIT labs are working to tap this very heat energy and trying to make our everyday gadgets run longer by recycling the wasted heat energy by adding thermal diodes and quantum dot semiconductors. This is good news indeed because nearly 60 percent energy goes waste globally. MTPV Corp is trying to commercialize this technology.

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Bicycles help you maintain your fitness apart from being a far more viable and desirable mode of travel ecologically. Keeping in view the steep rise in the number cargo bikes in Copenhagen every year (it is estimated that six percent of the household of the metropolis is the proud owner of at least one cargo bike bring the average to a staggering 15,000 bikes in the city alone), goodmorning technology has come up with a unique car-shaped parking option for these bikes called CarGo. This "car" helps to store up to four bikes in a space required by one car. Each shell is created with fiberglass and has four separate cabins to park the bikes inside with ease. The casing has five solar powered lights: four as headlights that come on after dark and an additional one inside that is automatically turned on when any of the doors are opened.

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If you enjoy fishing as a hobby, then you would have encountered green and smelly algae growing around fresh water steams. If you thought they were really good for nothing, then there are scientists working rather hard to prove you wrong! Imagine powering a "slim" phone of the future with them! Batteries which seem to be a feasible alternative to electricity crisis are usually bulking and made of metal, which adds to harmful wastes if not disposed and recycled cautiously. And so efforts are being made to come up with flexible, lightweight, inexpensive, environmentally friendly alternatives that too made of nonmetallic components. One favorable material for such batteries seems to by conducting polymers, but they seem to deteriorate in use rather rapidly. Scientifically called as "Cladophora" these algae hold the key ingredient for these batteries: cellulose, and that too almost one hundred times the amount usually found in paper.

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When a company decides to make every child computer literate with a unique scheme like OLPC (One Laptop per Child), they seem to have their hearts at the right place. Pixel Qi is back in action and this time they are developing an HDTV that will run on batteries powered by the sun! The sub-10 watt HDTV has been created keeping in mind places where electricity supply is either unstable or scarce.

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