Inhabitat’s Week in Green: of electric tractor unicycles, garbage-powered garbage trucks, and luminous nanoparticle trees

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. This week we were blinded by the light as researchers unveiled a way to transform city trees into luminous streetlights using gold nanoparticles. We also showcased a mesmerizing paper LED structure shaped like a tree at Tokyo Designers Week, and speaking of stellar architecture, check out this stunning star-shaped Taiwanese tower topped with a built-in wind turbine. In other news, strap on your rollerblades and hang tight – from the Department of Questionable Transportation comes the FlyRad , an insane electric unicycle that pulls you down the street at 25 miles per hour. Meanwhile, the city of Toronto is doing their part to preserve the environment by rolling out a fleet of garbage trucks that can be powered by the very waste they collect . Finally, the University of Rhode Island signaled a bright future for efficient transportation as they unveiled four designs that could tap the United States’ 2.7 million miles of roadways for solar energy . This week we also looked at several new applications for futuristic manufacturing technologies – a dutch designer has pioneered a way to create 3D printed shoes that fit feet perfectly, and researchers have found that activated carbon cloth is a quicker picker-upper for toxic waste . Finally, with the holidays on their way, this week we rounded up our top ten green gadget gifts for 2010 ! Inhabitat’s Week in Green: of electric tractor unicycles, garbage-powered garbage trucks, and luminous nanoparticle trees originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Posted by on November 15, 2010. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry