Inhabitat’s Week in Green: Mission Mars One, MulchFest 2014 and a pickup truck made of ice

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.

Ever wish you could just get away from it all? Mission Mars One is a prime opportunity to secure a one-way ticket away from Earth. The Dutch nonprofit organizing the mission just finished screening its first round of applicants, and it will soon move on to the second round. The Mars mission is still more than a decade away, but here on Earth, we’re seeing plenty of life-changing innovations. In June, a paralyzed teen will make the ceremonial first kick of the World Cup using a mind-controlled exoskeleton. Ghana has some of the worst sanitation in the world, but MIT’s Susan Murcott is looking to provide clean drinking water to people with an amazing $6 water filter that’s made from a big ceramic bowl. Embedding batteries in the human body for medical applications is a tricky task, but a team of scientists just created biological batteries made from cuttlefish ink that can be consumed in a pill. And on the design front, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava is facing legal action from his home city of Valencia over the beautiful, but deteriorating €100 million Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia opera house.

Bicycles and cars don’t mix, and adding dedicated bike lanes to existing streets can be very difficult. So architect Norman Foster came up with a novel idea: Create a three-story-high bicycle skyway to cover 135 miles in London. (It may be a long time before that vision becomes reality.) A couple of Chinese companies have developed one solution to the country’s transportation and emissions problems: A new series of robotic car-sharing stations will dispense small electric vehicles like candy. Meanwhile Ford gave us a sneak peek at its very first solar-powered car, and British adventurer Maria Leijerstam set a world record when she rode a custom recumbent bike from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole in just 10 days. And the Canadian ice sculpture company Iceculture added about 11,000 pounds of sculpted ice to a pickup truck frame, producing a completely roadworthy truck that’s made almost entirely from frozen H2O.

The world is still recovering from last week’s New Year’s celebration, but the planet isn’t nursing much of an environmental hangover, thanks to several green initiatives. In New York, the Times Square ball drop featured a 12,000-pound geodesic sphere made of more than 30,000 energy-efficient LED lights. As if that wasn’t enough, the LEDs were powered, at least in part, by stationary bikes that were parked in Midtown Manhattan. In other holiday news, New Yorkers looking to get rid of their Christmas trees can recycle them at MulchFest 2014 next week. And looking back at some of the highlights of 2013, the readers of Ecouterre and Inhabitots have spoken, selecting their top eco-fashion and green parenting stories.

Filed under: Misc, Science

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We’re live at CES 2014!

Meet our home — or, rather, homes — for the next eight days or so. Above you’ll see our stage coming together. For the third straight year, we’ll be livestreaming interviews with some of the industry’s biggest and most innovative companies — and doing the odd podcast. Below, you’ll find shots of our trailer in the beautiful Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot, ground zero for the week’s blogging activities. If things appear a bit empty, it’s because, well, not everyone is actually here yet. With Hercules slamming the Eastern seaboard and general flight delays all over the place, making it to Las Vegas has been something of a harrowing experience for team Engadget. But fear not, come Monday, we’ll hit the ground running as the Official Online News Source of International CES 2014!

Filed under: Meta

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Chevrolet debuts Corvette Performance Data Recorder: records audio, video and overlays telemetry (hands-on)

Chevrolet spent some time before CES showing us how it plans to offer Corvette owners a new instrument to hone their track skills: the Performance Data Recorder (PDR). The system, which was designed with British auto engineering company Cosworth, will begin shipping in 2015 Corvette Stingrays as a factory add-on. In its simplest form, the PDR captures video with user-selectable levels of vehicle telemetry overlaid on the 720p output. In its most complex, the session data can be dissected by the included Cosworth Toolbox software on your PC.

The PDR consists of three main bits: audio and video recording, telemetry capture and an SD card slot in the glove compartment where the data is sorted. The driver then selects one of four modes: Track, Sport, Touring or Performance and with the click of a button on the car’s 8-inch display, sets the start/finish line and begins recording the lapping session. Once started, the system starts grabbing info from a dedicated GPS receiver that captures data points five times more often than a normal GPS, a 720p camera mounted at the top of the windscreen begins recording and then hooks into the car’s Controller Area Network (CAN) for access to all the vehicle’s performance data. During our time in the driver’s seat, we used Track mode as it records the most metrics including speed, throttle position, brake force, rpm, g-force, lap time and even a location-based map. Once you come to a stop, you can quickly replay the video in-car or take it offline and examine every nuance of the drive on your desktop.

When loaded in Cosworth Toolbox, the data is superimposed on a Bing map of the track and can be compared to a reference lap in real time to help find where you’re losing precious seconds with corner traces, vehicle speed and cornering forces. Obviously, the PDR won’t sell Corvettes — they do that perfectly well all by themselves — but for a novice or pro driver looking to help improve their skills, it seems Chevrolet has put together a very compelling suite of tools.

Billy Steele contributed his driving skills to this report.

Filed under: GPS, Transportation

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