ULTRA

The Greener Gadgets Competition sprouts a wireless cork mouse that needs no batteries, and a bicycle that charges up your iPhone with a 3 kilometre ride.

So we won't be wearing these anytime soon, but the idea's something extendable.

Energy created from the movement of wearing the dresses power up lights and sound integrated into the pieces themselves.

In all their conceptual glory, the three pieces, lovingly named Sticky, Stiff and Itchy use retractable cables, restrictive tailoring and purposely-irritating integrated necklaces to get LED lights and MP3 players working.

They say the artist wants to explore 'ideas of boundary and perception', we like but think a little more like this.

(via Ecouterre)

Prefabricated modules making up of rubber, wood and photovoltaic panels aimed at a sustainable solution for homes, offices and equipment. Presented at the FIAC in partnership with the Louvre, Paris by Edouard Francois.

We walk on sidewalks, through buildings, dance on dancefloors. POWERleap energy-harnassing floor tiles want to capture all that movement and make it an energy source.

We've often seen the idea of human powered energy generation in transportation concepts but Elizabeth Redmond wants to take our daily footings and power up the urban electrical grid.

Reminds of Surya London, where the piezo-electric dancefloor generates some of the nightclub's electrical power and a wind turbine the rest.

(via core77)

A blood powered lamp. Receive lamp, break top, use broken glass to cut finger, drop in the blood, lamp powers up - designer Mike Thompson laments, "The user must consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is."

Kind of harsh, but point taken.

On a less extreme and more mass-implementable note, a pilot program in North Carolina has measured energy savings as much as 40 percent, due to a web dashboard that lets home and business owners monitor and control their own use. A simpler more socially-conscious (neighbours-are-watching) version with Tweet-a-Watt/Kill-a-Watt.

Make it visible/visual and results shall form?

The shift to energy-saving bulbs can be easy, thoughtful, financially-motivated or entirely ignored. But Alok Jha and his bulb journey borderlines obsessive. His daily mental calculations of watt-wastage, emotional anguish over the wastage of others, whilst destroying his 1.5 tonne carbon habit, and slotting in time to drool over LEDs.

Fluorescent lighting could soon be powering up offices.

New Energy Techonologies are on it, developing solar cells that could harness the lighting that offices seem to so love.

First application will probably be used in general office objects, calculators...iPods. But as Clean Technica note, it'd be a great thing for the lighting to power themselves - an in-office solar cycle.

Malin Karki, an 18 year old from Nepal is generating solar energy from hair.

On a building it can absorb CO2, store it for energy usage and survive/flourish on waste/ocean water.

Remember the Potato Battery Experiment from school? MIT and Voltree are doing kind of the same thing, with trees.