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.

California is giving away free solar panels to its poorest residents. Between now and 2016, the state will donate 1,600 free photovoltaic systems -- and each array will save a household $22,800 in energy costs over 30 years. Meanwhile in Southern California, director James Cameron gifted his wife a field of solar sunflowers to power her sustainable school. In other energy news, Tesla's battery-producing Gigafactory is starting to take shape in Nevada -- and this week we took a first look at the gigantic building thanks to an aerial drone.

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In 2013, a pair of private investigators in the Bay Area embarked on a fairly run-of-the-mill case surrounding poached employees. But according to a federal indictment unsealed in February, their tactics sounded less like a California noir and something more like sci-fi: To spy on the clients' adversaries, prosecutors say, they hired a pair of hackers.

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Uber has rewritten its privacy policy to make it easier to grok and added some very important changes. According to the updated guidelines, the ride-sharing app will soon give drivers the power to track your location if you allow it to, so long as it remains running in the background. This, Uber claims, will allow them to pick you up a lot faster than just dropping a pin to signal where you're waiting. Drivers will be able to meet you on the way, for instance, or right out the door you used to exit a large building. Also, the app will start asking for permission to access your contact list, so the service can send promotional materials to your friends and family.

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Just as steel's physical properties change depending on how it's produced, so too do 3D printed materials. However, unlike steel, we don't yet fully understand how different these newfound techniques affect the resulting printed item. Sometimes a printed item -- even if it's made from something common like aluminum -- ends up having a very different microstructure had it been created with traditional, subtractive methods. You can see an example of that below. Heck, even using the same material on different printer models can result items with wildly divergent properties. But DARPA is looking to change that. The DoD's advanced research agency announced Friday that it is launching an Open Manufacturing program to create comprehensive reference documentation for 3D printing and usher in an era of productive predictability.

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Researchers from the University of Miami have started looking more closely into category five hurricanes this month. No, not by chasing them around -- they're thankfully quite rare -- but by simulating their effects inside a huge indoor tank. Oceanographers from the institute built the 66 x 20 foot tank officially called SUSTAIN or Surge-Structure-Atmosphere Interaction Facility on an island off the coast of Florida. The scientists merely have to flip a switch for the paddles inside to start churning the waters and for fans to begin mimicking howling winds -- in just few minutes, it all turns into a small-scale storm.

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If you were on pins and needles wondering whether or not the LightSail solar ship would resume contact with the crew back on Earth, you can relax. The Planetary Society reports that the Carl Sagan-inspired spacecraft rebooted as predicted, and the ground team is once again in touch. There's already a software fix waiting in the wings, and there will be a decision on when to deploy it "very soon" -- if all goes according to plan, the Society will deploy the vehicle's namesake sails soon afterward. You'll know more in the next two days, but for now it appears that this years-long project is back on track.

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We hope you didn't lean too heavily on Google Calendar's text message alerts in order to keep your life organized. Google is warning that Calendar's SMS notifications will vanish for regular users (education, government and work are safe) after June 27th. The search firm argues that they're no longer needed in an era when smartphones give you a "richer, more reliable" heads-up. It's true that modern mobile devices render SMS a bit redundant. With that in mind, this isn't good news if you can't justify a smartphone on your budget, or prefer to keep most notifications off -- you may remain blissfully unaware of an event change until you reach a computer.

[Thanks, Kristy]

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Solar Impulse has already shown the potential for sun-based aviation in its attempt to fly around the world, but it just embarked on its most ambitious trip yet. Pilot Andre Borschberg has taken off from Nanjing, China on a cross-Pacific flight whose first leg ends in Kalaeloa, Hawaii -- 5,061 miles away. That's about 120 hours in the air, and should set records for both the longest single-seat flight ever as well as the first transpacific flight by a solar-powered aircraft. And did we mention that this leg is even more dangerous than previous parts of the journey? After a certain point, Borschberg's only choice in an emergency will be to bail over the Pacific and hope that his rescue goes smoothly.

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When Apple trotted out its first update for the Watch, fitness mavens were alarmed at the suddenly inconsistent heart rate tracking. Did Cupertino break one of its wearable's signature features? Well, not quite. Apple has posted an updated support page that indicates the change in heart tracking was intentional. Instead of getting your beats per minute every 10 minutes regardless of what you're doing, its new default behavior is to check only when you're staying still. You can still make the Watch check on the move by using the heart rate Glance (above) or starting an activity in the Workout app, but the change risks creating gaps when you're strolling down the street.

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